Excerpts from
THE BODY, THE
{ } AGAIN

Interview with Jennifer S. Cheng

Emma Sheinbaum:

You collect such a diverse array of found, familial, and original images and objects in most if not all of your lyric essays and poems. You recently participated in an epistolary experiment with poet Gabrielle Bates. You’ve also sewn fabric meditation books made with natural materials gathered in the vicinity, asemic stitching, bits of paper text fragments. How do you feel creative artifact-making, interacting with the tactile world, and writing all intersect, complement, and resonant with each other? What does this alchemy of text and image and object feel like as you craft your work?

Jennifer S. Cheng:

Immediately this makes me think of childhood, how the world begins primarily as something tactile, sensory, and relational. I spent my days gathering random found objects from my surroundings, recursively arranging and rearranging them on shelves, in my “treasure box,” at the bottoms of drawers. Such objects ranged from discarded broken pieces of my mother’s jewelry, to tiny dried flower heads, to segments of satin ribbon that soothed against my fingertips—pieces and shards that aren’t conventionally considered valuable but make up a child’s world. The logic of my relationship to these objects was purely instinctual, a felt pattern of intimacy. I wonder if these childhood assemblages are our first poems and essays? I still have this gathering practice, no matter how much I try to curb it. My home space is teeming with small objects and textures: haphazard vignettes of rocks, seeds, broken shells, plant matter, as well as ceramic bowls, postcards, letters, textile patterns… There’s a resonance here between poetry and nest, where the debris of one’s environment is accumulated to make a space for the body, and where pattern-making, arranging, or assembling becomes a kind of utterance. Obviously as an adult, it is a more complex and layered endeavor, but there’s still something beautiful and startling to me about how impulses of juxtaposition and context (that is, relation) can rupture open new articulations and spaces of meaning.

ES:

When I attended your Poetry in the Time of the Pandemic workshop, which truly rejuvenated me in a way nothing had during quarantine, you discussed the concept of “negative capability: the ability to tolerate—and integrate—the state of unknowing, doubt, and uncertainty into one’s navigations.” How does experimenting with genre, and hybridity, let you write into uncertainty, into the unknown? 

JSC:

I’m so warmed to hear it was nourishing for you! My response to this question might also speak to your previous one about alchemy. Maybe the reason why I gravitate toward various modalities—textual, visual, tactile—is also why I love prose poetry and lyric essay: in my view these hybrid forms inhabit the poetics and ethics of bewilderment in profound ways. Their disrupture of the conventions of meaning-making is particularly poignant, and there is a way that the interstitial space invoked by hybridity becomes generative and fertile in its uncertainty, in the way it recognizes what cannot be known or put into language. That space feels deliciously freeing to me, and truthful; it makes my heart pound. Writing has always been the one place in my life where I am able to allow myself to inhabit my most primitive, intuitive, interior mode of being and navigating—where I feel safe enough to wander into the dark, to feel lost, to risk f(l)ailing. As a writer, it’s not so much that I intentionally set out to experiment with genre; it’s more that I sense inherent meaning and beauty in what is slippery, tenuous, fragile. The state of unknowing happily permeates my writing practice, but in my everyday life it is more ambivalent. Spiritually, I might willingly gravitate toward the unknown/unknowable, but in practical, tangible ways, that can be terrifying and even devastating. Maybe writing helps me to negotiate between the beauty and the terror of it, the desire and the fear? Maybe that is why there is an intimate resonance between my sense of the world as a fragmented, fractured place, and the fact that my innermost narratives emerge as fragmented, fractured language.

This might be related: recently I started working with a therapist who seems to be subtly reframing the parts of me that I brought to her as broken and hindering instead as portals of bewilderment. That is, rather than damaged, defective things to extinguish or dominate, perhaps they are things to approach with curiosity, care, even a sense of play. What if wholeness comes from simply making a hospitable space for my holes? At first it was surprising and alarming to think this way. But in fact, the question my therapist proposes is one I often ask of my students, especially those who come from marginalized communities: What are the aspects of your writing identity/process that feel broken, voiceless, or uncertain—and how might you embrace and honor them?

ES:

Another crucial aspect of this virtual workshop you led was the practice of poetic ritual. What does poetic ritual mean to you? How has this poetic ritual guided you through challenging times? How has it challenged you? 


JSC:

Ooh, I love your insightful pivot on the word “challenge.” My poetic-ritual experiments began during the pandemic in 2020 as a desperate attempt to alleviate some of my grief by making space for it. Like many writers I felt unmoored even in language, and I needed something else. It started with arranging rocks in a blue ceramic bowl my friend had sent me, then pouring water over it and watching the rocks slowly saturate. In subsequent iterations, I started adding fragments of language written on tiny squares of thin, delicate parchment paper. I lit candles. I watched and smelled the smoke dissipate. Sometimes I discarded the papers afterward, and sometimes I wrapped them around rocks, tying them with thread. What was important to me was listening to the body’s impulses and desires, even (especially) if they were inexplicable.

There’s a connection between these brief gestural sequences and poetry—ritual as language, and language as ritual. Ritual, as I see it, is poetry embodied. It attempts to give form to what is otherwise formless. It converges the concrete and fluid, recognizing the value of intuition and the unknown, while grounding the body in time and space. Ritual, even more than textual poetry, emphasizes process and ephemerality. I think of it as a liturgical or artistic process without a product, where the focus is the embodied experience itself, the carrying out of an impulse. As someone who, in normal everyday life, has enormous difficulty inhabiting and hearing my body—so much that I often do not even know what I am desiring or feeling in a given moment—this kind of engagement is actually rather difficult and intimidating! I love it for this reason, how it affirms bodily attention and orientation as an important mode of meaning-making.

ES:

Your books, essays, poems, and genre-defiant projects are each wholly distinct and come in a surprising variety of shapes and forms—text-image lyric essays, letters, geometrical diagrams—sometimes all in the same projects. I’ve always been curious to get some insight into your writing process. How has writing guided you through various “homes” over time, or even provided you with a home (metaphorically speaking)?


JSC:

Oh my goodness, for sure they are homes, even if temporary—I feel the truth of this deeply! In a way, my second book, MOON, is really about this: the un-building and re-building of homes, shelters, nests, as part of an aesthetic practice. As humans, there is a way in which we want both safety and wilderness—we want to be lost and found at the same time. Writing makes possible this space for me. Gaston Bachelard says that “our house is our corner of the world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos,” and I wonder if the impetus for most first books for poets is “to find the original shell.” My first book, HOUSE A, which is in conversation with Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, is about immigrant home-building, and the book itself was absolutely a textu(r)al home, a primal home, that I was constructing, the way a child might sit in a small corner and trace the shadows and debris around her into a tiny fort. In that book, the speaker and I conjured a “dream-geometry” where our ghosts, absences, and aberrations of history could be woven directly into the construction, in terms of both subject matter and form.

ES:

In Moon: Maps, Letters, Poems, you weave mythmaking with lyric prose and poetry to explore “the feminine monstrous” in ways that excavate and reshape/rebuild narratives of mythological figures like Chang ‘E. You write, “she will continue to ask herself: How does one make a habitation of it? What is the relationship between a woman’s fragments and her desire

for wholeness? What does a body know better when it is alone. It radiates

in multiple directions

and cannot be caught in a fistful.” 

What follows is an inventory of artifacts Chang E’ collects. Through writing this book and being so intimate with these women of folklore, collecting your own folklore along the way, what do you appreciate about interacting with other texts in your work? 

JSC:

I was just reading an interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha in BOMB magazine where she says, “We know very well that we carry with us the collective, and we carry it all the time… You use an I because language requires it in grammar and sentence structure. But the I is not merely about personal subjectivity; it’s actually there as an open space to invite many Is to inhabit it.” I love both the refutation of the myth of individuality (and ‘original text’) here as well as the idea of an “open space.” She goes on in the interview to discuss the ethics of multiplicity, that is, multiple voices, multiple identities, multiple registers, which has been salient in my own impulse toward hybrid forms (here is my column in jacket2 on “refraction as resistance,” in case it interests anyone).

The other part of my response to this question is that in writing MOON, I found my childhood folktales to be incredibly helpful as co-conspirators for voicing what couldn’t otherwise be spoken aloud. Allowing our stories to intermingle and blur, unraveling and raveling along the way, allowed me to locate myself in relation to a framework while also loosening the coordinates. And maybe because I am a person of color, a woman, a second-generation immigrant who lived overseas—there is always the compulsion to take a set of established boundaries, and to set them in motion.


ES:

Are there places you go, routines you practice, books or works of art or music that you return to when you feel stuck, unable to focus, or unmotivated to create? 


JSC:

Lately I have been turning to hand-sewing, the stitch as a unit of articulation. This practice, like my poetic rituals, feels like writing to me, like unearthing language. Other things that nourish me: taking a walk in the fog through the forest or coastal prairie; spending time with favorite artworks or art books (lately: Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Ana Mendieta, Leslie Hewitt, Yokota Daisuke); pleasure reading (recently: Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung, Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, trans. by Christina MacSweeney, The Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop, Imagine Us, the Swarm by Muriel Leung); listening to the podcast series On Being and Between the Covers; visiting SFMOMA and perusing online image archives (I especially love old geographical surveyor photographs).

ES:

You write in HOUSE A, “Strangely enough, it was not my father but my mother who gave us history lessons steeped in a pale, languorous liquid: We sleep where our home is, and we build a home where we sleep.” 

Some of the most prevalent and resonant themes throughout all your work are the concepts of immigrant home-building, shelter, displacement and dislocation, internal and external landscapes. How has intergenerational memory informed your writing, and perhaps who you are as a writer? 


JSC:

There’s something interesting about the connection between memory and language for a child of immigrants, how there is a certain texture of intimacy that draws them into orbit with one another. In my family, the threads of history and memory that were passed down—in both content and form—imparted to me a fundamental sense of history, knowledge, and language as haunted, porous things. They are not like a slab of stone, concretely defined. Rather, they permeate the atmosphere of a room elusively, leaving subtle, sometimes undetectable, imprints all over the furniture. They carry specificity as much as ambiguity, intimacy as much as distance. This particular worldview has certainly shaped and informed my writing, though I never considered until now how my interior language, then, is a kind of ancestral inheritance, something that connects me to my ancestors even as it has often felt like a gulf between us. (Thank you, Emma, for this gift of reflection!)


ES:

Something I’ve always loved about your writing is how you utilize space and punctuation in such innovative, emotionally resonant ways, especially in Invocation: An Essay and more recently in “So We Must Meet Apart” (Poetry Foundation).

What do you think space offers on the page, how does it function? How does the concept of liminality inform your writing? I love how this gives this effect of, as you put it on your website, “trembling language.” What are your blank space poetics? 


JSC:

Oh! This one I can answer by pointing to my lyric essay on the subject: “Dear Blank Space: a Literacy Narrative.” Blank space is very much a meaning-making element because silence, absence, and ghosts are necessary and evocative components of my language. The use of blank space in my writing sharpens the rhythm and atmosphere. It contributes to the tonality or tenor of a textual fragment, framing it either higher or lower on the page, cushioning it with a silence that is vast or narrow. The silence of blank space is like any other element of language, I think, where meaning is created together and in tension with adjacent elements.

My use of trembling language is based on Édouard Glissant’s pensée du tremblement (“trembling thinking”). One of my favorite quotes of Glissant’s is a translation that Carina del Valle Schorske tweeted in late 2018: “Because the world trembles in every which way, we understand the world better when we tremble with it.” It just makes sense to me that as a writer, the way I tremble with the world is through language.


ES:

You recently edited Eloisa Amezcua’s chapbook DREAM / LIFE (Drop Leaf Press), a selection of poetic collages published in four distinct volumes, printed on various types of paper with images and scans of bugs, insects, and their lifecycle along with text cut-outs that explore life in the real, dream life, intimacy and affection, loss and growth. What was this collaborative process like? What have you learned through being an editor?

JSC: 

It was truly an experiment in bewilderment! I fell in love with Eloisa’s beautiful poetic collages the moment I came across them and felt they would make a thrilling chapbook. Though I am by nature quite shy, I reached out to see if she would be interested in working with an odd, experimental micropress. We talked briefly about our poetic approaches and desires, and then she basically handed over four packets of her poems and said to do whatever I like and let it be a surprise. I’ve always loved ephemera and, given the physicality and themes of the collages, I wanted to explore it as a published form. During the pandemic, the project became even more about the process itself; in the same way that many people started gardening and baking, I inhabited my editorial role as a function of care and tending. To honor something outside oneself with sheer joy—it’s so good for the heart! I ended up making the chapbooks from start to finish in my little room, so for a season my floor was entirely covered with: paper piles, textile scraps, paper cutter, sewing machine, test prints, sample chapbooks, printer, colorful thread… Lots of practical knowledge was gained regarding weights and textures of paper, how to relieve a paper jam, the nuances of various printer settings, the cost of ink, and how to sew with paper.

ES:

What does a perfect day look like for you?

JSC:

Ooh, thank you for the permission to dream for a moment. It would begin with abundant sleep without any nightmares, a natural waking, cuddles with my toddler and partner, breakfast congee made from leftovers, a sloooow morning of writing and reading and tending, which dips into the afternoon, followed by a foggy hike along one of my favorite trails, then playing with the toddler, eating 餡餅 and her favorite charcoal roll cake, more family cuddles, and finally, oh to dream, even stepping out into the night and taking the bus to attend a reading or talk or book club at The Ruby while the little one sleeps.

Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms. Her book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Poetry Book of 2018” alongside Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, Julie Carr, and Raquel Salas Rivera. She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. She has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives quietly in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com