“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情。这个名单越来越长啦，敬请期待，漏网之鱼也欢迎在后台和我们取得联系！今天我们请来了刚出版了新诗集的Jinjin Xu来我们做分享
Five Questions with JinJin XuAccent: Why do you write in English?Jinjin Xu: For me, English will always be, at once, a place of freedom and betrayal. But it is also my secret language where my current self came into being, away from my family, which means myself in either language is only ever half true. I want to view English as a language to be molded. I want to use it to create a private language, where its insufficiency and betrayal can become a place of imagination.A：What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?J：Because I am indecisive and felt bound by the idea of MFA genres, I had applied to and was deciding between, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry programs. It is really a slip of fate that I ended up at NYU for poetry, where I learned to write away from myself, to try out forms unnatural to my own, to hear the undertow of language and where it may lead, to listen carefully to the views others who may not understand my work, and then to discard their opinions and trust in my inner voice.A: What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing? J：I wouldn’t view it as a break, because while my fidelities seem to lie in writing, I also work in film and performance. The most generative realm, for me, is the space in between genres—my work, then, is to learn to trust that the idea will find its way to its form. Genre, to me, is really just the institutional shell within which my work is seen, a capitalist way of framing what is fluid and unknown—though at times, it can also be a political choice.A：Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.J：Yesterday, I watched Christine Sun Kim’s recent video “Closer Captions” on rewriting closed captions as a deaf artist. The video was a manifesto in the privileges we take for granted as hearing, able-bodied consumers of media—it is a tonal poem, a reimagination of a different kind of cinema. It made me aware of the possibilities/limitations of silence—even more, it reoriented by relationship and responsibilities to sound.Spending most of my days alone recently, I’ve also been obsessed with the haunting and ethereal songs of Molly Drake, who my friend April introduced me to. She was a Welsh poet and musician known to the world as the mother of musician and cult idol Nick Drake, and it was only years after he died from suicide at twenty-six, that her home-recorded albums were found. Her songs, recorded before she gave birth to Nick, embody a sort of prescient grief—and Nick’s music, who some say changed British pop, turned out to have directly inherited something of his mother’s.A：Share with us some gossip about your writing community.J：Anne Carson eats peanut butter every day, just like the rest of us.JinJin Xu is a writer and filmmaker from Shanghai. She has received honors from The Poetry Society of America, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Her films have exhibited at Berlin’s Harun Farocki Institute and NYC’s The Immigrant Artist Biennial. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, she traveled to nine countries for a year writing with women dislocated as refugees and migrant workers. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU, where she received the Lillian Vernon Fellowship, teaches hybrid ballet/poetry workshops, and serves as Books Editor of Washington Square Review. Her debut chapbook, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, was selected by Aria Aber for the inaugural Own Voices Prize and is forthcoming in November.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“Reader, you are lucky to have the award-winning chapbook of JinJin Xu before you. These superb poems resonate with personal and cultural intimacy. JinJin Xu writes with the insight and skill of a veteran poet, a doyen, a griot. Her lines open and breathe on the page as they do in the mind and heart. There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is inventive, linguistic, ambitious, tender, wise, brave. This fabulous chapbook may be a collector’s item someday.”
— Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
“The way family pervades every aspect of our lives, the way we remain children forever, the way we can never transcend our bodies, the way some people really do write their poems in their own blood, the way we can move to a new country and become masters of its language and poetry and still never be set free from the grasp of our homes, the way the dead refuse to leave us, the way there is still singing in the afterlife, these are only some of the ways JinJin Xu writes sharp, beautiful and genre-threatening poems in this ridiculous time and place. Listen to her quiet, insistent voice; you’ll learn something.”
— Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light
点击阅读原文订购Jinjin Xu的新书There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife， 2020年10月20号重磅上线！
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