Travis Chi Wing Lau and the radical act of remaining tender

Poet Travis Chi Wing Lau opens his new poetry collection, What’s Left Is Tender (Small Harbor Publishing), with a series of deeply revealing verses centered on his experiences growing up with a scoliosis-related disability, writing of the various ways the tendrils extending from these chronic pains wormed into every facet of his existence. 

In the opening “Ars Poetica,” Lau writes of being born with a back “bent by a mother’s womb,” later addressing the combined physical and mental strain of his condition when he writes, “It’s been hard to carry the weight of my own head.”

“There’s this phrase I borrow from an 18th century disabled writer, where he anatomizes himself and he says, ‘Oh, what if I just cut myself into pieces and displayed them for your perusal, for your entertainment? Am I achieving something? Or am I doing a kind of violence to myself?’” said Lau, who will celebrate the release of What’s Left Is Tender at Prologue Bookshop on Monday, Aug. 18, reading alongside Michael Leong and Mandy Shunnarah. “And I think those questions pervade a lot of the first section and then travel into new directions.”

In writing about disability, Lau also confronts related external issues that range from inaccessible spaces (“Incantation for Access”) to the ills of a for-profit healthcare system where “the bodies jingle with profit.” Owing to this, the treatment to which Lau has been subjected by medical professionals has, at times, left him feeling dehumanized (in one poem, a doctor relays how Lau’s maladies could make him useful “even after they call time of death”). And even the prospect of doctors finding ways to improve his condition comes with its own set of anxieties, the poet questioning the person he might become should his pains subside.

“Unfortunately, for political reasons, a lot of disabled people don’t want to wade into that territory of what if I wasn’t disabled, because it feeds eugenic discourses in all sorts of ways,” Lau said. “But I think something that’s very real to that experience is, if I were not defined by pain, at least in my case, would I be someone else entirely? And something I try to deal with in the book is the ambivalence of that. Yes, maybe I would be pain free, but would I be as – to use a word the book is focused on – tender in the ways that I am now?”

Not that holding to this softness has been easy. In one poem, Lau writes of a growing concern that he’s become calcified in a way he promised himself he never would. And throughout the book, the outside world continues to present as a counter to this vulnerability, existing as a place that serves to harden us, fortifying our guards in a way that leaves us less open to connection.

“There are so many forces that want to harden us, and to be tender or sensitive or soft is seen as weakness, or as the thing we need to leave behind to do the good work of fighting for what’s right,” Lau said. “I remember constantly being described as the fragile one when I was younger, and I used to see it as such a badge of shame. More recently, I think, I’m coming to terms with the fact that my softness is what allows me to do meaningful and important work.”

This includes his work alongside students as an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College, a career track that has finally introduced some sense of grounding and security for the poet, which he credited in part for the more outward look given rise in the book’s second section. There, the words “I” and “me” begin to fade, replaced by mentions of Lau’s parents, relatives, and the other people who exist within his orbit.

“Several people in my life have asked me directly why I’ve never really written extensively about my family. … And I think it’s because, weirdly enough, of all the facets of my identity, my Chinese heritage has been the one that’s most difficult to talk about, because there’s so much anxiety in Chinese families about how we look to the public, where family shame is a thing that we don’t express,” Lau said. “And as a result, we’ve had many unfortunate mental health challenges. In the second section [of the book], I write about an uncle of mine who ended up taking his own life over what essentially was undiagnosed depression. But depression is such a stigmatized word that we never named it, and as a result I don’t think he received the care that he needed. And for me to tell these stories, I feel like I needed to break from the traditions of silence that existed in my family. And this book felt like the time to do it.”

Lau described his poetic voice as something that emerged gradually over time, taking shape in spiral-bound notebooks and on typed-out pages rather than in the air at poetry open mics. Owing to this, everything down to the typography and layout of a page can become a part of the work for Lau, with the text in one poem mimicking the curvature of his spine as he writes about the pains of his disability. Later, in “Elegy for Security,” he shrinks the type size, which has the impact of pulling the reader in close, increasing the intimacy of the lines. For Lau, the intent is also to play with the concept of time, the contraction of the text serving as a way to increase the seconds spent with a verse and meant to reflect the way that a sharp burst of chronic pain “can be expanded into what feels like a year or a generation.”

The idea of time also echoes in the years that have passed since Lau wrote the book’s earliest poems, some of which began to surface in 2016. As a result, Lau now identifies differently with certain verses, tracing this development to how he’s grown and changed as a person in the last decade, but also to the reality that emotional scar tissue has a way of accruing over time.

“I know this is going to sound strange, but I like to think of it in the same way that I did when I started getting tattoos … in that they’re records of a particular time,” said Lau, who got his first tattoo in 2015, a year before he wrote the earliest poems that would eventually become What’s Left Is Tender. “And when I think now about what tattoos do for me, it was definitely about reclaiming my body as a space I can make my own and seeing it as an artistic surface after spending so much of my life feeling shame about it. And I never made the connection in terms of the temporal closeness of those decisions until this conversation, but that was simultaneously the moment where I really started to think of myself as a disabled writer, writing about those very issues in my work as much as I was living them in my life.”