9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 9 :: SAMUEL ACE on CHING-IN CHEN
Five and a half years ago, on a cold Winnipeg night, I asked Ching-In Chen to improvise a performance with me, using some loose scripts of my poems. We read under pulsing red and blue lights, on a stage in a club. People were talking, drinking, milling around, as people do at readings in bars. Ching-In’s voice was distinct, sometimes shouting the words, sometimes whispering. We had not rehearsed, and it was only the second time I had performed those choral-like pieces with a soundtrack and a partner. Ching-In got everyone’s attention. Conversations stopped and I heard voices appear in my poems that had never been there before.
We had gathered, as trans and genderqueer writers, to realize the prescient vision of Trish Salah’s “Writing Trans-Genres” conference. So many of us were there: micha, Zoe, Trace, Red, Casey, Cooper, K, Emerson, Imogen, Aiyanna, Joy, Nathanaël, Ames, Ryka, Gr, Rachel, Jake, Tom, and many more.1 I met Sonny2 that weekend — and Ching-In was an intimate presence at that beginning.
I desire a language that pushes itself off the page. If a book of poems fails to do that, I almost always put it down. If the voice stays with me, I take in the marks on the page. But some work elicits a more embodied experience. My heart longs for the work of Ching-In Chen, where I find orchestral relief. When reading their work, I hear a ringing in my head. Not the linear static of the human voice, but breath and music, where language is but one instrument in a greater whole. There is weight and physical presence. Sometimes a gesture in the air. Sometimes a drawing. Sometimes color. Sometimes a dance of molecules. Sometimes flesh. Sometimes a narrative woven in, appearing and disappearing.
In Chen’s first full-length book The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems, lines braid, weave, divide and re-divide, with multiple simultaneous voices. In a 2009 interview with the poet Ely Shipley, Ching-In said of this book: “In terms of resisting certain narratives, I didn’t want to tell the same story, or the story I felt I might be expected to tell. But I also felt I had to deal with the legacy of the communities I am part of and the impact of those histories on me…. I’ve been particularly interested in multiple and fragmented narratives, … moving away from a single text with clear boundaries.”3
The line is never pure linearity. In The Heart’s Traffic, Chen demonstrates mastery of form, using renga, sestina, pantoum, haibun, zuihitsu, riddles, and more to tell a complex narrative. Chen also creates new forms. The lines in the poem “Burning Down the House” are structured in unequal columns, and can be read both vertically and horizontally. Each section and column communes with the others, at times breaking their borders.
In “dear nightpeople we couldn’t ferry,” from Chen’s newest book, recombinant, past, present, and future exist at the same time. As Chen writes across the page, my awareness is constantly redirected into a wrenching and emotional stretch. recombinant witnesses forced migrations, genocides, and survivals. The multiple forms travelled by text become silences, holes, and branching pathways. My eyes take in that music; the voices and the blended words in the poem sound like bells, whispers, hammers, the violence of human upheaval — all calls of the heart.
On a humid July evening in Houston, Sonny and I had dinner with Ching-In, their partner Cassie6, and some friends. It was a few days before Cassie and Ching-In moved to Seattle. As we hand-folded dumplings for dinner, Ching-In and Cassie expressed their grief about leaving the community they had nurtured in their four years in Texas, even when that leaving was for something they wanted.
One of the poems that came from their cross-country drive was “South in Hundreds,” chosen by Meg Day for the Poem-a-Day series from the American Academy of Poets. The poem is full of the missing, of loss, leaving, and the violence of the unknown.
South in Hundreds (excerpt)7
Missing one hundred.
for many leagues, i slept under
surface. couldn’t learn enough
to stay, couldn’t hurt along
midriff, scrum and scrub. see myself
rushing into tomorrow’s wet
world. thin trees almost ferns with quiet mouth
desire. took to cold high plain, only wind and a murdered boy.
In the poem, Chen braids together strands of observation, memory, and found text — mixing personal journeys with the language of a father looking for lost daughters, migrants crossing sometimes fatal seas, the death of Matthew Shepherd. The weavings understand the complexities of grief, violence and loss — layered lines challenging the regimen of the printed page and its left to right English linearity. They subvert that linearity to mirror our simultaneous distinct perceptions that ping through our neural structures, senses firing all at once.
In recent multi-vocal work, Chen adds more visual components to their performance, projecting text as they read to create further multidimensional layers of emotion and understanding. In these works, the projection fades in and out, changes size, becomes motion.8 One thought or another might rise to the surface of our experience, but there is always a synesthesia of creation. How does the page purport to reflect this? Chen respects the ghosts who know that the mere line can never contain the whole story.
Footnotes:
1 micha cárdenas, Zoe Tuck, Trace Peterson, Red Durkin, Casey Plett, Cooper Lee Bombardier, K Bradford, Emerson Whitney, Imogen Binnie, Aiyanna Maracle, Joy Ladin, Nathanaël, Ames Hawkins, Ryka Aoki, Gr Keer , Rachel Pollack, Jake Pyne, Tom Cho
2 Sonny Nordmarken
3 Chen, Ching-In and Ely Shipley. “Disrupting Forms, Multiple Selves and Migrating Bodies: A Conversation between Ely Shipley and Ching-In Chen.” Boxcar Poetry Review. http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/019/conversation_chen_shipley.html. Accessed 2.23.20.
4 Chen, Ching-In. The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems. Arktoi Books,, 2009. p. 4
5 Chen, Ching-In. recombinant. Kelsey Street Press, 2017. p, 84
6 Cassie Mira
7 Chen, Ching-In. “South in Hundreds” American Academy of Poets — Poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/south-hundreds. Accessed 2.23.20.
8 Chen, Ching-In. “Writers on Writing with Jaswinder Bolina, Ching-In Chen, Bich Minh Nguyen & Timothy Yu” Asian American Writers’ Workshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qR9euAGyTI (25:06). Accessed 2.23.20.
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), the newly re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. His work has been widely anthologized and recent poems can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. In the summer of 2020, he will be guest faculty at the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat in Los Angeles.
