Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia

I’m intrigued by the long sentence, sentences, that stitch together to form Vancouver poet Jane Shi’s full-length debut, echolalia echolalia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection that follows her debut chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Vancouver BC: Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Stretching across the length and breadth of the one hundred and twenty compact pages of her debut collection, hers is a remarkable extended thought across lyric meditation and formal invention writing the body, loss, nostalgia and layers not simply reconsidered, but recycled, repurposed. “a tide-pool winter a hiss / of hot violets little fibres / along my bedspread brush of threaded grass / in the grubby broken cinema of memory scrub / my back filthily in the thick sublunary lust / starts would make canyons o me the vast valleys / airless marshes where travellers stumbled,” she writes, to open the poem “worship the exit light,” a poem subtitled “A found poem created / from my wordpress poetry journal / of my late teens (2008-2016) [.]”

Across five sections of lyrics that offer visual and language play—“Unreliable NarReader,” “griefease,” “picture/que,” “The Organization” and “ECHOLALIA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE”—Shi offers poems as declaration, observation, visual reference, restraint and expansive gesture, study notes; as points of clarity, both to the reader and herself. “You offer to run him over with your wheelchair.” begins the poem prose sequence “I’ll Dial Your Number,” a sequence that counts down in reverse order, starting with five. “I come to you deceived and smelling of fish oil. You pat my back with your hospital-gown grin. It’s so soft I cackle. I cough him out tat the rate of decomposing newspapers.” Her lyric is delightfully witty, even absurd, and subversive, articulating through her exploratory gestures an underlying loss that layers, ripples, the more one moves away from those points of origin. Listen, for example, to the opening of the poem “then you put missing them in your calendar,” that begins:

after tax season you stare at the gingko leaf lines of your excel sheet. long bridges dull linger of lullabies. until. you pause at each last lantern lit desk doorknob dusk grip laptop foxglove-covered drawer. open it to sort through documents you were too tired to sort through last winter. return to each drawstring/word dock/sticky note: another year, gone. smoke in song-shadow, milk candle rehearsal. you light things up to shimmer chimney what they’ll say when they hear you. you light things up till your steps are in step with theirs through history’s afterword.

These are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old, and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically / misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.” There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of, providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one lands, such as the poem “is it literature or deforestation?,” that includes:

you imagine her in the faces of others: you see the mogui of race in the crowds of this too-Asian campus: so you emptied yourself of what they saw as competition: remaining useless so you no longer needed needing: years later he will Gwen Stefani another sidekick: she will have the same name as you: will get another chance to pay respects: stilling a compass of coincidence: had a knife fight in the Uwajimaya parking lot: not a shell (not a shell): you belong to shoe polish: you belong to gavel polish: goodbye 2014: your legs froze: your throat thawed: you ripped up their contract: refused to take hush money: god/dess of mercy smiling through the paragraphs: ghosts: historians: hesitations: scrawled hi: hello: the caramel salt sting: sigh: wont be long now

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jane Shi

Jane Shi [photo credit: Joy Gyamfi] is a poet, writer, and organizer living on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her debut poetry collection is echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I wrote and published my chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022) and then my full-length collection echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) during the pandemic, so the idea of poetry ‘changing my life’ makes me laugh. I’m mostly stunned that people want to read my work. And I’m also surprised that no one is voraciously tearing it apart the way I sometimes imagine people doing in my head. Which is to say I think seeing people’s kindness and appreciation for poetry and creativity is heartening in an otherwise disillusioning world.

For me, from a young age, poetry was a source of escape, coded wordplay to dissociate into and hide behind. I’m learning to lean into poetry’s relationality, sociality, and sense of responsibility more as I write more seriously and expansively.

I would say echolalia echolalia sprouted from Leaving Chang’e on Read in an organic way. Many poems from the latter are in the former. I had a really great experience working with Mallory Tater and Brandi Bird at Rahila’s Ghost Press; their insights into my poems helped me prepare for my full-length for sure.

I enjoyed the space a full-length collection offers. The other month at my book launch, one of my first readers, poet Beni Xiao, reminded me that my first drafts of echolalia echolalia was significantly longer. My editor at Brick Books, Phoebe Wang, helped me cut things down. She said that she’s more of a minimalist compared to me, and that was intriguing. I have a hoarding issue that I didn’t know about until a loved one pointed it out. So, I think that shows up in my poetry. I learned a lot about myself through writing both the chapbook and full-length: I guess that’s probably what changed my life the most, the internal change. In general, I feel relieved that my work is out in the world, less fearful, and more excited to be in conversation with other poets I admire.

echolalia echolalia goes deeper into things, perhaps, and talks more explicitly about the exploitation of marginalized artists, filicide of disabled children, wanting to leave this world but staying because you haven’t watched that episode of Arthur yet. I enjoyed being able to play with multitudinous forms.

I’m especially thankful that my book was able to help raise funds for different Gazan mutual aid projects via Workshops4Gaza’s bookstore at Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle. Billie of Open Books—a bookstore that is poetry-only—invited me down to sign copies and it was a wonderful experience. Every person who entered the space was a poet, which was the coolest.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I have been writing poetry for most of my life, since I was eight, so it made sense to work on poetry more seriously as a first full-length book project. When I graduated from university in 2018 the first thing, I said to myself was, “I get to write poetry!! I get to write poetry!!” I remember the exact location in my former place living situation where I said this, too.

I write essays and non-fiction outside of poetry, but I felt like the things I most wanted to write about over the last few years only poetry can handle. For example, I have written about the abandonment of autistic children and reshaping language in my essay “Rewriting the Autistic Mother Tongue.” But you can use line breaks and metre and white space on the page to convey what experiencing violence from a young age feels like, and what that does to the imagination. For me, poetry is about learning to be itself, so the subject matter and the form naturally gravitate towards each other. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I write all the time but the act of deciding that something is a project takes a bit more intentional effort. What I learned most out of writing a first full-length collection is that you don’t realize what you’re doing until you’re almost finished, but taking a stab at things as if you do helps you along that process.

I don’t take notes unless I’m writing longer-form essays, but I copy-paste earlier drafts somewhere else, maybe the bottom of the page or in my notes app, possibly to be lost forever. Sometimes reading poems in front of an audience helps me figure out what I need to work on, and I follow what I feel in my body as well. There are a lot of things I edit out because I didn’t enjoy how reading it made me feel. Or I notice an audience member takes to a particular line, so I highlight that in another draft. It feels very collaborative that way. And of course, if you’re not completely forgetful like I am sometimes, you acknowledge their insights and influence in your work. That’s probably why my acknowledgement section is a bajillion pages long. And I’m almost afraid to look at it for fear that I’ve forgotten to mention someone…

My not-note-taking tendencies is a bit frustrating because it makes it hard to return to drafts to figure out what I was thinking. But then it’s like, I’m creating a palimpsest with another draft, and you can see faint outlines of the earlier one. Because between the moment you wrote the first draft and the next, your perspective has changed.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m only more recently thinking about things in terms books. But at heart I think in terms of a collection of images and feelings, of dreams. I want those things shaped and made concrete and alive and sometimes that’s a poem and other times it’s a book. Other times it’s an essay or a meme or a doodle.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I really enjoy them! A few months ago I took the time to work with spoken word poet Kay Kassirer to practice performing more. I appreciated that a lot as, in part, the pandemic has limited opportunities to read in public, and I felt out of practice. I like telling jokes between my poems and making people laugh. Readings can be public spiritual acts and acts calling for rebellion and change.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’ve talked a lot about this with my friend shō yamagushiku. I noticed, when I was reading his book shima, that a lot of the collection takes place outside, whereas a lot of my book takes place inside. It feels like the questions my poems are concerned with are related to what happens behind closed doors, what gets hidden in plain sight. I tend to write about the bigger, external things in essays. The mundane, household things that appear in my work make me think that my poems are listening for the secrets of everyday objects and what they eavesdrop and collect along the way. So maybe, on some psychic level, my poems are concerned with what everyday things can teach us about ourselves.

Intimacy with interior spaces is also a gendered, disabled experience. So, animating disabled queer interiority feels like a huge concern in my work, one that hopefully reminds us that the revolution starts at home (as the book about intimate violence within activist communities suggests) and that we sometimes need to teach ourselves (or reparent ourselves) how to do it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A few words that come to mind are noticing, tending, interjecting, remembering, and dreaming. Writers are assassinated for telling the truth about the state of the world. They often play the role of ringing an alarm and dousing cold water on us when it’s needed. Writers can be dangerous to empire, or they can choose to serve it.

A few months ago, I learned from WAWOG Toronto that of all the arrests for protesting genocide in this country, literary events have had the most proportionately speaking. So, I think writers around me, those I want to align myself with, are doing the work of redefining what writing ought to do. That’s seen as dangerous by the powers that be.

If nothing else I think writers ought to write to free themselves or imagine a way to do so, and to consider who else they’re freeing in their work. June Jordan says it beautifully: “Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I really enjoy working with an editor. I enjoy disagreeing with someone and knowing why and knowing why something lands in a different way than I intended. Editors also help you recognize the things you’re doing and how they are or aren’t aligned with your vision.

The thing I enjoy the most (while also finding it terrifying) is to be read intimately. For example, earlier on in the editorial process, Phoebe pointed out the speaker in my poems have had a hard life. I was very confused when I heard her say it: Don’t most people have a hard life? Why would I write poetry if I had an easy one? But that comment prompted me to put a line about having a hard life in my poem “Catalogues of Tearing.” Others reflecting what you’re doing is crucial to the writing process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Wayde Compton says that your writing is often wiser than yourself. I think that helps me let go of control and needing to understand what I’m doing all the time.  

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I start my day by topping up eSims. They’re electronic sim cards we’ve been sending to people in Gaza since December through the Crips for eSims for Gaza project that I began with Alice Wong and Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna Samarasinha. I feel uneasy having a writing routine when there are multiple ongoing genocides and crises impacting people around the world, including locally. But I write all the time anyway. It’s just that right now, my routine looks a little different, and I pour more of my time into these organizing projects and write towards them.

For example, in my essay, “When the Poem is a Spreadsheet: Joining Us in #ConnectingGaza,” I weave doing this organizing work with thinking through the role of poetry and the role of writers in the world. Weaving disparate parts together is a poet’s work, and it’s also the work of engineers, and I found it moving to think about the role of engineers and poets in tandem. I had intended to complete this essay months earlier. But for better or for worse, I hadn’t really processed what we were doing fully and needed time to prepare logistics. I felt the responsibility and inadequacy of weaving my experiences into urgent mutual aid work of thousands of people and their families. I also, in the process, taught myself how to write an instruction manual and likely have way more to learn. That’s a totally different genre than poetry!

I often write later in the day, usually at night, when things are quieter, when my brain is overactive. I also write down my dreams first thing in the morning.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I wouldn’t say my writing is ever stalled but would say there are times when my heart, body, mind, and spirit aren’t aligned or speaking to one another. Or because of life, trauma, hardships, they don’t feel settled or still enough to focus on writing.

Sometimes when I read earlier drafts, I see that I was processing lots of anger and resentment and shame that I didn’t know I was feeling. Those drafts are still important because they teach me something about what I was feeling at the time. On the contrary to ‘writer’s block,’ I struggle with wanting to share every thought I have with the world; I think that’s partly because I grew up with the Internet. In a lot of ways, a writing practice is more about creating a filter for my blabbermouth-brain, scaffolding my voice with intention.

When I struggle to read, I often turn to film or music. I write Letterboxed reviews of nearly every film I see.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sesame oil.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

In echolalia echolalia, I bring in Jia Zhangke films, the film Arrival, the bands I used to listen to as a teenager (that, apparently, teenagers still listen to!), Twitter polls, Matthew Wong paintings, cartoons, video games, and TikTok videos. As Rebecca Salazar suggests in their blurb of echolalia echolalia, the poems are chronically online. The Internet is a place that my work inhabits intimately. Existing on the Internet as a preteen in the early 2000s is a specific experience that feels important to document.  

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I was deeply influenced by reading José Saramago growing up and likely wouldn’t have become a more experimental poet with an eye for satire were not for reading Vladimir Nabokov and Chuck Palahniuk in those years as well. In the last few years: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee; Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries; the writings of Kai Cheng Thom, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Jody Chan, Beni Xiao, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Alice Wong, Lucia Lorenzi, bell hooks, Rita Wong, Mercedes Eng, Christina Sharpe, and Dionne Brand, etc. These days I’m also reading Octavia E. Butler, Wendy Trevino, June Jordan, and Rasha Abdulhadi.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

So many things! I want to try writing short stories and speculative fiction. One day I’ll try my hand at a film.   

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I wanted to be a therapist as a younger person but realized, after working briefly in social services, that I couldn’t stomach the exploitative landscape of psychological and psychiatric institutions.

I suspect I could have gone into film-editing or visual arts. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

As silly as it sounds, I’m not a painter because it’s expensive to get your own studio and I’m not great at cleaning up a physical mess. I’m also a touch sensitive to scent. The tech aspect of filmmaking also feels daunting in a way that opening a Word doc isn’t. Writing, on its own, feels like I can do anywhere and anytime. Writing is painting with words, cinematography with language.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reading about Le Guin talk about her opposition to the Vietnam War… this novel feels like it could have been written today.

Tokyo Godfathers is a gorgeous portrait of family and the interconnectedness of neighbours. One of the best Christmas films.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to not just observe and witness injustice but confront power and end systems of domination. What makes it possible for people to fight back collectively? What problems do we inherit from our ancestors in that work and what problems do we replicate in our attempts at liberatory action? How can we build towards liberatory futures? I’m working on different ways to write about that and think through those questions.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: early June, 2019: THIRTEEN, ed. Ali Blythe + Marty Cain

Are you coming by to the ottawa small press fair on June 22nd? And/or the pre-fair reading the night prior? I mean: we’ve only been doing this twice a year since 1994. Why haven’t you made your way over to this? I mean, really. Honestly. What gives.

Toronto ON: Edited by Ali Blythe and produced by The League of Canadian Poets is THIRTEEN: New Collected Poems from LGBTQI2S Writers in Canada (April, 2019). Given the plethora of publishing ventures through the League over the years (I discovered the work of Jane Eaton Hamilton through Going Santa Fe, Hamilton’s chapbook produced through the League in 1997 as winner of their then-annual chapbook manuscript contest) I would be curious to know if anyone has compiled a bibliography of the scattering of publications they’ve produced over the years, from occasional books to chapbook, postcard and/or pamphlet series. THIRTEEN includes work by (obviously) thirteen Canadian poets currently producing work: John Barton, Karin Cope, Tanis Franco, Keith Garebian, Kayla Geitzler, Matthew Heinz, Rachel Lallouz, Chloe Lewis, Nisa Malli, Trish Salah, Jane Shi, Matthew Stepanic and John Emil Vincent.

Vaults then

Dizzy hopes for ginseng

To be sent

Nonce hopeful

A chant for it

Cure there or here

Garter makes six

Her or over

Or there

When you turn on me

Rose naïve

Styles of tremble

I want it

Ruse destiny

To secede (Trish Salah)

I’m aware of only a third of the authors in this short mix, so am pleased to be introduced to the work of a number of the other contributors. This collection is an impressive overview of some of the writers currently working in the country, and the purpose of THIRTEEN, then, seems to not only provide, but to acknowledge space, as Blythe writes in the introduction:

I know it has taken decades of the heart’s muscle to build these spaces we can gather, and quite a few more to invite others in to listen. I know good authors who have had to keep hammering on the doors of granting bodies, publishing house, festivals. Then took up positions as doormen to let others through. Then built their own spaces with their own doors.

In my former capacity as editor for a youth literary magazine, in about half the submissions I could tell the young writers were exploring in their writing their gender and sexuality. It’s no necessary for people to have a place to do this in art, especially when it can be so hard to do so in the real world.

America (geography otherwise unknown): I’m very taken with the remarkably-crafted rawness of Ithica, New York poet,editor and publisher Marty Cain’s chapbook Four Essays (Tammy Journal, 2019), an assemblage of four interconnected lyric essays on craft, male sexuality and desire, sexual violence and trauma, all of which bleed the boundaries between the lyric essay and the prose poem in powerful ways, such as in this excerpt from the final of the quartet, which could also be used as a descriptor for the collection:

For the remainder of his life, Wordsworth revised the Prelude. He mediated the adolescent rawness; he made the edges eloquent, the poem more like a formal container for a feeling. Originally, he’d intended for it to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one whose length surpassed Paradise Lost.

/

But he failed. That motherfucker died.

And form is a feeling.

And form is a garment. (“Wordsworth Poem”)

In four essays—“Prologue,” “Robert Penn Warren Poem,” “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II” and “Wordsworth Poem”—Cain explores writing craft through and around elements of personal memoir, attempting to reconcile a number of experiences, including the revelation of his father’s sexuality, and a possible sexual attack by a drunken colleage that he might easily have buried away from his conscious memory (I like, also, that an essay titled “Prologue” is both prior to the collection and part of the collection, the first of the four). There is some dark and complicated material Cain moves through, but he does so in such an open and thoughtful way, and one can only hope that the trauma of these experiences is lessened through the process of writing, thinking and publishing. These are very smart pieces, and I can only hope that this chapbook is but a prelude to an eventual full-length collection, whether with or without these four essays.

I remember a time when we were in a car in rural South Carolina. My brother began seizing in the backseat, then his words ceased to signify, they began to garble and turn like an ocean or the simulated sound of an ocean in a shell you hold to your ear, your own blood / a circular river, I remember his eyes as he spoke, I remember seeing his eyes speak, they said, Listen, I don’t know what it is I’m saying.

They said, There is something true in what I’m saying.

Then he didn’t speak. Then his eyes shifted to one side, his mouth like a garage with nothing in it. Then trickling saliva, neck limp and hanging. I remember my mom saying something. I remember the car speeding up and a force pushed me back, we ran through red lights. I don’t remember whether I was scared.

I remember a time. (“Prologue”)