About Sean Cho A.
Sean Cho A. is the author of American Home (Autumn House Press) winner of the 2020 AHP Chapbook Contest. His work can be found in Poetry, The New England Review, Black Warrior Review, and Iron Horse, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California Irvine and PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature at The University of Cincinnati. Currently, he is an assistant professor researching ethical AI and creativity. He is also the editor of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and Thought. Which is open for submissions until Aug 2025.
Follow him on his (new!) bluesky account @phlat-soda
A Profile of the Author
Notes on “Poem”
I wrote this sonnet and its series when I was like 24 – I’m getting too close to touching 30 now.
I remember reading a ton about the sonnet as being the perfect form which had this sense of completeness and resolution that was favorable to a readership, and of course, like a typical young annoying dude who writes poems, I was like “I’ll show you” and tried to write a ton of “half sonnets”: poems that aimed for narrative completeness by the volta point.
After like three days, I had 100 of these “half sonnets” and surprise(!) they weren’t working, so I ended up over the course of the next three weeks “completing” them all. About 75 of them ended up “working,” with publications from the series in The Michigan Quarterly, The Academy of American Poets, Passages North and Willow Springs, and like 50 of them ended up getting mixed in conversation with a series of prose poems, in a manuscript titled “Workbook/” that I’m (eagerly possibly desperately) shopping around (hint hint).
I’m not sure what this poem or any of them are about. I never really think about language when writing, I have a constraint, in this case sonnets, and then a way the speech, or dialect sounds, what David Foster Wallace (I promise I’m not a DFW dude though) called the “Brain voice” – even without language the sounds, the pacing, the movement has distinct differences we can feel.
I’ve written intentionally everyday 9 months out of the year for the past 5 years, and the energy of the writing process, not the writing itself, is something I’m always aiming towards.
Etc.
Literary Excerpts: Since I started teaching, I always recite a poem or literary excerpt at the end of class. These were a couple that really struck the students this year, and secretly turned business bros and stressed out pre-meds into writers: – From “Two years with Franz” (2018), specifically the quote “There used to be a real world. Fuck, you could walk there.”
– Matthew Rohrer’s collection A Green Light especially the moment in the poem “Hone Quarry”: “I am in love /with the way I see the world./But I am all alone there.”
– From Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf: “I try not to think of God as a debt to luck,/but for years I consumed nothing / that did not harm me / and still I lived, witless // as a bird flying over state lines.”
Day Job: My day “job” has me preparing to teach a course on ethical artificial intelligence use (I feel the writers’ eyes rolling), so I’m reading/thinking/pausing etc. a lot around the subject. A few ideas that I’m stuck on:
– It’s fine if 4 out of 5 advertisements AI selects for me are relevant—companies would consider this a success. However, I’d never purchase a medical robot that promises to move my grandparents in and out of bed without harm 999 out of 1000 times.
– “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” —AI pioneer Herb Simon, 1965
– This self quote: “the central AI question is how much of yourself are they willing to give away.”
Lastly, I want to scheme my way into getting an ARC of Richard Siken’s new collection, I Do Know Some Things – without dreams we have nothing.
