The Space Between

Poetry has the unique ability to replicate an emotional journey in the reader, and psychic distance molds that experience. It determines whether readers feel they are inside the speaker’s consciousness or observing from afar. A poet’s ability to control psychic distance affects how the poem is experienced. Through shifts in syntax, line endings, repetition, and imagery, a writer can bring the reader close or hold them at bay.

In Franny Choi’s “Turing Test,” the reader enters the poem at a distance. The poem takes the form of an interview between a human and AI, its syntax is broken and fragmented, the imagery is sharp and disjointed. The reader is forced to try to make sense of the text, which means they are in their head, responding intellectually, rather than in their heart, responding emotionally. At the end of the poem, Choi brings the reader close with a plea: “please / please let me remember this.” Because Choi keeps us at a distance for most of the poem, then narrows the psychic distance at the end, the plea resonates in the reader. Because of Choi’s control of psychic distance, the reader feels the speaker’s confusion and indignation, which is a more powerful and impactful connection than passively receiving factual information.

Where “Turing Test” predominantly uses wide psychic distance, “It Is What It Is” maintains close psychic distance throughout. The poem uses colloquial language and begins like a conversation. The speaker asks direct questions that feel like a conversation with the reader: “What am I supposed to do?” Five lines in, Choi writes, “a man killed three Korean mothers / Just like mine.” The lines are blunt and devastating. There are no metaphors to soften the blow. The phrase “just like mine” echoes through us. The poem is a pantoum, which traps the reader into the speaker’s emotional cycle. The tools of craft—syntax, diction, imagery, and even form—become the levers that determine how much the poem lets us in.

Such mastery begins with vulnerability. Before Choi could close the gap between speaker and audience, they first had to close the gap between themselves and the poem. In an interview with TheAdroit Journal in May 2019, Choi explained that the “Turing Test” poems began when they watched her father practicing perfect English, which he had spoken fluently all his life. As the poem progressed and revealed itself, Choi made editorial choices to create the effect wanted in the reader. In other words, Choi made deliberate choices in diction, syntax, imagery, and other elements to shape the reader’s emotional connection to the work. The result is a poem that adjusts our emotional connection until we can feel what the poet feels.

To be aware of psychic distance is to look at every editorial decision—point of view, tense, syntax, imagery—through the lens of intimacy. It’s to ask: How closely do I want the reader to come? How much am I willing to reveal? Each poem answers differently.

When vulnerability is shaped with care, it becomes art. Through that art, we begin to understand one another. Psychic distance asks us, as poets, to measure our own permeability. Too much closeness, and the poem risks collapsing into confession without transformation. Too much distance risks detachment. The poet’s work lies in finding the tension where language can bear emotion without breaking beneath it.

When we find it, something miraculous happens. The distance closes—not into sameness, but into shared awareness—proof that language, when shaped with care, can carry feeling across the gap between us.

Writing Prompts

1. Shifting the Distance

• Write two different short scenes or moments—a memory, an injury, a conversation—in five lines of simple, direct prose. Then, rewrite each three different ways:
  • Rearrange the syntax, allowing fragments and disjointed sentences.
  • Add a line of repeating words or phrases to each scene.
  • Break up the sentences of each scene and combine them, merging the two different scenes. 

Notice how each version alters your emotional relationship to the event. Where does the reader feel closest? Where do they have to reach for meaning? 

        2. Rewriting the Stuck Poem

• Return to a poem that feels flat or stuck and revise it a couple of different ways to change the psychic distance.
  • Rewrite the poem in a different point of view, switch from first to third, or even second person point of view.
  • Change the tense—past to present, or vice versa—to alter immediacy.
  • Break or fuse sentences to shift rhythm.

Each change will move the reader nearer or farther from the emotional core. Watch how those shifts open new doors.