Jennifer S. Cheng

Kara Walker: Unsettling narratives

Refracting history/archetypes

[image: Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Bet

If refraction reorients boundaries and shapes that we take for granted, then this literal impulse lies at the center of the well-known cut-paper silhouettes of Kara Walker, which I now examine through the lens of translation and refraction. In Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), the title itself is an off-center re-naming of Gone with the Wind, the famous romance novel set in the South during the Civil War. What do the contents of such an intentionally unsettling translation entail?

Cybele Lyle: Transfiguring space

Refracting rooms, architectures, frameworks

Jennifer S. Cheng

[image: Cybele Lyle, The Moon is Slowly Rising] — Cybele Lyle, The Moon is Slowly Rising

This week I continue considering the implications of refractive poetics for artists who address issues of social identity. Cybele Lyle works with sculpture, photography, video, and projection, addressing themes of architecture, location, and space:

The spaces I create—queer, safe, architectural, and emotional—form a critically reconstructed mirror of reality, an alternative environment in which all forms of intimacy are allowed to be visible. I use social and visual material of my own life to represent spaces of transformative potential and desire.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Mother tongue as white noise, water, wind

Refracting linguistic identity

Jennifer S. Cheng

[image: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth]

This week, I consider the video art projects of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who is well-known in the literary community for her hybrid book Dictee but less famous for her other body of work. Born in Korea in 1952, Cha emigrated to the U.S. when she was nine years old, so it is not surprising that much of her art centers on issues of language, voice, identity, and the unsettling or loss of these. She spent her adult life invoking, like prayer, physical representations of silence and disruption; the breadth of her art—spanning written texts, film, slide projections, and performance art—is filled with empty spaces, broken language, and images and terms of silence.

Christine Sun Kim: Translating the ghost of sound

Refracting sound/silence

Jennifer S. Cheng

In considering the implications of refractive poetics for artists in the margins who address issues of social identity, this week I explore the work of Christine Sun Kim, an artist who was born deaf and whose primary investigation is sound. For Kim, what is most palpably at stake is access to a part of the world she cannot experience the way most others do. “How can I learn the idea of sound and silence from [others’] perspective?” she asks.

Francesca Capone: Text(ure)

Refracting language

Jennifer S. Cheng

[image: Francesca Capone, from Oblique Archive] — Francesca Capone, from Oblique Archive

As an introduction to alternative modes of meaning-making through the lens of refraction, the notion is most directly embodied, perhaps, in the work of Francesca Capone, who explores the materiality of textual language by literally warping and distorting it (she even has a piece entitled Refraction). Such treatment converts text into a new mode of visual information that one experiences bodily and viscerally, most exemplified in her series Oblique Archive.

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.