Washington Square.

On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review.

Lansing Community College's literary journal.

Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey, there.

This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review.

I'm here today with poet Leonardo Chung, whose poem Hot Cuisine and Hyperboles will be in our Summer 24 issue.

Hey there, Leonardo.

Hello.

How are you doing?

I'm doing excellent.

So tell us a little bit about your poem.

How did you come to write that?

So Hot Cuisine in Hyperboles is sort of a poem that's supposed to look like a menu or like a course menu, like you would find at a restaurant or something.

And the reason that hyperbole is in there is because each course, so, as in each stanza, represents its own course.

And, you know, the description of each course includes, like, these hyperboles of nature and different concepts.

So I noticed that you had it broken out into, like, romance, nature, adventure.

How did you decide which of the categories you were going to focus on when you made this menu?

Well, I thought I kind of got the inspiration after I read another poem or several poems about kind of tropes in novels.

And I thought I might take out or use, like, major themes that I saw in the novels I read, such as romance, such as tragic tales.

So.

And, like, adventure would be like a thriller, novel and similar things like that.

Do you like tropes when you see them in fiction or in movies?

Yeah.

I mean, sometimes they can get cliche, but you can also.

Sometimes it's fun, actually, when you can predict a story, because if it's the way you want it to go, then that's great.

Don't you think that?

Well, this is my opinion, so you can agree or disagree, but some genres are more tropey than others.

Like romance is typically known to be.

Yeah, I'd say romance is also very predictable.

I'd say it's always about two people falling in love, and then they have some rocky road with obstacles, and then they end up getting back together in the end.

That's usually what happens.

But with some other tropes, you might not have as much of a predictable, like, storyline.

Yep.

Yeah.

I would argue that mystery, a lot of times, you kind of know it's gonna be solved, generally.

Yeah, that's right.

So there's a lot of food description in your poem.

Are you a food person?

Are you a foodie?

I'd say I'm a food person.

Not to the extent in which, you know, I'M not like a.

Those people kind of obsessed with picking apart like the nitty gritty, like when you go to a restaurant or something.

But I do enjoy food and I kind of looked at menus of like Lux, like fine dining restaurants near me and you know, like a lot of their descriptions of the courses or the meals were like this.

So I was like, why don't I make this more whimsical?

Yeah, it definitely has a, a light hearted, upbeat feel to it, which I really appreciated and the descriptions are really surprising.

And so now that you've talked about the menus, that makes.

Makes perfect sense.

How did you even decide though, to contrast tropes to foods?

I feel like if you go to like a fine dining restaurant, in a lot of the meals you'll have things that say, like a delightful blend of, you know, and then I'll include some actual foods like lemon zest and balsamic vinegar or some foods like that.

And I thought those descriptions are always like poetic and they're meant to kind of captivate the eat eater.

Yeah.

And like an experience.

Right.

They're trying to create like an experience.

And usually like, the more fine dining you go, the more of that experience compared to the.

Because, you know, people say like, the more expensive the food is at a restaurant, usually the less portion they give you because they want you to like, savor the experience.

That makes good sense.

And maybe that's true of poems too.

When they're really short, you're supposed to savor them.

Yeah.

Because, you know, some poems, most of my poems are actually a little bit shorter than this length.

And I mean, obviously there are some, like really long poems that are well written and some really short ones that are well written too.

But I think it's important to think that the length of the poem doesn't kind of dictate the amount of meaning that it has.

Mm.

Yeah.

I think that is one of the neat things about poems is they can have a slightly different meaning, you know, depending on who reads them.

And that is absolutely one of the most beautiful things about poems, I think.

Talk a little bit more broadly about how you came to write this poem.

I know you've written in the past couple years quite a few poems and had many of them published and received many awards and placed in many awards and contests.

Was the poem, this particular poem, was that for a classroom assignment or is that something that you did on your own?

A lot of my poems I write on my own without, like actually at my school we don't get like A lot of poetry related assignments.

Our school for the past like three years, like for my school in 9th, 10th, 11th grade, it's mainly focused on like personal narratives and analytical writing.

Obviously there's some like, poetry sprinkled in.

If, like, there's a teacher that is interested in poetry and wants to include that as part of their curriculum for that term.

But other than that, I'd say the only time you actually get to delve deep into poetry is during senior year when we have different English electives that you can choose from.

Like, what I'm doing is I'm doing two, like, specialized English electives.

And the first one is one that is solely dedicated to poetry.

So reading poetry, writing poetry and talking about poetry with others.

And then the second one is going to be kind of an advanced portfolio intensive where the whole semester is focused on creating this like, finalized portfolio, which obviously will be poetry for me.

But yeah, I'd say most of my poetry I write by myself because there aren't really opportunities to write about it in school.

But since I find writing poetry as more of it's not tedious, I'd say it's something I enjoy spending my time on so I don't feel a burden when I have to write a poem.

Talk a little bit about the school where you are.

You're in a kind of a unique setting.

Yeah, so I go to boarding school in New Hampshire.

It's called Phillips Exeter.

And obviously, like adjusting.

There was a little bit of a rocky start at first, you know, I was 14.

And then suddenly it's like you have to live alone hundreds, thousands of miles away from where your parents live.

And you have to kind of sustain yourself all on your own.

You don't have parents there to like, comfort you during stress.

Like in person, obviously on the phone you do, but in person you wouldn't.

You have to like, study for everything by yourself.

You get no, you get much less guidance than were you to have your parents there in person, if that makes sense.

How did you choose to go to a boarding school?

So for the past.

So before I went to high school, before I went to boarding school, I would say that during elementary middle school.

So during elementary school I was in the US and then the middle of elementary school I went to Korea.

And I stayed there for the last half of elementary school and middle school.

But what I would say is that I found a lack of opportunity, especially because I lived in a small town and it just.

The opportunities the schools gave were very little.

And I did some research and I Found that these schools, these boarding schools, especially on the east coast, provide so much opportunity.

They have so many resources and things like that.

And I was like, if I want to pursue what I want to do, I want to go somewhere where they have the facilities in order for me to, I guess, like do what I want to do and aren't restricted by the facilities or resources that my previous schools had.

For sure, that makes sense.

So you were thinking long term about where you wanted to be, you know, after high school and probably after college.

Yes.

And where is that?

What's your long term goal?

I haven't exactly decided what I want to be when I grow up, but I am looking into several sectors because not only am I interested in poetry, but I'm also interested in stem, in mathematics and in science.

Obviously I've had a little bit of a hard time choosing between, you know, which one to focus on for college and things like that.

But I do want to pursue both fields very deeply in college.

Yeah, I could see how those are.

They can't.

They are seemingly very different fields.

But it seems to me, especially when you think about structure and understanding the logic of stories or the logic of poems, there isn't.

To me, there's an underlying comparison because there's a lot of logic in stem, obviously, you know that.

So tell us a little bit about how did you navigate.

So you said that you didn't have a lot of guidance from your parents when you first arrived at the school.

How did you find ways to make things happen for yourself?

Like how did you find friends?

Or how did you figure out where the resources were?

So it's very similar to your first days out of college.

You know, at your first days of college, everybody leaves their door open.

Everybody's looking for friends, everybody's looking for some set, some way to ground themselves in that community.

Right.

Because everyone's new and it's the same thing.

Like in my grade it's only boarding high school.

Like there are no grades below it.

So everyone is new in like ninth grade.

So everyone's trying to find friends.

Everybody's trying to find people to eat meals together with and stuff like that.

And I'd say when I first went into school, one of the big things was the dorm community.

They were very supportive.

And we have these like, student listeners who will always be open to hearing about your problems or any issues that you may be having.

So that was the one big part of how I was able to kind of establish myself in that community.

And I wasn't.

I didn't feel like an outsider or ostracized.

And it was a little bit hard because when I was in ninth grade and when I first entered my high school, I had a single room.

So, you know, in many colleges, when people first enter, they'll get, like, a roommate, right?

I didn't get a roommate.

And, like, I lived myself, and I lived by myself in my own room for the past three years up until now.

But because I didn't have a roommate, it's like I didn't have an immediate friend or immediately someone to connect to.

So that dorm community was such a big way that I was able to find friends and kind of operate independently as well.

When you think about the friends that you did make, are they friends that you think are very different from the friends that you would have had had you stayed in that small town?

I really agree.

I feel like one part is also the diversity is so much larger at my school compared to when, like, at my old school, there were very few people that actually looked like me.

And in this school, like, that I'm now in, it's much more diverse.

So the.

And people come from different sociological backgrounds.

I believe about 10% of the school is international, so from other countries.

So I'm allowed.

So it's allowed me to, like, see different cultures as well and just bonding with these people from all over.

You know, people say one thing about Exeter, which is the school I go to, is that you find, like, lifelong connections, even more than you would.

So at college, like, the friends you have at Exeter stay friends forever.

And that's how, like, every year there's some sort of reunion between these people of, like, different years.

And the school is very old.

I believe it was built in 1781.

So for that long time, there have been a lot of families associated, you know, a lot of people.

Or the Exeter kind of alumni network is also very tight.

So with that, I'd say it's a way where my connections there can continue to last.

I hear what you're saying about when you first arrived.

Everyone is new.

And so when I think about what you just said, not only are they new to the campus, but they're also from all over the place.

So it's not like they can get.

Take a bus an hour away and see some people, like, you guys are all new and you all are in this new place together, and you pretty much got to be friends.

You've got to find friends and got to get, you know, get along and build networks.

And I think that's.

That's fascinating because I'm guessing that a lot of the other students are like you, and they came there because they wanted the resources and they wanted to, you know, build a future for themselves intentionally.

So I'm going to switch gears a little bit.

I know I told you I was really intrigued by the.

One of the poem titles, Ode to ChatGPT, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that poem, because as someone who teaches composition, ChatGPT is a new force in my life, whether I want to deal with it or not.

And I'm super curious what you think about it.

Yeah.

So there are obviously a lot of debates on, you know, the ethical use of ChatGPT, like, you know, whether it hurts the integrity of writing, whether, like, it should be able to be used in more academic context.

Like, I know there's been a lot of debate recently because people have been found finding that ChatGPT has been used in, like, journal articles, like professional journal journal article articles written by, like, professors and adults.

And people are like, to what extent is that your own work?

And to what extent is that the compiled work of others?

Because, you know, AI trains on that Internet database that has been.

And I wrote this wishful Ode to chatgpt poem because I just found it kind of.

I found it very funny at first.

So when ChatGPT first came out, I asked it to write a poem, and it wrote a very, like.

It wrote a poem, like, every line, every stanza with, like, four lines with AABB rhyme scheme.

It was like, roses are red, violets are blue, and then some rhyme after that.

Not obviously always those lines, but, you know, something similar.

And it was just like.

It was just really funny how it's been.

It's had this whole database of the Internet, and yet it's just so bad at creating poems.

And I was like, it has the whole world to pull from.

This is what it gives you.

Yeah.

And I was like, that's the one part I feel.

That's why I feel poetry is so hard to replicate by the use of an AI machine, because you.

It just.

It's just.

It just can't write it.

It's not like, because ChatGPT can write an essay, it can write a story, it can write, like a memoir or a narrative, but it just can't write poetry.

It's not creative enough.

And then I was like, this was.

I.

I'm sure it's gotten better.

I haven't seen yet.

But when it first came out and it rhymed, I was like, you know, you'll find very few poems that are written nowadays that rhyme because, you know, that's considered kind of antiquated.

So I told it not to rhyme, or I told it to use three verse, and it just can't do that.

It's so conditioned to think that poetry is rhyming and in that format that when you tell it not to rhyme, it'll still rhyme, like, no matter how much, how many times you tell it to.

So that solidified my belief.

Poetry is something that cannot be artificially replicated in a way that can be as effective as if a human wrote it.

That's wonderful.

That is awesome to think about.

What kind of creative work are you doing right now?

Well, I currently have a magazine called Club Sidra literary and art magazine.

And I've been running it since I started 10th grade.

And we've had four issues so far.

And what the.

What Clepsedra is, is basically it's an ancient water clock.

So a clock that, you know, runs by water.

So the whole idea of the magazine is that it is the clock.

The like.

Clepsydra allows these flowing words to be displayed, to be shown out to the world.

Like how a clock's hands, like how the clip cedar uses water to show the time.

It's a similar concept to that.

Each issue we've received, it's me and I have my lead editor.

Her name is Elena, and I'm the editor in chief and founder.

What we do is we comb through these a ton of submissions.

Each submission, each issue.

We usually have about 400 submissions to comb through.

So it's a lot of submissions.

That's why we also have reviewers that help us go through them.

But from that we'll pick the best poetry and art.

It's usually about 20 in total.

And then we'll publish them in an issue.

Nice.

And when, at what time of the year do you accept submissions?

We usually open up submissions as soon as the previous issue is finished.

So we originally aimed for a quarterly system, but then we realized that that wouldn't allow enough time to have enough submissions.

And also.

And I'm also the sole graphic designer, so making those issues takes a lot of time to actually do actual formatting of the issue and layout.

That takes a lot of time.

So we were like, we'll just do it.

We'll just go with the flow.

As soon as we finish one, we'll start another.

Do you publish them in print and ebook or one or the other?

Yeah.

So originally they were only digital format, but we've branched out to doing print issues.

So currently the second and third issue are in print and able to be bought.

Where can people buy copies of those?

I'm working with a local library next to my school to have those in stock like there, but you can also find it on the website soon.

Okay, well we'll be sure to put the link in the show notes so that listeners can find it and check out your magazine and maybe submit Are you open to submissions at this time?

The fourth issue is about to be published in the next following day, so by next week we'll definitely have the submissions for issue five open.

Awesome.

Beautiful.

Well, thanks a lot for joining us today.

It's been great chatting with you, of course.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was wonderful to talk about poetry and boarding school and my magazine.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review.

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