Course:Palindrome: Eye Level by Jenny Xie
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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When I read Jenny Xie’s poetry collection, Eye Level, it was the perfect book at the perfect time for me. As someone who immigrated from China to the U.S. and who spent several years living and traveling in Hong Kong and Cambodia, Jenny Xie deals with a lot of discussions on “seeing” in her poems. From the physical “eye” to the pronoun “I”, there is the conflict between what the self sees, and versus how the physical "I" is situated amongst different places. For example, she asks herself in her poems, "what am I seeing in Phnom Penn, and how am I being seen in return?" How do we grapple with the distances between each other, and the distances within ourselves, bridging the fluidity of the mind and the solidity of the presented body?
I came across this collection in early 2023, a time when I was also dealing with a lot of homesickness and questioning of place. What was I doing here, inhabiting a space that is barely containable of all the snot and tears? I think for me, Xie’s collection allowed me to create more space (which my mind had to learn to see as acceptable) for the idea of “place & homesickness” to take root in my writings. The way she talks about being an immigrant, a tourist, and a foreigner made me reflect more visually my relationship with all the cities I’ve lived in. Writing poetry wasn’t new to me at this point, but experimenting so much with form was. In generating my own prompts for poems inspired by Xie, I started experimenting with more irregular forms such as Q&A, quizzes(multiple choice), numbering/lettering sections in my poems, etc. Where words failed, can white space and fragmentation on a page make up for it?
It was also the first time I thought about the idea of transitioning from an overload of visuals to a muting of visuals. When thoughts lose itself in language over translation, would sensory details lose its vividness as well? When lines break themselves in her poems, there seems to be states of rupture in memory and a certain permeability in identity. Which led me to explore the visuality of concrete lines on a page, and its links with the fragmentation of the mind and the self. With Eye Level (also a palindrome!), I’m still asking myself, “how do we deal with these fractures (of identity, of memory, of places) in our writing through form?”
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