Her current literary work

Her current work on the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong is especially demanding in terms of the amount of code-switching it requires from her. “Writing about a place like the Chungking Mansions which is just so dense and rich and varied… it’s important to do it well, right,” she says. Drawing loosely on the words of anthropologist Gordon Mathews who teaches at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, she describes the Chungking Mansions as an "intercultural nexus of the low-end global economy", where economic migrants and asylum seekers from Asia and Africa end up trying to carve out a life, sometimes without even having intended to end up in Hong Kong.

The diversity of the Chungking Mansions makes it an interesting test of the human ability to adapt and work together. In such an environment, mistrust and racism inevitably crop up. She laughs as she recounts how “depending on who you talk to, you'll hear people say - you can't trust ‘fill in the blank’. And so I can have a few conversations over the course of the day and learn that you can't trust Indians, can't trust Pakistanis, can't trust Nepalese, can't trust people from West Africa, can't trust people from East Africa…” That being said, she also emphasises the unlikely friendships that emerge, and the fact that many people do get along quite warmly despite their cultural differences. She observes that many unlikely alliances form amongst the people of Chungking Mansions: “So you see for example, Muslim shopkeepers and their Hindu shop assistants, mainlanders and Hong Kongers working together, or you'll see Africans doing business with Indians, or all of these unlikely alliances.”

She seeks to portray the stories of these economic migrants in a way that “honours” rather than merely romanticises them. She is exploring how she, as an outsider, can ethically represent people whose experiences are “poorly understood” by mainstream society. Ultimately, to ensure the integrity and accuracy of her project, she plans to show her poetry and documentary work to the people she’s written about in the Chungking Mansions - “I'll make an effort to make sure that they have them,” she says firmly, “And [I’ll ask] - what do you think of this? Did I get this right in some situations?”

The value and purpose of poetic and literary thinking

Ms Greenberg uses poetry as a way of documenting these experiences, drawing on literary thinking to make sense of places such as the Chungking Mansions, outsider communities in the US, rural Texas, and the world in general. This raises two questions: firstly, why use poetry to study field sites more commonly studied through the lens of the social sciences? Secondly, why engage with field sites at all, when there is no strict necessity for poets to incorporate empirical or anthropological research into their work?

The first question invites us to consider the value of poetic and literary thinking. Ms Greenberg is firm in her conviction that poetry provides an alternative way of “knowing”, and that it is valuable to look at places through a literary perspective, rather than just using quantitative or qualitative lenses. Although the social sciences may be able to nail down “specific detail”, poetic knowledge is more able to provide a holistic understanding of “time, place, milieu or zeitgeist”. She describes the latter as “these things that build the world, but don’t quantify it”. The innate structure of poetry, which allows the poet to move through or around ideas with a great deal of flexibility, and which allows the poet to move away from a single unified speaker into a “disunified multi-vocal approach”, is also what she considers to be one of the unique abilities of poetry as a genre.

The second question makes us reflect on the many different “purposes” that poetry can be called upon to serve. Ms Greenberg observes that there are many types of poetry. Some people use poetry as catharsis for their emotions, using it to heal from heartbreak or loss or grief. Some people use poetry to heighten the moments of ordinary life and enable the “transcendence from ordinary life to the spiritual”, bringing it out for example to celebrate a wedding, or mark a funeral. Yet she feels that it is limiting to think of poetry only as a means of accessing the sacred, or only as a means of catharsis. She uses her poetry to document this world, without necessarily aiming to transcend it, because she feels that there is value in using poetic knowledge to make sense of current global patterns such as economic migration, race, nationalism, and so on. Hence she seeks to connect her poetry to some kind of empirical grounding, and seeks to give her poems a historical context.

Her workshops at USP

Through the workshops she will be holding for USP, Ms Greenberg will teach students how to use poetry to make sense of the world, and guide students to work on assignments that are documentary or fieldwork informed. Although poetry can be a highly solitary activity, the “workshop model” of teaching poetry brings a social element to the process, and helps students become aware of how their work comes across to an audience. The “workshop model” is a model of critique often used for teaching the arts within an academic context, and is something that Ms Greenberg has been familiar with for a long time--she has been in workshops for half her life, ranging from informal workshops in high school, to more formalised workshops in graduate school.

She describes the “workshop model” as a warm, welcoming and generous space where writers come together to critique each other’s work, and be critiqued in return. Everybody should ideally bring a poem each week, to demonstrate that they have “skin in the game” and are willing to risk a little vulnerability. Through workshops, Ms Greenberg explains, writers learn about the “mutual support and mutual responsibility” necessary to keep a healthy feedback cycle going. They learn how to give feedback that is not just rigorous, but also well-suited to the project that each individual person brings. For instance, the critique that one person’s work would benefit from might differ vastly from the critique another person might need to hear, and the critique that would be valuable to a beginner would differ from what a more experienced poet would require. One important aspect of criticism is therefore to “meet the poet where s/hes at”, and be conscientious of tailoring one’s feedback to the specific project or goals or interests of the writer. This requires a certain amount of self-discipline, as writers critiquing their friends’ work must be aware that what they “like” or “dislike” in a poem is not necessarily the same as what “works” or “doesn’t work”. The larger goal of critique is not simply to say “I love this poem”, but to go beyond personal taste and answer bigger questions - “You love it, but what makes it so good? Is it just [that] you like this image? Or does the image connect to something broader in the poem, or in society?”

Ultimately, Ms Greenberg hopes to provide an introduction to the workshop model, for people who have not encountered it before, as well as an introduction to poetry, for those interested in learning how poetry offers an alternative form of knowing. She remarks that people often do things in poetry with the help of their unconscious mind that they could never have plotted out with their conscious mind. We look forward to the valuable contributions that Ms Greenberg will bring to the USP community, as she helps us explore the depths of our imagination and unconscious.