The Functions of Image & Fragment in Jennifer S. Cheng's House A

Jennifer S. Cheng talks with The Rumpus about her first poetry collection, House A, chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2015 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest. "House A" is "the first house, house of beginnings, house of embodied language, house archetype, foundational house, primordial house, house of our first cosmos, house with our angled roof, house with an apex," explains Cheng. More from this interview below; check it all out here.

Rumpus: Could you also talk a bit about how you decided to include images—was it always part of your plan, was it suggested, or…? What texts were you using as a model?

Cheng: I am a visual person and have always been drawn to literary work that incorporates visual elements; this might be actual artifacts, but placement of text and blank space can also function like images. As an undergraduate, I took a workshop called “Lyricism and Lucidity,” which brought together lyric and essay, word and photograph, and ever since I have been working with the interaction of image and text. How do the different modes influence and alter one another? How might the visual capture something the textual cannot convey? In what circumstances does the need for a multiplicity of modes arise? Years ago in utter alienation I was having trouble formulating language to describe a particular experience of cultural silence, so I “wrote” an essay consisting of photocopied images, and it wasn’t until I combined these images with my splinters of text that it felt wholly articulated. It became a chapbook published by New Michigan Press called Invocation: an Essay, in which fragments of text, family photographs, found images, and white space haunt one another to create meaning. On each page, the placement of text, image, and/or white space carries a specific tenor that has an impact on its reading: certain images needed to be lower or higher on the page, and there needed to be smaller or greater space between certain fragments of text and image.

In House A, I became interested in visual artifacts as prompts and talismans. I have described this in Poets & Writers—can I quote from it as it relates here?

I noticed that I was keeping collections of images close to my writing process… houses with A-shaped roofs, geometric figures, and maps/diagrams/blueprints… These textures, atmospheres, and tones were ways for me to enter and re-enter my writing: a specificity of feeling to write toward; a ‘wound’ to unearth; an amulet to remind me of my goals; a specter to seep unconsciously into the language. The visual artifacts were at various moments prompts to set up the emotion of my writing, and they were also ghosts to haunt my work.

I didn’t have a specific model at hand, but Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and John Berger’s collaboration with Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling, have always been important books to me. They taught me that an image can function as a fragment in the same way that text does.