In the not-quite-four-decades since Michael McClure was prosecuted for representing an act of cunnilingus at the climax of his play The Beard – Billy the Kid, as I recall, talks while he eats, an act of almost archetypal male behavior – the number of straight men who have written erotic work within the post-avant tradition has been startlingly few. Erotic writing has been the territory of women (Kathy Acker, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian) and gay men (Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Cooper), who have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of shoving the doors of Eros wide open, while their straight male counterparts have largely been silent or highly contextualized by brackets of irony (Bruce Andrews). So it comes as something of a shock to open a book whose short poems are as carefully crafted little mechanisms of language as anything you ever read by William Bronk, yet which likewise seems obsessed with the same idea as McClure that meat and flesh are intermingled paradigms. But, and this is significant, where McClure’s equation, like that of the filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneeman or even James Broughton, all members of that same first generation of the 1950s & ‘60s, is Dionysian, Linh Dinh views meat with far more of the butcher’s eye, or that of the food prep specialist at a burger joint:
Negligible
Like male nipples, the bellybutton’s
Fairly pointless, a dumb ornament.
A cheap souvenir from a forgotten trauma.
One only misses one’s bellybutton
As one is hacked away from it.
I can imagine the reader who might argue that’s not erotic verse at all. But what about this, literally on the facing page:
She Said
My body’s like an egg, she said, and it was true.
It was certainly hard, round and smooth like an egg.
My body’s like a squid, she said, and that was also true.
Milky white with a purple underside, chewy and slippery.
My body’s like a scoop of ice cream or a pound cake.
Or this, which virtually shouts McClure’s equation:
Language and Meat
Language comes from meat. Without meat,
There’s no language. It’s too obvious.
Meaty words shaped and rolled by a meaty tongue,
Such as tender, juicy or sliced, for example, would be
Meaningless without the muscles, tendons and fat
That wrap around bones. Words such as dead, lovely,
Haggard, touch, desire or satisfaction. Further,
Everyday language is overstuffed with meat.
Don’t you slander my meat. A piece of meat,
She turned down such prime meat.
Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around. One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the traces of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born), note that he is hardly the only good or successful Vietnamese American poet, let alone the only poet to come from a working class background, yet he is not writing “about” or even “toward” nor “from” any one of these contexts so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters, that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine whom any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have had to become in order to write such poetry. Ted Berrigan, for example. Berrigan shares Linh’s class background, which enables him to be as ruthless in a different way as Linh is in his. But the comparison stops there. Linh is writing straightforward poetry, but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind of exile is far deeper than mere geography.
