What will not cohere: On Valerie Hsiung
Valerie Hsiung | The only thing we can call it now is not its only name | Counterpath | April 2023 | 112 Pages
Valerie Hsiung | To Love an Artist | Essay Press | August 2022 | 123 Pages
Valerie Hsiung | outside voices, please | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | October 2021 | 120 Pages
Sounds are native to breath, writes Valerie Hsiung in To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022). Though the words instruct against breathing, at least coherently.
Incoherently, I understood it backwards. I read it as a body that is breathing is also making sound. That breath is prior to sound. That only things that breathe make sound. I thought—does a stone breathe? Does it sound? Do all things that breathe make sound?
I lean closer in to listen. I put a probe in the ground, or a camera to the sky. I fixate on a line that doesn’t open the work into the whole. A book I could explain in themes: of illness, of language as illness, as currency and its circulations. What it is to inhabit your fractures, knowing what broke you. Punctuated in slivers, or paper cuts. So much as the line slows me down. I pause, put the book down.
When I return I understand it forwards: that things that breathe have the capacity to sound. Things that breathe mill around their elemental awareness without listeners. What breathes, what sounds is not the question. Merely that where there is breath there is a possible sound. What moves them? What is coherent is the material that is being blown to bits or released into the air and scattering. The sound betrays what’s happening (Artist 38).
It becomes possible to piece together an entirely new form out of that brokenness.
The sentences I have taken away from Hsiung’s books do not comment on their cohesion. Or wrap themselves into essence. Or arrange themselves like a moat around a castle of context. Instead, to borrow a term from Trin T. Minh-Ha, I am “speaking nearby.” Sometimes you hear a phrase and it makes sense, other times it’s murmurs and whispers of things that sound like language but are maybe other kinds of noise. As the virus introduces itself, it magnifies fragilities and contingencies: a milieu’s mille-feuille distances… (Artist 38).
Let me tell you of all the ways a body can be broken (Artist 100). Flesh is not glass but something about how glass fractures describes a process of desertification; if Earth is a future desert. Since glass was once sand, its pulverization into sand makes that metaphor of bodies and dust: to dust. to confuse this dust on the map with this part of your dust to confuse the mapping of dust with our incapacity (Artist 120). As wind passes over sand dunes, water vapor seeps into granular interstices where microbes live. There is a sense of exhalation as they move. Someone calls it breathing, the dune is porous—as the wind blows these paths are made and remade.
So even a desert breathes. Even the pulverized glass. Or the dust. The stillness of things opens into air, or a feeling of lostness, as Renee Gladman writes in the introduction to the work: It is most likely lostness that leads to air. I sense in this work a desire for air. And a want for language and writing to be like laboratories… What happens when your illegible sounds get pulled into the system? (Artist ii).
In the beginning a history of language announces itself this way, over airwaves and in the ground. As capacities to sound but without listeners. Language is mineral. Language is a plague…
A wave of climate change wave’s a wave of the plague (Artist 16).
And as I hold my breath: writers find their voice, speakers lose their voice.
To worm around in thought, to be a carrier, for weeks, even years, before it voices itself thus.
Once the words, which are a writing, are spoken outloud, in the black box, the trance begins and the people begin to form nations (Artist 91).
If there is sense in chronology, Hsiung’s outside voices, please (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2021) takes refuge in the soupiness of proto-speech, evading the captivity of the open air.
The book is divided into three sections: “Test,” “Test,” and “outside voices, please.” There does not appear to be any identifiable speaker, rather voices emerge from violent encounters, places, epithets, visions. What slurs / what variations— / of / what slurs— each elbow jostling against me now has used / under whose breath and / to whom (voices, please 88). This book is hard to read. It tries not to be read. It is defensive. It shifts like parkour around stable parts of the city. It offers language-like ingredients but does not make anything from them. It breathes without saying, defies saying.
I did not come into this world fully formed…/ On the contrary, when I wrote to you, I was not fully formed. / Since the past two years of our exchange, I came into the world more forming done rehearse / And so, not so far removed are they from the rhythm in the rhyme that makes us pink and hurl (voices, please 65). The senselessness of violation cuts the cord of belonging. Of coherence. What is there does not offer itself to be read, to be made sense of. To have meaning extracted from it.
Instead it offers magma, breath, some mechanism of motion beyond a threshold of (the reader’s) sense-ability.
I very honestly think it is possible to be magma for many years before emerging, unrecognizable and talking at such volume as to take up all the space. Of territorializing song.
But, in the world, the rage must stay unvoiced and unaspirated: unleaked. This reprise is the magma of Hsiung’s subsequent books, or so I read: the correct way to emerge is not to fluctuate, to keep one’s temper. I lost possession of my voice, once, or, notably, on at least a few occasions. I have been tempered beyond defense for losing possession of an untamed voice (voices, please 45). The written is this emergence from contaminated soils. Above ground, it is hard to breathe.
I don’t know how to write when writing is gasping for air. When writing is flesh, the sensing out of things. When really writing is breathing. When really, to borrow from Minh-Ha again, “writing is dying.”
In a physical sense, voice is gas. A moment of vibration in air. An interaction with gaseous air, through which sound travels. Do you love her, gas? (voices, please 36). Can the dune speak? If it is merely moving imperceptibly, wind skimming. And what is the obsession with that? A coherent sound within the paradigm of human hearing. The fantasy of coherence. Failed promises of breathability. Fail in their fact of brutality, of dust and disease.
In a Bomb interview, Hsiung iterates that coherence is coercive. An American project. Instead, her poetics “work[s] with obvious language as a language of alienation, because I’ve always found obvious language to be opaquer. Obvious language has never been a language I’ve felt at home with, and that’s probably why poetry is my first language.”
Across works the accretion of materials can look like thoughtlessness, an “I” not really existing, a geological age unfolding in her inertias of listening to wind, the body balled up in blankets. Sick.
The drawing out of breath across a phrase. The drawing out of breath across a sentence. The drawing out of breath across sentences, paragraphs, pages, entire books. The drawing out of breath across books. The drawing out of breath through flesh, through water, through electromagnetic fields, through strata and its folds. It looks incoherent but what it is is that somewhere an immune system is confused and begins to attack itself (Only 36). The frequency band that distinguishes light and sound is distinguished almost arbitrarily. But what matters is that they move through air. The air affects timbre, and shadow.
In that pulse between orality and literacy, the history of thinking and breathing, something forced—to hurl. Somewhere someone is apologizing for existing.
Or not saying at all, if thinking is real. What is the lyric?
The rhythm of information evasion.
There are times I lose my voice and I can only open my mouth, like a fish gaping at its element. Of air. Of being taken out of its fishbowl. Of being packed in ice and shipped across the world. Of being soup. Of being.
I don’t mean the voice that uses the air, to speak. I mean the voice that hovers at my fingertips while I think of the word. That shifts,
at a keyboard. It’s always unknown a little bit, or by a mile.
I am thinking of precision—how to be precise in thinking—if or when precision is a matter of property—if or when it attempts at coherence.
That many poets envy sentences for their ability to arrive. Because the sentence arrives it possesses an aura of completeness of thought, which is comforting. And in these times, or airs.
For them, the sentence is fetishized as much as the line break, aiming for coherence in its intentionality, a sentence propped up in a public space to be recognized as human and the line break smaller and more erratic like a dog.
Even now I am considering the best punctuation mark to make this point. What happened to the soap-box voices? Do I want to be home as it’s getting dark or do I want to be getting home as it’s getting darker? (Voices 55).
But these poets are unaware that the line, where it’s broken, is arbitrary—
a distinction made by the breath, if they are breathing, if they remembered.
Its frequency is determined by the number of satellites needing bandwidth, and what governments are in charge.
Breathing is unfashionable again. Part of the fun of being a body is that you can forget about breathing for a while. For a while a new consensus was being drawn around breath as a possible poison; socially, at least, as a pandemic. Now in the desire to forget it seems easier to imagine yourself as having always existed in the planet’s unbreathable airs. Where words and weather are double-edged. Cultivating “breathability…in this weather,” Christine Sharpe writes, requires “refusing nation, country, citizenship,” as anti-black forms (In the Wake 2016). This means, in our work as poets, we face an inoculation against the disease of transactional language. That makes it incredibly complicated to disentangle weapon from salve. It’s always both of these things. (Bomb). That thing you need to survive can also kill you, or wants to. Someone else is controlling the temperature, experimenting with the pressure. Someone else is controlling what words mean.
If you can control the weather you can control food. You can control the means to live, the air. And in The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, 2023), a farm figures as a place where the protagonist is controlled. Is farmed. The farm, as Hsiung explains in the Bomb interview, like all shadow states, is a transient place for transient laborers, a place for people to hide, to disappear, to stash away enough coins until they can continue on their migration—to where?
I thought of a farm destined to become desert. Of people destined to become sand. Of sand destined to become glass, or pipeline.
The interviewer says “I am unable to place the farm spatiotemporally, it’s always receding from my vision.”
It is the egg of zero in an odorless invisible gasland. What the farm does is slow time down enough to sense the vapor emanating from pavement.
Breakdancing in chlorine. I don’t like talking about chemicals.
Writing is not a Berkey for filtering out heavy metals in the tap water. It sits in a smell. What’s that? Rotten eggs. Writing seeps across its syncopations, its interruptions. That plastic subject is produced by secret, national laboratories scattered across the desert.
Its voice speaks (out) across the desert. A plant, when stressed, emits ultrasonic signals. A dune wicks moisture from the air, “breathing.” I read this work like an ostrich puts an ear to the ground, inching closer into the sand, as a form of self-burial, of cultivation, of farming, of phrasing where a sentence does not measure time or the coherence of its object so much as it fractures, or it seeps, drawn out ductile across it, or it shudders as air passes through. Its strata zigzags against its rage, which is often confusion, which is often a disguise—for survival.
I am re-punctuated.
Could situate myself with the heaviness of normativity and its promises.
The writing speaks to breakage: in the airwaves, across material forms, deep in inaudible and unbreathable soils.
Whatever hardness I become there will be a sound that can break me.
And the condition of that air, the weather, it breaks me. The dryness in the air which consumes the dampness brings the lameness of the shadow back to the sun and wall, whose arrangement I had misconstructed (Only 27).
How is it the shadow is not the first thing for understanding how flesh is tethered to the ground. Or a glass breaks with that frequency.
Now no one is here to listen to what is growing?
Each moment of sound is an emplacement of “I” as a figure, surrounded with air or the lack of it.
“I” don’t want to say these poems outloud anymore (Only 97).
To make a bare sentence—is to be trained to do it. To be Captain Obvious. So I had a jaw (Only 33).
It’s like… they expect you to be in a place after all. As if they are listening and know where you are. But the air is momentary.
I’m breathing, they are breathing. No one wants to listen to someone who follows the law. And so I console myself with the lullabies of criminals.
Am I confused? Probably. But in my confusion I find a kind of harmony. So I’ve spent all day replenishing. With the proper liquids, yes. And now I salivate too much. And what I salivate leads me to trouble (Only 37).
Are there really people who live.
Are there really people who do not think the quality of air matters? To speak. As well as to breathe.
Are there really people who do not see that the number of words to speak is often equal to the amount of money lying in bank accounts.
Though I have a feeling that in order for me to get back to a place a voice one voice that would meet the needs for this final performance I will have to examine some of these questions which come to me now in the form of painful, disproportionate antennae (Only 46).
Besides, what Anne is saying is quite precise. Haven’t you noticed? When I have consciously set out to not say one more precise thing (Only 34).
Precise, I can give myself permission to exist like that. With parameters: language.
Inoculated. Without the blueprint, without precision, the sound or breath that the voice also is classifiably air. Noise.
It is audible in tympanic (human) registers, but not across grasses, across dunes or underground.
What clenches its jaw in the act of making spit. It makes a specific kind of silence.
Often it will hold its breath to enunciate.