Poetry in the Everyday

This month, Emmanuel College alum and award-winning poet Belle Ling shared thoughtful insights about her latest poetry collection Nebulous Vertigo, offering an intimate glimpse into the ideas and images that shape her work.
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Belle first discovered poetry in her undergraduate creative writing course where short excerpts from poems captured her completely. Even a few stanzas revealed how much could be said with so little.

“A good poem, regardless of how short it is, lasts. It means eternity. That is how I found poetry so unique”, she says.

At the heart of her latest collection,Nebulous Vertigo, lies the exploration of food as a way of understanding relationships and life. Belle captures this through vivid scenes and sensory detail.

“Nebulous Vertigo is a series of poems which explore the poetics of mundane food reflected in relationship intimacy”, she says.

“It investigates, for instance, everyday life conversations on grief and delights in a Hong-Kong-style restaurant (cha chaan teng); how a Grandma talks about her last bite of pork belly in a hospital; a Japanese Uncle telling us village myths about acorns, Asahi beer, red chillies, and gaebul (penis fish) when hiking in the Sayama Hills; the rainy ambience when a tofu speaks for itself through the Chinese character of ‘beans’; and how a monk cuts a tofu cube by cancelling out this thoughts.

“I am always drawn to the minute sensations aroused by food, like texture, temperature, colours, as much as how different people handle food in their own innovative or awkward ways. And, I am very curious about the subconsciousness that comes along with such a kind of inevitable and necessary part of our everyday life—eating and cooking.”

Belle’s poems invite people to revisit moments tied to family, ritual or memory and to recognise themselves in the emotional layers beneath them.

“I hope that my readers will rediscover different layers of emotions hidden within themselves. They can echo with certain moments related to their intimate ones, especially in food preparation, food gathering, and food-related rituals.

“In Nebulous Vertigo, I have experimented with how Cantonese and the Chinese language can be incorporated into English through my own poetics of dealing with imagery, metaphors, and rhythms. I hope that readers could find that language itself is actually a very malleable art form with which one can always open it up to some unexpected possibilities; and there is no fixed boundary between languages—that is, you can always swim between them; and there, in the fluid space of becoming, you will find another version of yourself, or a more truthful identity that you can own.”

In her work, Belle draws inspiration from a rich lineage of poets whose work informs her own approach to meditation, imagery and vulnerability.

“I learnt a lot from Matsuo Bashō, Wang Wei, Adam Zagjewski, and Henri Cole. Matsuo Bashō and Wang Wei teach me how to dive deep into meditation which can be reshaped into a poem. Adam Zagjewski leads me into surprises between poetic lines, and his poetry teaches me how to manoeuvre mystique through imagery and atmosphere; while Henri Cole makes me think about how to be raw with our vulnerabilities when using language to express something deep within myself.”

Belle’s writing invokes a deep attentiveness to what some may call mundane. When asked about her writing process, she explained that her work begins not with structure or big themes but with curiosity. Small details, fleeting ideas and strong emotions are what guide her onto the page.  Sometimes a strong emotion pushes her to write. She jots down words or fragments of thought then later rearranges them to see what form they want to take.

“For me, it is always hard to start with a big idea. That is why it is really difficult for me to write something theme-based. I tend to digress from what I am asked to write about. Rather, I usually would be captivated by something really trivial but very interesting, and that is usually something which makes me curious to know more about.

“A square of lights changing its shape under the sun, a patch of green varying its layers of greenness, waterdrops on a shower pane that keep steering my imagination. Because of curiosity, I start to ruminate over the imagery and want to let itself tell me more of its story.

“Usually, after a while, I would know with what style that I want the poem to be rendered, like whether a haiku, a prose poem, a poem with irregular lineation, a sestina, a villanelle, or a vignette poem. I guess it very much depends on what kind of world that you want your poem to bring forth—a suffocated room, a philosophical meandering, or something like a polaroid.”

Her advice for emerging writers is simple and encouraging. Experimentation and courage, she believes, allow a writer’s true voice to surface.

“Experiment. Be courageous. One of the things I most enjoy with poetry is that I can try whatever I want. There is no right or wrong. All you need is to find your voice, and truly own that voice. Find your fingerprint, something that embodies your uniqueness.”

Nebulous Vertigo is available in local bookstores across Australia including Books@Stones in Stones Corner, Better Read Than Dead in Sydney, Amplify in Melbourne, Mostly Books in Adelaide and The Hobart Bookshop in Tasmania. It is also available through Amazon and the University of Chicago Press.