'Time Text Body Noise'

The way the line never ends

When I was thinking about a motif or query that could help focus my Commentaries here at Jacket2, I kept returning to a central question about time. The way that we experience and imagine time is directly shaped by the quality of our attention and the terms of our engagement. There are many areas of interest through which I could engage this experience of time (film, for example), but while commentating here, I shall limit myself to the way that language operates in poetic contexts.

I decided to title my series TIME TEXT BODY NOISE because these elements are all centrally linked in how I am coming to understand the production of time as a poetic experience. Embodied realities inform how time proceeds for us when we encounter a work, but there are also historical and discursive habits that engineer time for us as readers, watchers, and listeners of poetry...the short breaks on the page as synaptic observations mirroring the spoken phrase in Creeley’s work, for example, or the way Myung Mi Kim’s lines begin to “cohere” like fallout or debris from a slow-moving explosion in what constitutes a different sort of “dailiness” in her book Commons.

One quick example of this that I'll use as a way of opening is from Truong Tran's 2004 collection, within the margin (Apogee). The title poem is composed almost entirely of one long line that becomes a horizon on the page. As a reader, I feel an interminabiilty in the line that suggests density. All events get thrown into this horizon together. The line reads and feels as if it will never end. This begs the question to me--what is complete? What has deeper "value" in this flattening, endless, running time?

March 9, 2014

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I'm titling my Commentaries series TIME TEXT BODY NOISE in order to capture some central questions I've been investigating regarding how we experience and imagine time when we read, watch, and hear poetry happen. These considerations are part of my broader efforts to make sense of time as a technology, and how we understand and imagine it--especially "the future." I suspect that our experiences and imaginations of time are not wholly native to us. Hopefully, my posts will help me understand these phenomena better. May they also cast some new light on how you experience and think about time, texts, bodies, and noise, too.

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About me:

I live in Philadelphia, PA, where I edit Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to innovative multi-ethnic writing. Through Corollary, I've released work by authors such as Bhanu Kapil, Douglas Kearney, Craig Santos Perez, Lynn Xu, Carlos Soto Roman, Jai Arun Ravine, and several others. All the books are handsewn and run in intimate editions of 150.

I'm also a 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature.

For a living, I teach freshman composition and creative writing at the University of the Arts and at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. I also work for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists (CAATA) as a coordinator for the 4th National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival.

I've had several collections of my work published--my poetry books include That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, and Solar Maximum (forthcoming from Future Poem in 2015), in addition to a bunch of chapbooks I adore.

I was enrolled for many years as a doctoral candidate in English at Temple University, but decided to leave without defending. While there, I was also a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought (headed by Lewis R. Gordon) and at the Center for Humanities. My dissertation explored social space and Asian American experimental poetics. Before that, I received an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I also completed a Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies.

For a comprehensive list of my publications, actitivities, and to check out my personal blog, you can visit my website: silentbroadcast.

Jacket2Commentaries 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 Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.