Interview
“It just makes sense to me that as a writer, the way I tremble with the world is through language.”
Elliston Poetry Collection, University of Cincinatti, Sep 21, 2021.
Conversation Series created & hosted by Felicia Zamora: “Poetry as Radicalization & Liberation for BIPOC & Marginalized People”
Timber, 2020.
“Hybrid Forms & Becoming with Jennifer S. Cheng”
“I’m compelled by the notion of artifacts and collections, how a kind of narrative can emerge from a juxtaposition of small or partial pieces... MOON is interested in debris, in what is left over, in the potency of what is held in the smallest motions of our existence.”
NBC Bay Area, Asian Pacific America, Sep 24, 2019.
Black Warrior Review, 2018.
“Interview with Flash Judge Jennifer S. Cheng”
“There is a particular potency in flash for bringing the reader into that infinite, ineffable space beyond the text; for opening instead of narrowing; for evoking or invoking; for the strange, alienated, stranded, uncanny, liminal; for building tiny universes out of debris; for accumulating language or voice or atmosphere; for ritual; for incantation; for obsession.”
Essay Daily, 2018.
Roundtable on the lyric essay & marginalized identities w/ Shamala Gallagher, Aisha Sloan, April Freely, Addie Tsai
“[T]he lyric essay…seemed to me to be a language for the broken, the haunted, the liminal—a way to speak wholeness by speaking holeness, by acknowledging more explicitly the gaps, the silences, the slipperiness of the world… [I]t’s been at least in part informed by my experience as a marginalized person, sensing all along the dissonance in how prevailing bodies of knowledge are invariably incomplete and ephemeral, that our lives are in some part hidden or erased, that our bodies are inarticulable within our socialized vocabulary. Singularity and linearity of history and reality was never true for me, as a marginalized person in society and as a child of immigrants. So it had to be a broken/haunted/liminal language with which to articulate myself into being.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017.
Vi Khi Nao asks me phosphorescent questions.
Featured in LitHub Daily and Poets & Writers.
“In the same way that I think every utterance is a kind of prayer, everything we do also feels like a kind of epistolary address, as if these were the most primal forms of articulation and gesture.”
The Rumpus, 2017.
On home & American as fluid categories, attempting to measure the immeasurable, and the blurry space between writer/reader.
Featured in Poetry News.
“I am saying something here about language and truth, but also related is the poetics of refraction, which to me is about de-centering sightlines, disrupting linearity, shattering normalized boundaries and constructs. Recently a reviewer said my writing is like the immigrant’s decentered network, a collection of ‘ands’ and ‘ors’ that are too intimate, too contradictory to build up to something as singular and definitive as a thesis. Perhaps the fluidity of identity, of our categories, becomes its own kind of meta-thesis. Why should we pretend that home or American are monolithic instead of multi-faceted, complex, and slippery? In this way to explode the very idea of definition is a political act.”
Brown Alumni Magazine, May/June 2017.
“Jennifer Cheng ’05 writes poems about the wholeness and holeness of an immigrant home”
“He was such a phantom in my childhood home, both deeply intimate and far away, like history itself… It felt important to write to Mao about the afternoon sunlight in our Texas house, the mythology of homeland, my uncle in jail, the sound of my mother’s feet on linoleum—the wholeness and holeness of an immigrant home.”
Iron Horse Literary Review, 2017.
Chen Chen asks me questions about the negative space between things & using untranslated language.
[…]
Poets & Writers: Writers Recommend, 2016.
On using visual artifacts as prompts and talismans
“I think of visual artifacts as prompts and as talismans… In these images I was not looking for content so much as atmosphere, feeling, tone (Roland Barthes’s punctum, an inarticulable wound); even the maps/diagrams/blueprints were not necessarily literal, but textures and shadows I was reading as navigational and instructional. …[They] were ways for me to enter and re-enter my writing: a specificity of feeling to write toward; a ‘wound’ to unearth; a talisman to remind me of my intentions; a specter to seep unconsciously into the language.”
The Conversant, 2016.
On my book House A
“While writing these poems, I was thinking about this tension and how the body unconsciously absorbs the years of war, famine, fear, and separation in inexplicable ways. Where in the house is it located—in the lamplight, the placement of objects, movements of bodies? I am interested in the interactions of histories in a household: personal history, family history, and History. Intersection implies a point, but this is more like ocean waves meeting, a convergence of tenderness, loss, protection, vigilance, rootedness and unrootedness. The ocean emerges as a metaphor and guiding rhythm: And if water is a metaphor, then it is because water fills up a room, slow-moving, blurry, immersive but obscured.”
AGNI, 2015.
On my lyric essay “Hikikomori: Salt Constellations”
[…]
SF Weekly: The Write Stuff, 2014.
On knowing something beautiful and other miscellaneous questions
What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?
“Did you know that when there is a solar eclipse, it changes the shape of the shadows? Everything looks like little moons.”
HTMLGIANT, 2011.
On my chapbook, Invocation: an Essay; blank space; and the Hong Kong literary scene
“I think, too, as a nonfiction writer there is generally the compulsion to articulate things as truthfully and accurately as possible, which is not necessarily about a precision of facts or literal meaning but a precision of emotion, mood, voice, essence... Another way of saying it is that a sentence can make sense emotionally, or evocatively, rather than strictly literally, and the words I choose are usually a matter of getting as close as I can in that way.”
The Collagist, 2010.
On my lyric essay “Midnight”
“Issues of motivation and intent are important to the piece, that’s true, it’s something I really struggled with while there, and in the end there was no straightforward answer. The section you quoted is part of the intense ambivalence that became central to the essay: misgivings and skepticism and yet a desperate desire in simply being there; discomfort and also intimacy; sensing how a place is both out of reach and immediate… In those particular sentences, I wanted to express divergent sentiments that were yet closely related and juxtaposed—how both sides are true and turn on themselves quite easily. There was something, too, about the tension of straightforward syntax and indirect explication that felt right to me, both aesthetically and intellectually, that pull between clarity and opacity.”