Emily Peng — "Pengus" — poet — moonlighting as a techie

"Tell me that you hear it too" is a line that I've recycled across countless poems over the years. Sometimes, it is an address to the recluse subject of my words. More often, it's a plea to my reader. A question of whether the lines that I've painstakingly drafted have landed in that place where words take on infinite meaning.

Lately, as I've been more lost in my writing than ever, "tell me that you hear it too" has gone from a question that my poems ask to one that I ask as I write. The doubt of whether anything that I write has any value or meaning haunts me, and I've grown unsure about what I'm trying to say, or if language can even still carry that which is unspeakable.

I've always been drawn to unconventional forms, but during my last year of moonlighting in tech, I've become interested in exploring how computation can shape the reception of my work. This website is my playground; a coded representation of my intrusive and unfinished ideas. Each work is shaped by a direct interaction between the words and the reader, so at its final conception, you are as much the writer of the poem as me.

Maybe these works will finally produce a satisfying answer to my question. More likely, they'll only complicate it further. Either way, I hope you enjoy.