A Mouth Holds Many Things is a book, an exhibition, a website, and a literary-social-art experiment that seeks to create a space for a type of literature—a literary art—straining against and splitting the seams of its textual confinements, that spills messily across borderlines into other art domains, that by its very nature resists containment. The hybrid-literary exists because it cannot be relegated to, is not at home within, any one realm alone.

The print publication of A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions & De-Canon, June 2024) features the works of 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. In our initial call for submissions for this project, we looked for works that reach beyond the textual and at the same time still utilize language as a primary material. What does it mean to break out of/through/into the domain of the letter, with elements that present language—lingua, tongue—in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile, and more?

To consider language and text as a chosen material (vs. as an immutable bedrock of writing) means to acknowledge their manipulability, as well as their susceptibility to the weathers, the temporalities and fallibilities, of circumstance and design. At the restless heart of this project, at the heart of our desire to examine and present hybrid-literature as its own resonant and relevant field, lies a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? And, how are we to write and read, today, now, and moving forward, if we are to truly acknowledge all of the different fluencies and frequencies feeding into the streams of our multiple ways of languaging, of living?

As part of this project, we asked each contributor to A Mouth Holds Many Things to write briefly on the intention and process behind their work as well as how they interpret hybridity through their practice. We gathered and published these artist reflections as an appendix in the back of the print anthology. Together, their responses read as a series of micro-essays yearning to be in dialogue with one another—suggesting the book itself as a social space. We wondered what might happen if we engaged with the text of these reflections as material for this essay. What questions and insights into the nature of language might emerge if we “produced” a kind of conversation among these artist reflections? Might we “compose” a roundtable conversation of sorts between the writers, but in the form of cento poems?

We began by selecting lines from this polyvocal appendix. Lines that called to us in their articulations and insights into process and hybridity. Lines that iterated the necessity of hybrid forms for these writers. Slowly we built centos as prose poems and text blocks. We observed shared themes and questions emerging, listened for echoes and transitions, played with meaning-making. What follows is a sequence of collective conversations “composed” out of our reading, our listening, our gathering and arranging of voices from A Mouth Holds Many Things.

—Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors of A Mouth Holds Many Things

1.

◳ Just like my own body, hybridity isn’t comfortable or pristine but, through its dance, moves our understanding into new dimensions. ◳ I lean into that restlessness by assembling the poem, the multiform poem, as it locates its wholeness spreading to more than one place—a verse, an essay, a book, a performance, a video, a sound. ◳ To create a partial space where two mediums collide in great asking for they are unable to breathe in just one. ◳ Living and creating memory and landscape, traveling and teaching, description and movement, image and text, video and dance, the critical and the creative, togetherness, being somewhere else, tuning into the frequency, accepting the gift, interweaving, connecting, and fusing. ◳ I try to push the text, image, and sound to their full capacity as vessels for the piece. It is their interrelationships, the space in between and the moments where they touch and meet, which animates the whole. ◳ If the world—and myself in it—never seemed whole to me, why would language?

2.

◳ Sometimes an uncertain truth feels truer than a certain one. If the world—and myself in it—never seemed whole to me, why would language? ◳ What occurs in a realm of comprehension? Unreadability? And how much did you pause, breath held, in your own kind of askings? ◳ Why are our ways of knowing tethered to (keeping/losing) our bearings? What are the paths we take to return our bodies to ourselves? ◳ How, on and within the ocean floor, do words and their remains swirl about and unsettle? ◳ Listening is composition as potential: what’s being composed in your listening, and what “poem” can be composed nearby? ◳ What would happen, I wondered, if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions?

3.

◳ We remembered when we thought we didn’t. ◳ Why are our ways of knowing tethered to (keeping/losing) our bearings? What are the paths we take to return our bodies to ourselves? ◳ When the body catches a memory, like a pearl of sweat catches the light, something is there like practice: the images in this piece are dance notation, are spiritual messengers drawing from my own cultural access points and fabricating reconstituted approaches to meaning. ◳ To find where I might speak, where language might emerge in the rupture and new layers. ◳ Asemic writing is what I turn to when my ability to understand language fails. ◳ My brain was struggling and would not cooperate with making anything, so instead I experimented with ways to creatively destroy and repurpose things (text, image, ideas). ◳ What a porous surface that ends up being, holes or openings, fits and starts that make possible the development of a poem. ◳ Both my works came from thinking about language as landscape and landscape as language. ◳ Hybridity occurs when the language of poetry must extend from the limitations of fact, in essence, completing what the original historical texts I relied upon leave blank. ◳ Given the history of Natives and American museums, the museum form is also a perfect place to repatriate a stolen body, and the artist in the collection hopes to do just that across the course of the work.

4.

◳ I was born hybrid. ◳ My interior language—the one I use to speak myself into being—has always been composed of fragments, splinters, opacities, and absences. I have always felt more seen and heard when I was partly occluded, untranslated. ◳ I am interested here in enacting an immersive environment and testing the limits of a given voice within the context of that space. How does that space consolidate and break apart the words I place within it? ◳ Making space for the unsaid and unknown both in the image or the time in between its shutter release and my looking in the present. Distilling the text into the spatial juxtapositions of frames by drawing, to inhabit the intentional and unintentional gaps in my grandmother’s memory. ◳ This hybrid work is a documentation of my love for the nuptial tissue between text and the visual. ◳ In these attempts to mathematically model human consciousness and spirituality through geometric forms, I kept noticing the absence of ancestors— ◳ “Countdown” began out of a necessity I felt to access my ancestors, to be in a narrative inaccessible by time and physicality, and emotional connection—the point of view of a uranium-235 gun-type fission weapon. ◳ A poetics of looking that descends the imaginal underworld of a past catastrophe that ceaselessly binds and permeates the present. ◳ Our individual relationships to specific tree species helped ground visual conversations about the overlaps and gaps in our hyphens, hyphens sprouted from shared family histories of migration and displacement, as well as from our work in multiple genres and languages. Though planted in different places, we come from peoples who commune with trees. ◳ I was born hybrid.

5.

◳ A poetics of looking that sees the past as a disorienting land strewn thick with absence and loss, a moor that crawls with rifts where meaning drops. A poetics of looking where words and images are softly interleaved so that the former might refrain from loudly, heroically, desperately striving to interpret, master, and besiege the latter. A poetics of looking that listens to both the laments and the laughs latent in an image, both the freedoms and the unfreedoms born of a revolution. A poetics of looking that descends the imaginal underworld of a past catastrophe that ceaselessly binds and permeates the present. ◳ Created. Made. Insisted upon despite the despair. Pieces like this: an attempt, through the floss, to continue being. ◳ And isn’t this hybrid writing?

6.

◳ And isn’t this hybrid writing? ◳ What would happen, I wondered, if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? ◳ Not long after I started playing around with AI in my work, I decided that, if I were to ever publish something written using AI, it would have to somehow be partly about what it means for AI to be able to write. ◳ Regardless of the tools and materials used to develop the writing element or its surroundings, the impact or effect is the same: the human eye will always discern, distinguish, and isolate any text or text-like imagery first, acknowledging the innate power of language. ◳ To write on the computer extends writing into realms of data-parsing, copy-pasting, string-matching, and new scales. New media offers shifts from old canons by offering new conceptual and formal values. ◳ This idiosyncratic, hybrid style becomes a fitting testament to how deeply mediated we were by technology and the glitchy strangeness of the time. ◳ For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.

7.

◳ In terms of hybridity, I think that I tend to listen to whatever it is I’m working on and ask it what it would like to be. ◳ Working across genres and mediums and creating hybrid works that serve their own mysterious purposes is a vital part of my spirit’s unfolding. Hybridity is for me a way to honor and enact the true dimensions and facets and restless curiosity of the life-force(s) within me. ◳ My desire is for the utterance that gestures toward without pinpointing because complexity cannot be pinpointed; the utterance that is a wild, liminal space, where identity constructions are not fixed but instead a question is inserted, an uncertainty is posed. ◳ So many years I lived its questions. Its demands still shake me: imagine! Its own insistence on remix—on reimagining and re-presenting itself. ◳ I’d like to think that art is not very mathematical, wooden, or mechanical. It is ineffable, indecipherable, effluent, and fluid. ◳ imagine: to be not just carousel but doorway.

8.

◳ I once printed words on the ripening skins of apples using sunlight. That installation couldn’t possibly survive untouched more than a day or two ◳ to make art is to float or flutter in a state of non-intention for as long as possible ◳ to stir fresh fragments to the surface… excavations ◳ the ongoing process of meddling with the structure ◳ I made stop motion animation sketches, I recorded a dance, collected videos from my phone, I curved the lines into circles, semicircles, slivers that took on the circular motions of the scroll-paper itself ◳ I taped up paper on my bedroom wall, got a bottle of ink and a dip pen, and went to work. I remember feeling trapped in my mind, and that is the closest I can get to an intention ◳ I could, however, make a small ball strewn with a few sentences as I tried to find a way out ◳ I recognized parallels to the language that many of us use as we navigate and attempt to find safety within systems designed to harm us ◳ Every metal detector, locker, and officer’s desk carries an emotional weight, and when they tell the story of their journeys inside, hallways and walls distend and contort around memory ◳ We know nothing about what she thought or felt. But nonetheless she exists to this day as a ghost in the text to complicate the official narrative and to stir up questions about how much else is missing from the record ◳ Rupture and loss might be seen—from a historian’s point of view—as flaws in the record. But for the poet, they offer opportunities to create alternative texts to both poetry and history themselves

Centos composed from artist reflections by these writers in A Mouth Holds Many Things:

1: (Addie Tsai) (Carolina Ebeid) (Ayesha Raees) (Gabrielle Civil) (Jenne Hsien Patrick) (Jennifer S. Cheng)
2: (Jennifer S. Cheng) (Ayesha Raees) (Divya Victor) (Imani Elizabeth Jackson) (Kimberly Alidio) (Sasha Stiles)
3: (desveladas) (Diana Khoi Nguyen) (Divya Victor) (Jhani Randhawa) (Aya Bram) (Arianne True) (Carolina Ebeid) (Cindy Juyoung Ok) (Paisley Rekdal)
4: (Addie Tsai) (Jennifer S. Cheng) (Imani Elizabeth Jackson) (Jenne Hsien Patrick) (Vi Khi Nao) (Monica Ong) (Sandy Tanaka) (Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng)
5: (Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng) (Samiya Bashir) (Gabrielle Civil)
6: (Gabrielle Civil) (Sasha Stiles) (Vauhini Vara) (Nadia Haji Omar) (Kathy Wu)
7: (Victoria Chang) (Stephanie Adams-Santos) (Jennifer S. Cheng) (Samiya Bashir)
8: (Shin Yu Pai) (Victoria Chang) (Stephanie Adams-Santos) (Sandy Tanaka) (Carolina Ebeid) (Aya Bram) (Kelly Puig) (Jennifer Perrine) (Anna Martine Whitehead) (Alley Pezanoski-Browne) (Paisley Rekdal)