On Family, History, and Identity in My Poetic Practice
March 26, 2025
A Q&A with Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
In November 2024, poets from Beacon Press’s National Poetry Series and Raised Voices series gathered at a National Council of Teachers of English panel to discuss how they use poetry to explore themes such as family, history, and identity in their lives. Poetry and its ability to access truth can be a transformative experience as they explore writing about the complexities of their lives and the world around them. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura was one of the panelists. His volume in the Raised Voices series, Common Grace, explores the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his bond with his wife. What follows are his answers to the panel discussion questions.
Beacon Press: Tell us about your teaching practices. Where do you teach? Who are your students? What topics and texts do you cover? What are your goals as an educator?
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura: I teach Introduction to Creative Writing at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where most of my students are freshmen and sophomores. The goal of the course is to give the students a strong foundation in writing poetry, short fiction, and short creative nonfiction, and to introduce them to the joy and benefits that creative writing can have in their lives. I encourage them to use their life experiences and imagination to help develop their unique voices. My approach to teaching is to create a classroom environment of respect where everyone feels safe, where they can freely explore their families, histories, and unique identities. To help them, we read a lot of great examples from contemporary writers of different backgrounds.
BP: Tell us about your poetry practices. What topics and themes do you explore in your poetry? How have your family, history, and identity influenced your poetry?
AC-K: Family, history, and identity are what my poetry is all about. I think I’m just obsessed with trying to come to terms with who I am and what it is that I’ve inherited. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about my father’s experience in the World War II incarceration camps here in the United States, as well as that of some Japanese American artists, like the painters George and Hisako Hibi (husband and wife), Miné Okubo, and the ceramicist Minnie Negoro.
BP: Our colleagues invited you to present one of your poems in the format of a sample lesson. Would you like to present your lesson now?
AC-K: I prepared a handout on one way you can go about teaching my poem “The Hardest Part” from Common Grace. I borrowed the format from poets.org’s Teach This Poem series. If you don’t know it, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a great resource.
My poem is about my parents when they were newlyweds, before my sister and I came along. At the heart of the poem is my mother’s PTS from World War II. She was a seventeen-year-old girl living in Tokyo during the US firebombing raids.
The lesson starts with a warmup in which students watch the trailer to the indie film Paper City, a documentary about the firebombing of Tokyo, to give them context and a quick history lesson. Then it moves on to reading and listening to the poem. I have a link to a reading I did of it so students can hear it in my voice. Then the lesson goes on to a discussion about the craft of the poem regarding tone, images, figurative language, and music. And then it concludes with the wrap up questions: “What do you think was the poet’s intention in writing this poem?” and “Why does it matter?”
BP: Can you talk a little bit about exploring liminal identities in your work and how students might use poetry and writing to explore the liminal aspects of their own identities?
AC-K: The liminality I explore in my work has to do with race, ethnicity, and nationality. I’ve spent my life trying to be comfortable in my own skin. Right now, I’m the most comfortable I’ve ever been—writing has helped with that—but if I’m to be honest, I don’t know if I’m 100% comfortable. I’m American. I’m also Japanese American but I have only a few Japanese American friends and acquaintances. I don’t have the support of an in-person Japanese American community. I don’t even know if I would be fully comfortable in such a community or if I would feel like an outsider.
I wrote a poem that was published in DMQ Review last year called “It Stays with You.” It’s about buying a shirt at the Banana Republic outlet store. The shirt caught my eye because it reminded me of Japanese yukata fabric. But when I tried it on, my first thought was: “Does this look too Japanese?” Too Japanese. Where did that come from? Why would I ask that? So my poem explores that. I think for me and for students writing poetry is helpful to sort these things out. It might not solve any problems, but it may help us come to terms with who we are in our liminality.
BP: Aaron, you describe works of art in your poems. In the classroom, such works are often taught under the ancient Greek principle of ekphrasis. What is it like to work as a modern poet in such an ancient tradition?
AC-K: Writing ekphrastic poetry is a great way in which one can write about history, family, and identity. A work of art is the initial inspiration, but from there, I can take the poem in any direction.
Two of my most recent ekphrastic poems have been inspired by the paintings Coyotes Came Out of the Desert and Floating Clouds by George and Hisako Hibi, respectively, who were incarcerated at the Topaz incarceration camp in Utah during World War II. The paintings were acquired by the Smithsonian a couple years ago. I start the poems by describing the scenes very briefly but then take the opportunity to bring in facts about the painters’ lives and some history about the camps.
In another poem, this one inspired by a photograph taken of Minnie Negoro (a Japanese American ceramicist who was sent to the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming), I insert something about my own family, imprisoned first at the Santa Anita Racetrack, then Jerome, and finally at Tule Lake. There are many ways to engage with the ekphrastic form.
BP: We all see and acknowledge that humanity is facing unprecedented challenges right now, from wars of imperialism and colonial domination to the acceleration of climate change and the rise of authoritarian governments. What do you see as the role of poetry during times like these and how do we teach this to our students?
AC-K: Poetry, both in the reading and writing of it, offers us the opportunity to slow down and deepen our experience of life and other people’s lives. It feeds our imagination, our curiosity, and hopefully, our empathy. Making poetry, making art of all kinds, is an entirely human act. And that’s what we need more of—humanity. We teach this to our students by having them read a wide variety of authors and write in their own unique voices.
About Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, a visual artist, and a teacher. He is the author of two poetry books: the full-length collection Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute, winner of the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. He is also the author and illustrator of the nonfiction book Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017). His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, The Cincinnati Review, Consequence, Shenandoah, Gordon Square Review, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura earned his MFA from Boston University and teaches creative writing at Trinity College.