Refraction as rupture

In investigating the significance and stake in refractive poetics, especially for artists who come from the margins, it is necessary first to ask what is meant specifically by the term refraction: How am I defining refractive poetries? What is it that holds my attention here?

In post 1 of this series, I describe how poets and artists, in renaming the world anew, engage in acts of “translation” that are intentionally askew. As mentioned, I am thinking of artists who translate a concept, experience, or form, moving from an exterior location to an interior one. Drawing loosely on scientific and colloquial notions of refraction, I consider a poetics of refraction to include:

A base-line that is being interrupted/modulated/dispersed;
Where “base-line” is the normative, the status quo, an expectation of continuity;
And in between the base-line and the line(s)-of-refraction, something opens up, is transformed, that is, new layers of meaning are made in a liminal space of displacement.

Refractive poetries thus depend on both something “familiar” and something “unfamiliar,” structural cohesion and then wilderness, the assumption of linearity that is uprooted into non-linearity. The hinge that connects and blurs each of these oppositions is the occurrence and quality of rupture.

Hermeneutics philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes how metaphor—itself a mechanism of refraction—does not convey meaning merely by mirroring or substituting, but rather it actually creates new meaning, across a distance, in the rupture it opens up semantically. It is “an indirect reference built on the ruins of the direct reference.”

In some ways, this architecture bears on the operations of language and art in general; we are always in the presence of ghosts, traces, shadows, echoes. Indeed, if all language and modes of reference are in some way metaphorical, with gaps and chasms, ambiguities and tension, a tenable relationship between signifier and signified, then it is inside that wild and slippery space where so much poetry and art reside.

In the works of art that I will be considering, the idea of meaning in relation to rupture and ruins might be even more salient. There is destruction: in the creation of new meaning, the old paths of meaning must be destabilized. The implication, though, is not that the old references cease to exist at all but that their ruins saturate the air like dust unsettling or particles of fog. Within that haze and cloud, something new and transgressive is created. What ghosts, echoes, shadows emerge between the ruins to hover and suspend in refractive poetries? How do they illuminate truths as they slip between cracks and gaps? What is ineffable in the space that rupture opens up?

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Notes:

Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," Critical Inquiry 5 (1978).

July 12, 2016

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refract : disrupt : interrupt : modulate : shatter : disperse

In renaming the world anew, poets and artists engage in acts of “translation” that are intentionally askew. What truths and beauties are revealed in such blurry distortions of our world, and what is at stake in this moment of refraction for poets and artists from the margins? While we are familiar with Dickinson’s dictate Tell all the truth but tell it slant, I explore these angles through the lens of visual and mixed media—artwork that function as poems in miraculous ways—with the belief that they shed light on the poetics of language by manifesting it viscerally and tangibly. Simultaneously, I take the study of refraction further by examining how oblique renderings of status-quo notions urge the audience to inhabit non-dominant spaces of perception that challenge the terms of their reality. These artists demonstrate how refractive poetries invoke alternative or marginal perspectives, constructing new meaning by moving beyond normalized ways of experiencing the world.

Jennifer S. Cheng is a poet and essayist who writes about dislocation as home, things the body knows, and bewilderment. She is the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize, forthcoming in October 2016. Her writing appears in Tin House, AGNI, Entropy, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, The Normal School, The Volta, Guernica Daily, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar and Kundiman Fellow, she received her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University, and BA from Brown University. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in San Francisco, where she is a founding editor of Drop Leaf Press.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.