hika.

Noah Song is a sophomore who is a double major in music and psychology, whose poems “ode” and “for bro” will be featured in the HIKA 2026-2027 magazine edition.

You submitted your poem’s “ode” and “for bro” to HIKA. What inspired you to write those poems?

I guess for “for bro,” I have a friend back home who, at the time, was going through a breakup and he was kind of going through it hard. It’s strange with that one because usually I like to have my writing take time and I like to kind of meditate on it for a bit before I write it, but that one was something that I just kind of came up with in like 15 minutes and the first, I guess, version of the poem was the text message that I sent to him because we were texting about it.

Then for “ode,” something that I’ve been interested in for a long time now is the idea of music being used as a vehicle to reincarnate in a way, and its power to not only bring back the souls and the spirits of the composers, but also to make us as listeners a part of the process in that way. I wanted to get that kind of feeling into a piece of writing—that feeling that not only are the people who create living forever, but the people who experience and are inspired by experiences, they’re also living forever too.

And then outside of Ode, how do you think being a music major impacts your creative writing?

The biggest way that I think that music affects [my writing] is that I like to have rhythm to my writing and that is obviously important, not just as a music major, but also being a percussionist like I am. And so I’m always interested in the role that rhythm can play in writing. I’ve kind of played around with that a lot in my writing, not as much in the 2 poems that I submitted, but in a lot of my poetry, rhythm is definitely a foundational element to it.

Could you walk us through your writing process?

So when it starts out, usually, It starts out very small, and it’s like a single idea that isn’t nearly fleshed out, and I have to, as I mentioned, think about it for a while—sometimes weeks or months—before I feel like okay, this is at a spot where I feel like I can kind of get something that I care about across to people, because if you don’t care about it, then other people aren’t going to care about it. I really try to be patient with that.

Then once I’m kind of at that point where I think that I’ve got something good, then I’ll write it, but I’ll write it really quickly. And that’s kind of on purpose. Because I’m trying to see what I can get out in a short period of time when there’s not much room to operate so that later on when there is room to operate I can kind of see how things can be improved. And it’s also good because it kind of gives me a glimpse into how I think. That sounds kind of weird because I’m the one thinking, and so I should know already, but that’s kind of the point where a lot of things come out that I didn’t know about myself necessarily, not just as a writer, but as a person. So it’s a very important thing for me to tie myself in a very particular way when I write. I think that’s the biggest thing about my process.

And then how did you start writing?

I think I’ve always had ideas, but I never really found a creative voice until high school…It wasn’t really until [then] that I started writing short fiction and started fleshing out ideas that I had had for like years before that. I got into poetry, though, maybe a year and a half ago. I went on a trip to Europe that was very important in a lot of ways, but also for my writing. Because it’s a very different place, definitely different from the places I’d been before and the place where I’d lived, and so it was very inspiring creatively. I remember writing my first poem that I thought was good after visiting a mountain range in Italy. It was just like this outpour, this continuous outpour of ideas and imagery, and I thought that there could be something there.

And then, I think the first time that I really sort of began to see inklings of the style that I have now is actually a little bit after the Europe trip. I was visiting Kenyon as a prospective student and on the way back…our minivan broke down. It was a really, really old minivan [that] had been part of our family for my whole life and longer than that, and so I was sad. It was weird. I was sad about this car, but I started writing while we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive. I generally don’t like to read my own stuff, but that one in particular is kind of hard to read. But that was the first time that I really kind of saw my voice coming to fruition, I guess.

Since coming to Kenyon, how do you think you’ve changed as a writer?

Well, I haven’t taken an English class yet. Most of my, I guess, interaction with literature at Kenyon has come through reading student magazines like HIKA. What I’ve kind of gotten from doing that is: not everything really needs to be presented in this big spectacular way. That was something that I had been thinking about a lot before I came to Kenyon, even, but seeing the intimacy with which Kenyon writers presented their ideas and their emotions was really moving in a way. It kind of taught me that you can present big ideas, but you don’t really need to decorate them too much—like you can just let the idea speak for itself. That’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned from being here.

Do you have any ideas or themes that you want to explore in the near future?

Yeah I’ve been working on a few ideas in my head recently that kind of revolve around the idea of sin. I think that is a really interesting idea, and I love to kind of mash up multiple ideas into one thing. I think that idea of sin—that’s a very personal idea to me. I grew up being a part of a church, and just the doubts that kind of arise from that have always been something that’s interesting. I think something that’s also interesting is Asian American identity in the US. I took a class last semester that talked about that, so that kind of jumpstarted my interest in it, but I mean, I’ve always sort of been interested in Asian American identities, so I think that would be something that’s pretty cool to explore too.

Finally, do you have any advice for people that want to be writers but might be afraid to start?

I think being humble is a big one because I think every work is a work in progress. Always. That’s something that I find beautiful about writing, is that there’s no finality to it in a way, so keep writing and keep reading as well. I think there was a point in time where I didn’t read. I hated reading because I had this fear that if I read something that I really liked, then I would not be able to stop thinking about that thing that I read, and it would somehow slowly creep into my writing, and I’d end up just restating what this other person had said. I was really scared of that. But honestly, I think the best solution to that is to keep reading as much as you can, because the more things you’ve read, the more things you can work off of, and you can synthesize different ideas and make it your own thing.