Through witchcraft, digital language and bodies, Marylyn Tan weaves poetry.

Tan is the author of “Gaze Back,” a poetry collection described as a grimoire for queerness, feminism and witchcraft. “Gaze Back” made Tan the first female poet to win Singapore’s English-language poetry prize. She was invited to read aloud poems from the collection, along with new ones from an untitled manuscript, and did a Q&A with the guests in attendance Monday at Kaplan Hall.

Afterward, she sat down with the Daily Bruin’s Beau Garcia to talk about the crux of her poetry and its meaning.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: You’re self-described as a “slutty, large-beasted, queer” artist and poet. Perversion is something that permeates throughout your work. Is there a line that can’t be crossed? Does that line exist within the poetry you make?

Marylyn Tan: The sacred cow that I want to protect is the sexuality that goes on between my current partner and I, but everything else is free game. If it happened to me, then it happened to me. Some people say, “Oh, you know, that’s not really your story to tell,” but I think it was traumatic for me as well. I think I should be allowed to talk about it.

DB: The term “bad queers” that you use on your website evokes much sentiment, especially with a lot of modern media’s staunch depiction of the conveniently attractive or moralistic queer person. What makes “bad queers” so interesting to you?

MT: I think I work mostly in perversion because I am interested in disrespecting respectability. I hate that in order to get respect, or I guess rights, queer people have to perform this model minority status where they show that they are just like every other boring heterosexual out there. I feel that we should make space for our freaks. Making space for that – which is weird but doesn’t technically harm anyone – is a core part of my ethos.

DB: The fluidity of bodies permeates throughout your work. From grotesque rot to erotic envisioning, you portray bodies in an artistic, genderqueer way. Why are bodies so interesting? What do you think makes them so rich in meaning when it comes to your writing?

MT: I think my fascination with flesh and the body and the embodied also comes from a certain sense of always feeling like this life is fleeting. I always like to say that I put the “rot” in erotic. Pretty or placid poetry bores me – I get bored really easily. When I was a kid, I saw a bunch of maggots eating a turtle, and I could not stop staring at it. I was fascinated by the way they look like a choir, shimmering up and down. I think that is a real thorough line through my work, where I am just very obsessed with the limits of the flesh and what a life may not be in the next moment.

DB: In poems like “Unicode Hex,” you bring in a sort of ritual into your poem. Does the idea of ritual speak to your poetry? How does the coexistence of digital language and occult language mesh within your writing?

MT: Rituals and magic are technology, right? It’s ancient technology, and there’s so many ways you can explain it. One of them is that magic is just science that hasn’t been explained yet. But the other thing about rituals is that actually you can – if you know enough about the mechanics of a ritual – look over it to your own specifications. Magic is always that DIY alternative to religion, because with religion, you get bogged down by all these different steps that you have to take in order to maybe access God, while the witch poisons the cows herself. For me, asking for divine intervention versus being the divine intervention is the core practice behind the work and, modern or not, that language.

DB: Lastly, what are some things you’d tell poets or artists that want to explore perversion and queerness in the way you do? What advice do you have for the budding “slutty, large-beasted, queer” artists out there?

MT: I don’t have advice, but I think I have wishes. I hope you get to a place where you’re scared of your own writing. I hope you get to a place where you say the thing nobody else dares to say because it is ugly and it is cruel. I hope your writing is the open wound that nobody can ignore.