In her second poetry collection, The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, September 2022), Jenny Xie poses the age-old question—“What is a poem?”—and offers an expansive answer: “Anything that continues.” To continue may imply that the existing language is incomplete and that a poem seeks to create a sense of completion. This idea saturates The Rupture Tense, in which language is seen as at once obedient and stubborn. At large, language helps formulate and complete thoughts using systems like the grammatical tense. On the other hand, a small rupture in speech may point to failure, despite the rest that is coherent. 

With “rupture tense,” Jenny proposes a portmanteau concept that encapsulates language’s simultaneous role in facilitating and forestalling expression. Her book calls up tropes about home and poetry to reveal and interrogate how language conditions us into habituated thinking. Alternately, the collection scrutinizes how omission can be patterned to convey meaning. The Rupture Tense opens with two poems, both titled “Red Puncta,” in which Jenny contends with photographic records of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The poems are highly contextual, though not contextualized. The lack of explanation foregrounds emotions and bodily suffering, which should never be subsumed in larger historical contexts.

Jenny was not born until many years after the Cultural Revolution, the accounts of which remain heavily censored in China. Her “Red Puncta” poems respond to photographs shot secretly by the photographer Li Zhensheng, who smuggled them out of the country and only saw them published decades after the political movement. In “Memory Soldier,” the poet intersperses Li’s biography with meditations on photography as a memory-keeping medium. Equally interested in history’s personal dimensions, Jenny also depicts a speaker visiting her birthplace in China and encountering an estranged past for the first time after living in the United States for most of her life. This transpacific journey materializes in a hybrid epic, the book’s eponymous centerpiece, that comprises verse, prose, and other syntactical collaging. It is an experience existing outside time as we know it. By reenacting the sensory experiences of engaging with keepsakes like photos and memorized bits of dialogue, Jenny gives emotions tactile facets, and her syntax gestures toward endlessness. “:: Not the marks of language, but a springing into” writes Jenny at the end of the poem “Distance Sickness.” I love how the utterance is left unpunctuated. Why punctuate any closing line if poetry will always continue?

The Rupture Tense brilliantly articulates the difficulties in confronting places where memory is redacted or discontinued. And Jenny reminds me that the materials artists can work with have always been abundant, like pointing out how the elusive rhythm of breath is everywhere in the air. This summer, I corresponded with Jenny and discussed with her the process, impetus, and style of The Rupture Tense, which was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry. Jenny is also the author of Eye Level, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.

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Weiji Wang

Like in Eye Level, many poems in The Rupture Tense—especially the titular centerpiece—grow out of travel experiences. What aspects of traveling conduct ideas? Could you contextualize the book in terms of your travels? 

Jenny Xie

In my own process, being spatially dislocated—even if it isn’t travel in any ambitious or even intentional sense—delivers me from habitual modes of thinking, looping mental scripts and memories, and stiffened ways of comporting myself. I’m more alert to experience and to what my sensory apparatus takes in when I’m outside of routine or when my mind has been pushed to actively process or map out some unfamiliar space. You’re undone by dislocation, and from that undoing, creative impulses get stimulated.

Many of the poems in The Rupture Tense arose out of a trip I made back to China in 2019, a few months before the pandemic started. I was in Shanghai on a fellowship, and during that period, I traveled back to my hometown in Anhui province, where I hadn’t set foot in thirty years. I didn’t stage this trip to write poems, but given all that I was wrestling with and the complexity of the experience, I suspected that some of it would make its way into future writing. I felt a great deal was accumulating that was shapeless—which occasions a fertile state to begin thinking and writing into.

WW

Do you regard this trip to your hometown as homegoing? How is a return to a spatially and temporally distant home experienced differently than general traveling?

JX

These are both questions that preoccupied me during the writing of The Rupture Tense, especially in the longer title sequence at the center of the collection. The concept of diasporic return, or homecoming, is a vexed one, for sure. It seems impossible to sidestep the expectations and narratives around what a “return” or “homecoming” might entail; in this sense, my experience was continually filtered through inherited narratives of return and longing. When you frame your trip as a return, it can come with heightened expectations for reencounter, recovered memories, fulfillment of nostalgic urges, and feelings of belonging. There are so many overpowering cultural scripts for how a homecoming might play out, even those that prove alienating and discomfiting. 

Wary as I was of these scripts, I remained curious about the sensorial experience of stepping back in the city where I was born—a city I harbored no substantive memories of. I left when I was four. I feel confounded by what “home” might mean for me, at this juncture, or if I feel at all attached to the concept. In any case, I was pretty certain I wasn’t returning home when I went back to Wuhu, Anhui.

WW

What does location specificity mean for your poetry? What grounds are opened up by naming sites? I’m thinking, for instance, of the invocations of Shanghai in “The Rupture Tense.”

JX

I’m not sure I know what naming necessarily means when I employ it in my poems. I care deeply about details and the texture of particulars, and naming is a way of providing an added layer of specificity and texture. Sometimes I just enjoy the tactility of the names, their sonic dimension. With the line “Shanghai is Shanghai is Shanghai,” I was thinking about how representations of Shanghai—in film, in art, in photographs—have been so potent in my imagination that encountering the city meant seeing it through many filtered lenses. I was also thinking of [Gertrude] Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” and of semantic satiation—those occasions when a word gets repeated so often that it becomes curious, loosened from its tether of meaning. How a city and a place can feel strange and estranged from meaning when one is bleary from jetlag and saturated in so many representations of the place.

WW

“Shanghai” divorced from both its denotation and representations! I’d like to add that in Chinese, when a character is looked at long enough, it becomes unrecognizable. One starts to appreciate the balance or hierarchy of radicals, the graphic components. 

Do you write with an audience in mind? Does it vary collection by collection, poem by poem?

JX

It helps not to be burdened by thoughts of future reception or specific audiences or readers when writing, but it also feels disingenuous to say that audience never enters into my mind. There is writing that I commit to exclusively for my own eyes, and there’s writing that I hope will find readers. In the case of the latter, I make decisions based on how I’m leading a (hypothetical) reader through a linguistic experience; my formal choices have to do with how someone else might make their way through the poem.

WW

Fascinating. Is it fair to say that the desire to structure an experience of language precedes other goals and expectations? You minimize the partition between your speaker self and your poet self, but never to an extent where differences don’t exist. The point is not about revelation but about how it is told. Does language come at a price of leveling or suppressing emotions?

JX

I care about creating an experience for the reader, and if I’m trying to do so in writing a poem, my main means of designing the experience is through language and silence and the visual arrangement of these elements on the page. When I write, I do think about how my work will be transmitted and received by someone else, even if that someone else is just another version of myself. I don’t think of general audiences, but I do think of a reader who will be in conversation with the work, though again, oftentimes this is just a shading of myself.

To the second part of your question, I don’t think language and emotion are separable. To the extent that I want to transmit an emotional experience to a reader in my writing, I only have language and silence. The challenge is how to activate a thought and feeling through the arrangement of the right language in the right order and form.

WW

I’m thinking about the visually sparse poems in The Rupture Tense. How do you conceptualize the white space or off-space? 

JX

White space and silences in a poem serve as presences and expressive gestures, rather than as an absence of language, in my poems. White space can point to the unlanguaged, an acoustical padding that allows language/sound to have reverberation and amplification, and it can denote speechlessness. I think of these silences as providing atmospheric pressure in the space of the poem.

WW

For me, your white spaces stand in for time—the processing time in between utterances. By including pauses to think, a visually spread-out poem depicts the trajectory of the speaker’s mind faithfully. I see an equivalent in the black screen in between film sequences. I admire this deeply because as a reader, I get bored easily and reach constantly—impatiently—for the thrill of the next line or an enjambment. In real life, whenever I pause even for a little bit, I get cut off from speaking. The sense of insecurity fomented by anticipated impatience and the perceived need to preempt being cut off really affects working around silence in my own poetry. I guess any absence of language also seems like a refusal of immediate clarity. On the one hand, silence feels clear-cut. On the other hand, nothing can be more ambiguous than silence. I’m curious about the tendency to delay explanation, which is grounded in your decision to open the collection with a “Red Puncta” poem, instead of “The Memory Soldier,” which provides the context for the former. What is your take on contextualization?

JX

I think I invite in and cultivate silences in my work for this exact reason that you point to: that they offer both clarity and mystery, depending on what one is looking for, and oftentimes simultaneously. How speechlessness in the face of certain situations, emotions, facts, and the like is not only the clearest response one can offer, but also the most expansive. That expansiveness is part of ambiguity.

One of the reasons I am drawn to poetry is that it doesn’t aim to explain or to argue; it’s not committed to rational logic and mapping out thought in linear paths. It can do these things, of course, but the beauty of it—at least in my thinking—is that poetry accommodates ambiguity, contradiction, leaping association, and multiplicity. It weaves together feeling and thought in unpredictable ways and doesn’t seek to pin down meaning and argument tidily.

I love how Fred Moten puts it: “Poetry just lets you put stuff together in a different kind of way; in a way that does not immediately tie you down with certain kinds of diegetic or argumentational responsibilities. The criticism is the same thing, it’s just that maybe you have to show more of the connective tissue that allows you to put these things together. In a poem I can just put Thornton Dial together with Sleater-Kinney, and I don’t have to explain it.” I like not having to explain things, even when I’m pursuing precision and clarity. 

WW

The “Red Puncta” poems engage with a set of photographs in an almost point-by-point comparative fashion. Why did you not include those visual counterparts? It seems in vogue to be more hybrid with presentation, too. But personally, I love the absence of photos. We don’t just get the kick of matching words to visuals, locating for example a detail you’re talking about and then moving on. No such ready satisfaction is offered. Do you think seeing may be distracting?

JX

The “Red Puncta” series were each provoked by a distinct photograph taken by Li Zhensheng, found in the book Red-Color News Soldier. I didn’t end up including the photographs for several reasons. One was mundane: I didn’t think I had enough time to inquire about permissions. The ambition to weave in photographs fell to the wayside during the production schedule. At the same time, I appreciate that not having those images present makes them spectral. They must be called up in the imagination, like you suggest. One doesn’t have to seek out visual confirmation or some sort of one-on-one mapping of text to image, though those images are available if readers want to look for them.

WW

You talked about writing retrospectively, needing some time to pass before you write about an experience from travel or elsewhere. Do you think spatial dislocation creates a rupture in language and beliefs so that contemporaneous writing, or writing on site, is difficult? How do you recover from it?

JX

 I usually require some critical distance from heated material before I can write into it. That’s not to say I don’t write in the moment or jot down impressions and notes when I’m submerged in experience itself. Partly, I’m wary of trying to “make” something out of what I’m experiencing while I’m in the moment, the way many of us feel instinctively pulled to whip out our camera phones before we’ve even looked directly at the thing we’re already trying to pin down through the screen.

The need for distance perhaps stems from wanting to allow my attention space and time to fasten. Going back to something I said before: I like things to remain shapeless for a while, before pulling at it, kneading it, trying to craft the shapelessness into something. Your question seems to imply that not being able to write in the moment might be something to work through, but I’m not sure it needs resolution. Sometimes I feel protective of experiences and don’t necessarily want to tie it to language right away, or ever.

WW

It’s so reassuring to hear this from you! This reminds me of you saying that you “didn’t stage this trip to write poems.” Is writing with intention also “ensnarement”? The idea of checking intentions bleeds through poems, too. I find a lot of moments around interstitial spaces, such as on the train, plane, etc., when the focus is quite removed from destinations. 

JX

Hah—yes! The will and the driving force of intention can be forms of ensnarement. I believe that, and I appreciate the connections you’re making. If we unpack the word “ensnarement,” we see it has to do with being trapped. Likewise, if I go into writing knowing exactly how it’ll play out—or enter into an experience with the understanding that I will try to write about it or frame it in certain rigid ways—I walk into a trap, which is to say, I limit my range of motion, my capacity to be led off track into fields that are wilder and stranger than what my will can imagine. One ends up losing the space for the unknown and for self-surprise.

WW

To linger on the geometric idea that poems give shape to thoughts, what contributes to finding the right shape? How do you know whether you’ve found the right form?

JX

I see poetic form as constituted by the activity of molding and sculpting language—adding structure to dynamic processes (such as thinking and feeling) that might be inchoate and unruly. 

For me, finding the “right” form is largely a process of experimentation and play, of trial and error. I’m most often led by the ear: a poem usually isn’t working because I can’t hear the life in it. The rhythm, cadence, or timbre is off, somehow. That could be because I haven’t yet figured out the tonality, the line length or stanzaic arrangement, the voice. If a poem isn’t working, I’ll try to play around with different formal elements to see if I can click it into place. I can’t really say when I know it’s right or at least getting close—it’s largely intuition and is subjective. I think I just hear something surprising there, and in that hearing, the poem unfurls in possibility and meaning.

Other times, I’m interested in the expressive gestures within forms. How sonnets have built within them a turning, how villanelles and sestinas are circular and obsessive. In these cases, choosing a form is a matter of letting the expressive gestures in a particular form illuminate and complicate the subjects of a poem. For instance, in “The Game,” I was interested in how games and game rules could be a way of thinking about public secrecy in China, of pretending to know what not to know. There was something insidious and interesting in writing about this phenomenon through the form of game rules, and doing so made me consider how public secrecy relies on a contract between individuals and of following certain behavioral norms.

WW

You write about the dead, and in your poems, you try to converse with them. I’m thinking of “Letters to Du Fu” in Eye Level and the address to your grandmother in “Distance Sickness” from The Rupture Tense. Can you talk about this gesture? Borrowing from Mary Ruefle’s idea that we must learn from dead poets, what can we learn from conversing with the dead? 

JX

That’s a difficult and moving question. I think all writers converse with the dead: the thinkers, writers, and artists who have gone before us, who we are always in conversation with. The dead are my preferred interlocutors, in some sense, because there’s so much more to imagine there when you know there can never be a response. When they have experienced a realm that no one I know, who is living, has. I feel more permission and expansiveness when I’m allowed to speak to someone with whom I will never receive a response.

WW

How has your idea of poetics changed from one book to the other? I notice fewer usages of first person in your second book, in which you use the second-person pronoun liberally to address the poem’s subject, the reader, and the speaker herself. Would you say “you” is more expansive, fluid, and free?

JX

The poems in Eye Level were written and collected together over the course of many years. Some were seeded during my MFA program in response to weekly or bi-weekly workshop deadlines; many others came together at different junctures of my life during my mid- to late twenties. Across them, there is a diversity of modes and approaches. In assembling Eye Level into a collection, I had to feel my way into the throughlines and thematic echoes that tied poems and sections together.

The Rupture Tense was written more quickly—much to my surprise. Many of the poems within the collection were set in motion by my trip back to China in 2019. I was writing fragmented pieces and lines after the trip, but at first, they were drifty, not coalescing together. It was only during the pandemic, when I began to write the “Red Puncta” and “Memory Soldier” poems, that I felt something shift. In finishing what would later be the first section of the book, I sensed momentum building, and preoccupations and inquiries growing thicker. This led me to arrange some of the fragmented poems I’d written before into two of the long sequences that appear later in the collection: the title poem, “The Rupture Tense,” and “Reaching Saturation,” both emerging from the time I spent in China. I would say that this second collection has more intensity of focus and is driven more by a single engine, perhaps.As for how my poetics have changed—that’s a great question. I think one notable shift is that in the second collection, I work across many long sequences and try to sustain inquiries across many, many pages, rather than aiming for compressed lyrics that fit to one or two. The title poem, for instance, is close to thirty pages. I didn’t realize that I used the first person less often in this second collection, but I’m glad you point that out. I don’t believe using the third person or second person means more or less freedom. It really depends on the context and what the poem is aiming for. In The Rupture Tense, I wanted to experiment with more agility in perspective, which is why I lean on the “you” and the third person slightly more. This also comes out of wanting to change up the tonality, stance, and voice(s) in my poems, if only to keep myself more stimulated in the writing of them. Maureen N. McLane occasionally uses a musical metaphor to describe her work: to write in different keys, as opposed to a unitary one. I, too, wanted to write in different keys, different modes, for this second collection.