Jennifer S. Cheng

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?

The poetics and politics of refraction

Jennifer S. Cheng

[image: jar of plant submerged in water]

In some ways, all language is errant translation. Language wanders from its intended assignments, language is slippery, and what makes the desire to communicate so beautiful is its desperation and inevitable failure; it revels in something basic and intrinsic to humanity, a primal longing, like Sisyphus and his round boulder, Wu Gang and his moon tree. In some ways this is every writer’s and artist’s ongoing work: to continuously rename the world anew, and in this renaming we attempt to grasp it while also giving it up to the ether.

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.

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