Interviewed by Dao Strom
A Mouth Holds Many Things is a collection of hybrid-literary works by 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writers. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, asemic writing, and more, this 300+-page, full-color volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media. As editors, we were interested in how hybrid-literary writers innovate in their contemplations—and complications—of language and form, pushing “writing” beyond the textual (and beyond the page), and in so doing expand the creative possibilities of how we write and how we read. In this roundtable conversation, Dao speaks to three contributors from A Mouth Holds Many Things about how they each arrived at their hybrid practices, about text as material as well as embodied practice, and writing as inarticulation as well as articulation across distances between genres, modes, cultures, past and present.
–Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors of A Mouth Holds Many Things
Dao Strom: Could we start by talking about how you each arrived at the poem-forms you are working with in these pieces? Was there a moment or event (or obstacle) that led your poetry practice to move into these image-textual, text as textural, text-as-bodied modes? Was this a natural extension or complement to previous, more conventional ways of writing poetry, or was it a reaction or deviation, even, in response to something missing, something needed, somewhere or how else you needed language to reach?
Jennifer S. Cheng: Both! I’ve always sensed a contradiction in the instinct for language—a desire to say what cannot be said—and this tension is central to my writing practice. For as many years as I have been writing, I have gravitated toward lyric-essay and image-text forms, where I find that the friction between seemingly oppositional modes opens a space for the unsayable. The language that feels most truthful to me is one partly occluded or occluding—not contrived for opacity but rather surrendering to it. Prior to the pandemic I’d encountered Renee Gladman’s Prose Architectures and become interested in asemic writing, which resembles language in form but is devoid of semantic signification. Then, in the face of global uncertainty and loss, my usual writing habits became painfully inaccessible to me, and I felt profound longing for a more embodied form of language, and for tenderness and tending. There was a widespread impulse, if you remember, to start gardening, and for me this was accompanied by explorations into hand-sewing, poetic rituals, and watercolor mark-making as alternative modes of articulation rooted in the physical body, oriented in careful attention to the tangible world, and actively integrating uncertainty into its processes. These forms were ways of materializing the interior gesture without the burden of legibility or linguistic logic. It was sense-making, perhaps, in its most primitive definition.
Stephanie Adams-Santos: In my early teens, I would lie belly-down on the floor surrounded by my older sister’s art supplies (micron pens; soft, dark 6B pencils, oil pastels, bristol paper…) and make strange things for hours listening to mixed-tapes. Most of all I remember the pleasure of being down low to the ground surrounded by all these sensual tools. There was such a sense of freedom and play and deep satisfaction. Language was almost always a part of these projects. Reaching for words felt the same as reaching for a certain color or a certain pen…it had its own texture and quality of meaning. Language and imagery would give definition to one another and help me make sense of what was emerging from me, creating bridges between foggy fragments within my own being. Over the years I lost some of that freedom and wildness and I’ve missed it terribly, and that’s how these poem-forms came to be. It’s a process of dismantling and return, re-occupying my body and my process. A need for sloppiness and privacy, a need to drop back into the body.
Cindy Juyoung Ok: I wrote “Translator” as the typographically subordinate column of a poem called “South Berendo Street.” Estranged, comparative statements remark on the need to translate experience, intuition obliged into explanation. Five or so years later the initially primary section seemed to deserve a wonderful private life on a hard drive, but “Translator” was enlivened in a new form: I wrote out a four-character phrase I say often in marker and made it a template for English letters. The initial end-stopped drafts accepted the authority of the gloss, trusting the absoluteness. It also ended on bowing, how the body can mark a sentence’s end. The current rendition offers a loving irony and closes with scrolls, differently ringing the physicality of text.
Dao Strom: Let’s talk about text as ritual and as material. I am thinking of how Jennifer’s work forgoes text/writing in the shape of letters as we know them, to create its own somatic, material, organic, asemic language-shapes. Or how Steph’s illustrated poems use handwriting that is not easily legible, the handwriting in these pieces becoming another textural element that feels ritualistic, like a spell being written. And, with Cindy’s work, while these poems still use typeface they also dismantle and rewire how we read type-text, creating defamiliarization. What do “words” or “text” mean to each of you, as writers who work with text artistically, aesthetically, visually, even ritually? What is the significance of “writing” as an action performed by the hands, whether this be fingers hitting keys, or sewing, or handwriting with a pen or stylus?
Stephanie Adams-Santos: Oh, I love this question and the attention to writing as a physical act of the hands. My grandmother on my mom’s side couldn’t read or write. She owned an old Spanish bible which she would sometimes open upside-down and trace her fingers along the words. She revered the text itself as sacred, perhaps even more so because of its illegibility. It was a mystery, a thing of God. Her awe of language without being able to read it really left a deep impression on me. I’ve always been fascinated by manuscripts and grimoires and spells and the idea of enchanted texts. In my morbid high school years, I filled a miniature journal with cross-writing and hatch-marks written in my own blood with a fountain pen; it felt like an ancient act. When I think about my Mam (Maya) lineage, I wonder whether there’s something deep inside me like a stelae carved in a language of blood and stone, something indecipherable even to me… and maybe that indecipherable script will be all that remains of any of us.
Cindy Juyoung Ok: Text is matter, a word which appropriately comes from mother. I prefer to write by hand, and messily, and wanted to consider the shape and meaning of words.
Jennifer S. Cheng: As an undergraduate in a creative writing workshop, I once wrote a paragraph where I replaced the word body in various contexts with the word text, and I’m still not sure I know exactly why. My second-favorite Roland Barthes quote is: “Language is a skin; I rub my language against the other.” Here is Walter Benjamin: “Language has a body, and the body has a language.” Certainly, there is a tactility to language, a texture to text, separate from its communicative function: I love the way certain sounds feel in my mouth; my heritage language envelops me in watery light; a textual fragment on the page can feel so pleasurable I want to swim in it. Maybe because I grew up in a multilingual environment with varying levels of comprehension, my relationship to language has always been as much on a textural-sensorial level as a strictly linguistic one.
Language is bodily, and my (Text)ile Asemic Books are very much about arranging articulations by and for the body, in intimate relation to the material debris of my environment; leaf litter, broken seashells, tiny pebbles, and scraps, literally shape the utterance. The result is a record of body-place-time, at the heart of which is the corporeal process itself of gathering, entwining, attuning. Similarly, I think of ritual as poetry embodied, where the process itself, of listening and attending to the body’s syntactical rhythms, is what matters, literally. It just makes sense to me that the curve of a dancer’s limb across the air is an articulation similar to a needle making a stitch or a personal liturgy of lighting a candle and pouring water over a rock. I once heard Yiyun Li say something like, “language is what moves me from space to space,” and this struck me as deeply true in multiple ways. Writing, sewing, rituals—these are all ways of carrying the body into unknown spaces.
(Text)ile Asemic Book 1, by Jennifer S. Cheng. Cheng’s “Field Notes” about this project can be read in full here.
Dao Strom: I would say that all of these works dwell, for me, in the realms of unsayability and inarticulations – that is, with things hard to say, or shrouded/obscured, coming up from hidden wells, silences, shadows. But, rather than clearly articulating meaning or experience, these works seem to use their forms/actions of voice to evoke, or invoke, new and other sensations and atmospheres into being. Could you speak to your works’ relationship to hidden or quiet realms of knowledge, and what might be your thoughts on the action of voice–of voicing?
Stephanie Adams-Santos: “Hidden wells, silences, shadows”… yes! The greater part of inner life dwells in these places. When you think about the body—though we might know the general shape of organs and skeletons from textbooks, we go our whole lives without conscious knowledge of our innards. Unless by terrible injury, I’ll never see my liver or truly have any idea how it does what it does. But to know it explicitly isn’t necessary. There are many ways of knowing, of seeing, of speaking that do not require a thing be severed from its mystery. Before pursuing a life of poetry and writing, there was a short time when I was on a pre-med track. I had the most beautiful class notes, full of little fragments of poems in the margins and inaccurate drawings of the heart, etc…and I realized at some point that I was in fact more interested in the margins and the dreamings of it all than the hard science. In writing and in life, I want to honor and work with the quiet realms of myself and others. I cherish those glimpses. I just got a terrible pang, thinking about all this in the context of genocide. How many vast inner lives, how many quiet realms of knowledge, lie extinguishing beneath the rubble at this very moment?
Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, my own writing seems clear and direct to me, and uninterested in obscuring, but I’m reminded often that others may not share this experience. Does a poem obstruct comprehension, does it demand work? If so, these are concomitants of other portable hopes. I distrust any system of language that claims to be whole. Take transliteration, which is impossible to read or write neutrally, as the orders created for “consistency” or “correctness” came from nationalism and colonialism. Any sensibility of knowledge as total deserves doubt.
Jennifer S. Cheng: I love how these questions are orbiting one another! So much about the experience of being human—especially one marked with alterity—cannot be expressed straightforwardly or linearly in the dominant language, but rather can only be invoked obliquely, at a slant, or through a veil. Western epistemologies and hierarchies of knowledge emphasize domination, ownership, an aggressive and authoritative knowing; but there are cultures and languages that give space for the absent and ghostly, for fluidity and multiplicity. I think about filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “speaking nearby” (rather than “speaking about”), which seems to me like the only possible location from which to speak—certainly it is the more relational and loving one. The other part of my answer to this question has to do with poetry as a way of saying the unsayable and of externalizing one’s interior language. Audre Lorde describes the body’s hidden knowledge as a “place of power within each of us” that is “neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” I feel more at home amid the depths of shadows and silences; sometimes a shadowy space is necessary for catching a pattern of light not otherwise possible.
Dao Strom: What are you working on now or next? How do the hybrid modes in these works (collected in A Mouth Holds Many Things) bear relation to your current or next projects?
Stephanie Adams-Santos: Very, very slowly—I’ve been pecking away at a collection of short stories that involve strange relationships, accidents, and encounters between humans and non-humans. I’ve also been dreaming toward a hybrid collection of poetry that is a kind of codex, spells and histories and personal mythos illustrated and hand-written. This summer I’m also writing some short horror episodes for a radio drama anthology series focused on Latinx monsters and lore.
Jennifer S. Cheng: I’m working on a hybrid manuscript examining the ghostly presence and felt experience of what Anne Anlin Cheng names racial melancholia. My explorations in asemic mark-making, including my (Text)ile Asemic Book practice, are woven into my rhythms of being and are integral to my writing, so they are probably ongoing for as long as I am alive.
Cindy Juyoung Ok: I have a poetry collection that I translated into English forthcoming and my book is also being translated into Korean, so surely a poem called “Translator” bears some relation to these roles. I haven’t written in many months, but I hope the “now or next” is on its way, and to learn someday that my mouth holds these many months.
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Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (2024). She teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms, exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the interior wilderness. Her hybrid book Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018) was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of House A (2106), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.
The work of Stephanie Adams-Santos spans poetry, prose, and screenwriting. Often grappling with themes of strangeness and belonging, their work reflects a fascination with the weird, numinous, and primal forces that shape inner life. They are the author of several full length poetry collections and chapbooks, including Dream of Xibalba (2023), selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the 2021 Orison Poetry Prize, and Swarm Queen’s Crown (2016), finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Stephanie served as Staff Writer and Story Editor on the television anthology horror series Two Sentence Horror Stories (Netflix), and was winner of a 2022 Gold Telly Award in TV Writing. They have received grants and fellowships from Sundance, Film Independent, Vermont Studio Center, Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Oregon Arts Commission. In addition to their literary work, Stephanie is illustrating an original Major Arcana tarot deck called Tarot de La Selva.
Dao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and multimedia artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of several hybrid works, including the poetry-art collection Instrument (2020), which won the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode, her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, and others; she is also the author of two books of fiction. In 2017 Dao co-founded De-Canon as a literary art and social engagement “pop-up library” project to center works by writers of color. She is a founding member of the Vietnamese women and nonbinary artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). Born in Vietnam, she grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Jyothi Natarajan is an editor, writer, and cultural worker and has collaborated with Dao Strom as part of De-Canon since 2021. She spent nearly a decade working at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she edited the digital literary magazine The Margins and helped to establish The Margins Fellowship for emerging writers. Jyothi now works as Program Manager at Haymarket Books, where they administer a fellowship program for writers impacted by carceral systems. They are the recipient of the 2017 Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts and, with Dao, are part of the 2023-24 IPRC re/source residency. Having grown up in Southern Virginia, Jyothi is now based out of Portland, Oregon.