Seeing and Being Seen in Sally Wen Mao's 'Oculus' , Ep. 249

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Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus,a collection of poems that explores sight and being seen, futuristic worlds and historical figures. She completed this collection during her Cullman Center Fellowship at NYPL in 2016-2017.​ In conversation with fellow poet, Jenny Xie, Mao shared some of the archival materials she used in her research, including those of the first Chinese American actress Anna May Wong. They discussed Asian American futurism, representation in Hollywood, and how a Solange concert at the Guggenheim inspired one of her poems.

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPT
 

>> You're listening to Library Talks from the New York Public Library. I'm Aidan Flax-Clark.

[ Music ]

Today on the show is award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao. She was at the Library recently to talk about her second collection of poetry which is called Oculus . She actually finished the book while she was completing a fellowship at the Library. The book explores themes like technology and displacement. She talks about the collection with fellow poet, Jenny Xie, whose last book was called Eye Level and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. Here's their conversation.

[ Applause ]

>> Well, hi, everyone. I'm so glad you could all join us today. It's such an honor to be in discussion with Sally tonight and celebrate her new dazzling book, Oculus . So we thought you would start us off by reading a few poems from the beginning of the book, Sally.

>> Sally Wen Mao: Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. This really means a lot to me. I'll read the three poems in the beginning. Ghost Story. Forgive me if the wind stole the howl from my mouth and whipped it against your window panes. When I lived, I wanted to be seen. I built this mansion made of windows for my prince and me. He fainted. I knocked. We were apparitions of splendor. Our dining hall was the Santa Maria novella. Our bedroom was the Izumo Shrine. Our study, a study in tension. Books slid off the buttresses. We bluffed a life together on this mattress. When I kissed him, I kissed a marble statue. It was Apollo. It was Krishna. It was Ra. Monitor lizards wandered through the empty halls, the pianola a stronghold for tarantulas. We relied on our plasma television to pull us back to the world again. Downstairs, the curtains parted, exposing us to the wolves above. We beamed our searchlights unto them. Soon, a Technicolor wilderness surrounded us. Turquoise ducks watched us shave with electric razors. We built new barricades between ourselves. Our bathroom, a wallpaper of scars. After he fled the premises, I unearthed my binoculars before the mansion was razed. That was the last time I trusted a body that touched me. All a ghost wants is to be chained to a place, to someone who can't forget her. Every day, I try to find my own brokenness but once you are forgotten, it's not so bad. A heartbroken joins another chorus. Can you hear the chorus speak? Can you bear it? The words of apparitions do not belong to a language. They flit over pines, meaningless and shed their skins in your hands. And this is one of the title poems called Oculus . And it is based on -- it's based on the story of a girl who uploaded her [inaudible] unto Instagram essentially. I became really obsessed with the story and one night, I was just scrolling through her Instagram for hours and this poem came from that. Before I wake, I peruse the dead girl's live photo feed. Days ago, she uploaded her confessions. I can't bear the sorrow, captions her black eyes, gaps across a face luminescent snow. I can't bear the snow, how it falls, swells over the bridges, under my clothes. Yet I can't behold or be held here in this barren warren, this din of ruined objects, peepholes into boring scandals. Stockings roll high past hems as I watch the videos of her boyfriend cooing. Behave, darling, so I can make you my wife. How the dead girl fell, awaiting a hand to hold, eyes to behold her as the lights clicked on and she posed for her picture. Long eyelashes all wet, legs tapered, bright as thorns. Her windows overlook Shanghai. Curtains drawn to cast a shadow over the Huangpu River, frozen this year into a dry, bloodless stalk. Why does the light in the night promise so much? She wiped her lens before she died. The smudge still lives. I saw it singe the edge of her bed. Soon, it swallowed the whole burning city. And this is the last poem I'll read for this beginning part. It's called Occidentalism . A man celebrates erstwhile conquest. His book locked in a silo still in print. I scribble, make Sharpie lines, defaced its text like it defaces me. Outside, green fields whisper. Marble lines are silent yet silver tongued with excellent teeth. In this life, I have worshipped so many lies. Then I work shopped them, make them better. An East India Company, an opium trade, a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation, a man parting the veil covering a woman's face. His nails prying her lips open. I love the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy it is to shadow -- no, to shatter chinoiserie like the Han Dynasty Urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995. If only recovering the silent history is as simple as smashing its container. Book, bowl, celadon, spoon. Such objects cross borders the way our bodies never could. Instead, we're left with history. Its blonde dust. The bowl is unbreakable. Oh, its ghost still shudder through us like small breaths. The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day, a girl like me may come across it on a shelf. Pick it up. Read about all the ways her body is a thing. And I won't be there to protect her, to cross the text out and say, "Go ahead. Rewrite this."

[ Applause ]

>> So I'm so glad that you decided to end on Occidentalism because for me, it feels like an Ars Poetica for this arresting, lush, searing collection of poems. And the book is so tightly cohesive around, you know, ideas about the strictures of representation, around the difficulty and the necessity of exhuming buried, silenced race histories, giving it a voice. Giving it eyes so it stares back and also the stakes of this kind of re-animating, re-narrating, re-voicing of figures in history. So I think, plus a lot of people in the room are also wondering as I am, how this collection Oculus got its start? Because it feels so tightly cohesive, was it a radically different process from writing your first book, Mad Honey Symposium ? Was there so -- you create some sort of catalytic experience, right, that sparked some of these poems? And also, because this is on the screen, maybe you can talk us through some of the very varied valances of the word "oculus" as a title for this collection and two of the poems?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Great, thank you so much. So I noticed kind of this thread as I was working on poems early on. This was around the time that I was still, I was still finalizing the manuscript of my first book, Mad Honey Symposium and I just had a lot of poems that were about something else. And I didn't think that those poems really belonged in my first manuscript. And I knew I wanted to write a book that responded to technology in some way and kind of like the rapid changes I was witnessing, happening in places like China. And Oculus kind of eventually came out of that process. And early on, I think, I think you said, you mentioned something like catalyst? Or early on, one of the catalysts was sort of me discovering this historical figure Anna May Wong. I became really interested in her, in her films, in her biography. And I just ended up reading a lot about her and reading a couple of biographies and watching some of her films. And then I started writing a series of poems about her. And when I first wrote the first poem for that series, I felt like it was going to be a series. I kind of came -- I kind of came into that thinking it was going to be -- like I had a lot to say about it. So I was going to write a few. As for the title, yeah, so Oculus came when I was thinking about what these poems have in common and that is this kind of looking and eye to kind of think back to your book too, Eye Level and who watches us like the double consciousness of you know, watching ourselves through how other people sees us and how that is such a common experience for women of color, especially someone like Anna May Wong who was a performer, an actress. So but I was also interested in other definitions of "oculus" so I found in Latin, it means eye. But architecturally, it means this circular opening on the top of a building or a dome and every time I think back to a moment where I'm looking up at an oculus, it feels like this kind of -- it's this very hopeful feeling to be able to see the sky from inside a building. And of course, "oculus" also, the virtual technology or the virtual, the art technology. That's another thing that interested me. So the title became very cohesive to me as I was working through the poems in the book.

>> Fantastic. Yeah, you definitely can see all of the interweaving and the tangleness of different kinds of gazes and sights beholding, being beheld. I want to go back to Anna May Wong and I'm not surprised to hear that those poems came first to you or early on in the process of compiling this book. They very much feel like a spine to the collection and they comprise two distinct sections in the book. So what was it about Anna May Wong? What was it about her magnetism? Because you wrote, you know, dozens of poems narrating her experience in the first person and yeah, I'm so fascinated by, you know, your choices here. Can you talk a little bit more about her also as a historical figure for those in the audience who might not be as familiar with her work?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Okay, great. So this is Anna May Wong. So she was born in LA in 1905 and she had kind of a short life. And that's one of her most famous quotes was, "I've died a thousand deaths." Because she -- because she is a Chinese American woman in this kind of really racist Hollywood machine, I was reading about her filmography and almost every movie that she starred in like she would die horribly. So like, so and at the time, you know, it was the 1920s and '30s. So at the time, there was still a strong anti-Chinese sentiment in America. You know, the Chinese exclusion laws were still intact. And most of the movies that include some kind of Chinese person, you know, it was very stereotypical. So I was really interested in her plight. Like she's, because she is pretty much the only, you know, Chinese American movie star, female movie star with as much of an audience as she had, like how did she negotiate that kind of conflicting identity? The two parts of your identity are essentially, like they essentially reject each other which was, you know, which was really interesting to me.

>> Hers is the Chinese and the American sides?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yes, yes. Especially, I mean, the American side toward the Chinese side. And I've recently been kind of researching her time that she spent in China as well. So she had never been to China her whole life until she was 31 and she visited China for the first time, just for research. It was kind of like a, like a tourist trip where she wanted to research, you know, like are my roles, you know, reflective of the reality in China? And then when she went there, she discovered that absolutely not. It's not, you know. And so, so these are some like I know the image on the left, that is her in a movie role from Lime House Blues and I watched this movie. So she was, she played kind of the scorned woman who, whose lover -- who her lover is supposed to be a half-Chinese man but he was played by a white guy. And his lover or her lover was like obsessed with this like white girl and like kept ignoring her. And like throughout the whole movie, she was just like really salty [laughter]. And like, but I'm like -- but I'm like look at her, she's so gorgeous, like what the hell, you know?

[ Laughter ]

>> From my understanding, that was like a very common trope in many of the films she acted in which is she would elect, in the film, and her fictional character would elect for some sort of death or suicide, right? So that she would never have to on screen, have real intimacy with the white male lead actor.

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yeah. And because there were anti-Chinese laws, there were also like anti-miscegenation laws. This is her being fabulous. More her being fabulous. Oh, wait. I wanted to show you -- did I include it? No, I didn't include it. Actually, I was going to show you a still from the Technicolor film that she starred in. It was called The Toll of the Sea . And in that, she plays a tragic like Madame Butterfly character who essentially like kills herself in the end. So that very common trope. And also the anti-miscegenation laws means she couldn't really kiss anybody on screen. Well, no white dude and since the white dudes were also playing the Asian dudes, it was like she kind of like a Catch 22, you know, so it was really, it sucked [laughter].

>> Without [inaudible], that's a good opportunity. Would you mind reading that, that poem, The Toll of the Sea ?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Okay, great. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so yeah, so this film, The Toll of the Sea , it came out in 1922 and it only had two colors. So it was the first successful two-color Technicolor movie and the two colors were red and green, The Toll of the Sea . Green means go. So run now. Green, the color of the siren sea whose favors are mortgaged upon the soul. Red means stop, before the cliffs jag downward. Red is the color of the shore that welcomes white, the color of the man washed ashore from his shirt to his pants to his brittle shoes. White, the color of the screen before Technicolor. White, the color of the master narrative. Green, the color of the ocean so kind, not leaving a stain on the white shirt. Green, the color of the girl, so kind but why? She speaks. Alone in my garden, I heard the cry of wind and wave. In the green girl's garden, the stranger clamps her, asks, "How would you like to go to America?" A lie soaked in the red of the chokecherries that turn brown in the heat. Red, the color of the roses that spy. Red, the color of their fake marriage. White, the color of the white man's realm. She asks, "Is it great lark or great sparrow you call those good times in America?" Green, the color of his departure. White, the color of the counterfeit letters she sends to herself. White, the color of their son. White, the color of erasure. Red, the color of the lost footage. Red, the sea that swallows our stories. Red, the color of the girl who believed the roses. Red, the color of the ocean that drowns the girl. Red, the color of the final restoration. In every story, there is a Technicolor screen, black, white, red, green. In every story, there is a chance to restore the color. If we recover the flotsam, can we rewrite the script? Alone in a stranger's garden, I run. I forge a desert with my own arms. Blue, the color of our recovered narrative. Blue, the color of the siren sea which refuses to keep a white shirt spotless. Blue, the color of our reclaimed Pacific. Blue, the ocean that drowns the liars. Blue, the shore where the girl keeps living. There she rises on the opposite shore. There she awakens, prismatic, childless, free. Shorn of the story that keeps her kneeling. Blue is the opposite of sacrifice.

>> Wow.

[ Applause ]

So in certain lines of that poem, Anna May Wong's voice comes through. And in other of the Wong poems, you know, they're almost entirely written from the first person. And I marvel at how you give voice to the interiority of this figure who's in many ways, flattened to these sock types. So I'm interested in why you chose to write from her perspective? And also, you know, for those of you who haven't read the book, Anna May Wong goes into a time machine. She, you know, she travels through time. She appears in films alongside Tom Cruise. She, you know, makes out with Bruce Lee. So what was behind that choice as well?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yeah, I'm really interested in her voice actually. I think a lot of her legacy, when I was researching her story, like there were a lot of complaints, for example. Like the Asian American community kind of has an iffy relationship with her because she had to play so many of these, you know, stereotypes. But it wasn't really actually her, you know. I, you know, because she was the only Chinese American movie star, she really had to, you know, she had to make choices about her career. And eventually, she did make a choice and that was to never portray like a stereotypical or an unsympathetic Chinese person again. Like at a certain point of her career, she stopped. And she was also very vocal. She had a lot of columns actually. She was a great writer so she has written many columns for the New York Herald Tribune and she's witty and she's, you know, she's smart. And I just felt like people didn't really see that side of her. They just saw her characters, just the movies where she played these like awful characters. And so, I was particularly interested in that and I know that a lot of poets have persona projects. And I've always been interested in persona as a form so I decided that I would use her voice and try to kind of use the first person. And I was informed by what's already out there from her writings and that was really helpful. And I was also informed by just kind of her demeanor and her disposition. I was watching a lot of clips and yeah, you mentioned the time machine. Like I chose a picture here that kind of looks like a time machine but it's probably not. And it kind of began as like a thought experiment and that's what kind of set off the series of poems. I really wanted to imagine how she would react to kind of today's films that depict Asians. We, in a way, we still have a lot of those problems that she was, you know, dealing with at the time. So I thought it would be fun to kind of go through the history of recent American cinema and have her react and respond to those films.

>> And you know, those poems are also like so many of the other poems in this collection, deeply, deeply researched. You address so many historical figures and you know, as I was doing some of my own research for this talk and for other interviews we've had, it felt like a ton of these like Easter egg moments where I would read, you know, there's one scene in one of the Anna May Wong poems where the speaker Wong talks about a boy sticking needles into her neck and that she had to wear more and more coats to sort of insulate herself from the touch of the needles. And I did not realize it actually came from natural incident, from her childhood. So because we are here in a space in the Cullman Center where you were a fellow two years ago, I'm interested in the uses of archival research for you in this project. You also talk about the first Chinese American on U.S. soil from Amoy and you know, what being a Cullman fellow was also like for your process. I remember visiting you here one day for lunch maybe two years ago and you had all sorts of image collages in your office and a ton of, you know, books as we would expect. There was also, at the time, I remember because it kind of appears in some way in Occidentalism , you were doing this kind of illustrated erasures of -- I'm not sure which book it was.

>> Sally Wen Mao: Nobody needs to know.

>> Okay, so let's -- we're not getting into that [laughter].

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yeah.

>> Yeah, the role of research and you know, what spending time at the Cullman meant for this collection?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm such a nerd. And this was like such a dream to be in the Library and just be among other nerds like no offense to those of you who are Cullman fellows. So I ended up did finding a lot of things. Like I had a manuscript by the time I had been to the Cullman Center but I felt like coming to the Cullman Center really like expanded my like idea of like, oh, like research can be so much more than just Wikipedia [laughter]. I know, I'm -- internet, anyway. Like for example, I took these photos from the Performance Arts Library and these are photos that were taken by her good friend, Carl Van Vechten. And it was just really nice to kind of see these physical -- large, physical photos of her. And also the person taking the photos is such kind of a close friend, a close, dear friend of hers and it was really nice to kind of see some of these like first-hand like -- like research materials. Like I went through the folders. So there's an Anna May Wong folder, you know. And I went through that folder and there were all these like really old like newspaper clippings. And I just thought it was so interesting, you know, to have these clippings. They're so fragile. Some of them like are broken at the edges. But then, there's this one, you know, fled for fame from -- and this is one of my favorites. I like that like here are some of the obit too, obits that I found during my research. And it was just really nice to have the primary materials. Oh, this is one of my favorite things that I found. This was -- so basically, Anna May Wong was asked if she had any romantic plans or you know, she was going to get married. And then she said something like, "I expect to be wedded to my art." And then the next day, an English language paper in Japan reported that the actress was planning to man whose first name was Art [laughter]. So that -- and another thing that was interesting to me is that she never got married. So she was very much like a modern woman. She was like, she was considered like a flapper, like a Chinese flapper which, you know, like it's interesting to me. These were some of the -- oh, these are some of the images of movies that I'm going to skip over to this Afong Moy. You mentioned Afong Moy. And Afong Moy was a figure that I kind of discovered here at the Library. And I did do archival research on her. So she was the first Chinese woman to ever come to America. And this was in 1834 so that was about like 15 years before the Gold Rush when there were much larger, you know, like Chinese immigrations. But she was brought over to the U.S. primarily to be used as like a display object. So she traveled around the U.S. as part of an exhibition where these merchant brothers put her like they placed her behind a glass panel with all these like Chinese oriental objects and just had her do things like eat with chopsticks or walk a little bit. So she had bound feet. So it was like she hobbled a little bit and they would make her play with an abacus and sing. So I was -- so I found her in the Library. I found some advertisement. This was something that I found upstairs actually. This is an original like advertisement of this woman. And it's a little inventory of the things that she was displayed with. And some marketing speech from 1834. And here's like more advertisements of this, of this woman.

>> So with someone like Afong Moy, were there any first person accounts? Did you actually read any of her writing, interviews with her the way that you could with someone like Anna May Wong?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yeah, so something that I was really interested in, in terms of Afong Moy is that there are no, there are no records of her like speaking from her perspective. So every, every record of Afong Moy that exists is written by or experienced by somebody who basically went to her exhibition and saw her. And so, for me, I also wrote an Afong Moy poem from her perspective, from the first person persona perspective because I thought it was necessary. Every, you know, like the way she is described by white people is going to be very different from like how she would see things, right? So for me, that was really important.

>> Well actually, Sally, do you mind reading an excerpt? I know it's a longer poem but maybe read a certain section of The Diary of Afong Moy ?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Oh, great. Thank you, yes. Okay, so I'll read the first section. Number eight, Park Place, Manhattan, November 1834. The merchant brothers who brought me here, Freddie and Nate Cairn, knew I'd make it rain for them. In their eyes, I was the hothouse flower, a goddess of dollar signs. They decorated me with precious imports, baubles, yellow pantalets, damasks. Then placed me in a diorama of snuffboxes and silk. I was a breathing mannequin on my brocade throne. I couldn't believe how many people paid to see me. Pink [inaudible] dropped, jawbones dropped and it was truly unnerving to watch the white people stare at me, mouths twitching in awe or pity or both. The men looked at my little feet. The women, at my regalia, they wanted to see my feet uncovered. Can you believe the nerve? The podiatrist, the reporters, I begged -- they begged for a glimpse. At the men, I snickered. At the women, I smiled. They swooned, blushed as if they swallowed Sichuan peppercorns. Their corsets were killing them. Heavens, a grotesquery. Their spines all crooked in their skeletons. I raised my brows ensconced in my civilized box. I counted the days with my abacus. Look, I was fucking bored. Was I the animal here or were they? On my throne in lonely New York, I presaged my own descent. It began with a tongue, English creature that curled its way into my mouth. They called me the celestial princess. I wanted them to bow down so they did. They fell at my feet in penance or worship over an [inaudible] of my ancestors across my face. A slap.

>> Brilliant.

[ Applause ]

>> Yeah and something in Oculus that I don't focus on at Eye Level as much and which I love about your collection is the ways in which technology mediates the way we see ourselves, the way we perform for others. In many ways, you know, [inaudible] is talking about this book as a kind of Asian American futurism and that was another question I was going to ask you about which is the role of technology in constructing Asian self, Asian American self -- the ways, I mean, did you see yourself as writing a kind of you know, Sci-Fi poetry about Asian American futurism? You know, it's such a strange genre because science fiction is all about otherness and encountering otherness, right? I think your poems are playing with that.

>> Sally Wen Mao: Yeah, so like here, like one of the poems I had Anna May Wong kind of like reference a film. So this film wasn't directly mentioned but I was very much thinking about this movie Cloud Atlas , released in 2012, and they used actors in yellow face. But then, what I was interested in was that the movie had like this, all this like cyborgs, these female Korean cyborgs who all looked the same. I think that, I think that if, you know, like yellow peril in the turn of the, you know, the 20th century created these like [inaudible], these like Chinese or these like Asian stereotypes, like I feel like the stereotypes have shifted. And today, I think that there's this kind of new orientalism that posits that Asians are all the same and so conformist and like they're all, they're like aliens basically and robots. They just work their nine to fives and you know, they don't have any individualism. So I kind of wanted to kind of address that as well as you know, this Asian American futurism, whatever it is. I think that in a sense, there are a lot of Asian American artists that are masters of this kind of genre that I try to pay homage to like Nam June Paik and Satoshi Kon. So I wanted to kind of address in the book. Anna May Wong, in her lifetime, was friends with like Paul Robeson and other actors and actresses of color. And I thought that the conversation is interesting specifically because both of those actors left America because of, you know, the problems in America in terms of like discrimination and what actors have to deal with. So in a sense, I think there is a lot of inter -- kind of cultural conversations. Like you mentioned like an Asian American futurism but like what is that without like what, Afro futurism? What is that without, you know, like the context of other marginalized groups of people in America? And for me, I absolutely want it to kind of curate this space that was kind of free from that white gaze that I'm trying to write about here because there isn't like people in the Asian American community talk about, you know, like assimilation versus culture as if it's some kind of binary. And I really wanted to go against that kind of thinking because it's so reductive of what even America is. And I wanted to kind of establish like a sense that like yes, there were all these like visionary people of color that also made up America. And you know, I had a poem with Josephine Baker and I had a poem with -- essentially, I have an imagined conversation between them about what they have to face in America. So yeah, thank you.

>> Actually, I was thinking. Would you read for us the last dedication in the book? Because as you were speaking about what you were trying to, the space you were trying to clear and create in this book, it made me think of what you wrote at the very end which I found so deeply moving.

>> Sally Wen Mao: Oh, great, yes. Yeah, so that very end poem -- well, it's not actually the very end poem. The last Oculus poem, I wanted to show you guys. So this was the last poem I wrote for the book. And it was, it was really late into the time. And I snuck it in like the last minute before turning in the final manuscript. So it's called Oculus and I did -- and it's about this experience I had here actually at the Cullman Center. So one of the other Cullman fellows, Angela Flournoy, like invited me to a Solange concert like when she -- when she was playing at the Guggenheim. So I think that this is a good way to end this. Oculus . May, pale pianist under soles. From the steps of the New York Public Library, we hailed a taxi uptown. Past the lines. Past patients. Past fortitude to the Guggenheim where we sat lotus style, wearing head-to-toe white with a sea of others. They checked our phones and cameras at the door, all of us, a cloud condensing into ourselves, our forms. All city, all air, all sugar, all brown, all gold, have a seat. This is a cause for celebration. In many places in the world, it could have been a funeral. She appeared and she sang, descending down the spirals, the golden nautilus. Past the skeletal [inaudible]. Past the Duchamp's. Past the [Inaudible]. Under the central pedal glass, a single layer in the interior. None of us, none of our names were there but our bodies, there they were. The most photographed place on earth was where we sat without cameras except our eyes and our faces. It was spring. I was still hopeful. In my chest, where a beat was cracked but still salvageable. Cherry petals strewing my shoulders where cranes in the sky, cranes shredded on my dress. Golden tubas warbled as she danced. We looked up and there was a sky light, a dome. The oculus at the center through which all fears still burned and awed.

[ Applause ]

>> Let's see if we have time for one or two more questions or Sally, did you want?

>> Sally Wen Mao: Oh, yeah. So I wanted to give you a little context in that poem. So I -- like I snuck that poem in last minute as you know, because I wanted to address this architectural definition of oculus which is and this is the, this is the oculus from the Guggenheim. And I thought, oh, I'm going to write about that time Angela Flournoy and I went to the Solange show. So as I was writing the poem, I didn't realize that like coincidentally, this place, this place -- this was the show. Here's a little still of it. That's Solange there. This place is actually the most photographed place on earth according to Google Satellites. And for me, that was such a crazy coincidence because the first poem Oculus is kind of about the camera, the camera's gaze upon the self. So it was this weird windfall that happened when I wrote this poem. Like of all the places on -- in this world, right, like this, the Guggenheim is the most -- is the most photographed place. So and yeah, they -- we weren't allowed to take pictures. They checked our, you know, our cellphones and everything. Well, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming.

[ Applause ]

>> That was poet Sally Wen Mao speaking with Jenny Xie about Mao's new collection, Oculus . If you live in New York and you have a New York Public Library card, you can go to one of our branches and check it out there. And if not, go to your local branch and give it some love. Library Talks is produced by Schuyler Swenson with editorial support from Richert Schnorr and myself. And our theme music was composed by Allison Layton-Brown.