Who was the first successful U.S. poet to write in English while having grown up in a Spanish-speaking home? It just might have been William Carlos Williams, whose mother’s roots were in Puerto Rico & who published a collection with a Spanish title, Al Que Quiere!, in 1917.* The nation’s fabled celebration of itself as a melting pot may well be constructed upon certain conspicuous moments of amnesia – the long genocidal destruction of the seven nations of indigenous Americans who preceded the first European colonists & the nearly equally long & devastating institution of slavery upon which the economy & civil society of the South were predicated, the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War & the exclusion of the Chinese throughout much of the first half of the 20^th century –  but in spite all the bloodshed & recombinant xenophobia, we have nonetheless become a nation of hyphenated Americans. Add gender & sexual orientation to the mix & you have enough social construction of the self in this country to drive nouveau white supremacists like Mr. Bennett or Ms. Cheney, or the belligerents at the New Criterion, to new heights of frothery.

 

But if there is a single social phenomenon – with the possible exception (not unrelated) of the longer term consequences of a bloodthirsty return to an openly imperial foreign policy – that seems destined to transform American poetry over the 21^st century, the acceleration of this gumbo-fication through the influx of influences from non-European cultures is an obvious choice. One instance of this broader trend, Walter Lew’s Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, is the sort of volume that makes anyone who has ever edited an anthology shudder at the contemplation of the sheer labor needed to produce a work that is at once both this comprehensive & challenging. Yet not one of Lew’s 73 poets appears to come from the landlocked Asian nations: Nepal, Tibet, Ulan Bator, or Mongolia.** This is just one reason why the arrival of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is of such importance – with two chapbooks (In Writing the Names, in Potes & Poets’ A•bacus series, & Recurring Gestures from Tangram) & one brand new larger collection (Rules of the House, Apogee) – everything she does creates new ground just because she’s doing it. A century from now, Tibetan-American poets will look to Dhompa as the source, the moment at which their own writing becomes conceivable.

 

Happily, the arrival of Dhompa is important also because she does it so well. Not unlike, say, Larry Eigner, who could be called a poet of disability but who was actually more simply a great poet who happened to be physically challenged, Dhompa is a good poet first who happens to have been born on a train in India in 1969 & raised in the Tibetan exile communities of Dharamsala, India & Kathmandu, Nepal before coming to the U.S. Her latest work showed up in the mail this past week in the form of the Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides Chaplets, miniature booklets printed on a single sheet of paper. Entitled A Matter Not of Order, it contains either two serial poems – which is how I first read it – or a single work divided into two serial movements (which is how I’m rereading it now). The first, which shares the title of the chaplet, is divided into seven parts separated by their respective lower-case Roman numerals. The second, untitled movement contains three sections or pieces, separated now by the standard Arabic numbers. Nine of the ten sections in the two movements explicitly involve a figured relationship, that old dualism of I & you (&, less often, we). While each movement comes to a closure of sorts, there’s no narrative in the vulgar sense of that term.

 

While there is less of the surreal here than I noted in her work in Bird Dog or Vert, the writing is continuously inventive & fresh:

 

I am drifting into a world of enquiry

to quantify, qualify, even as

around me, summer performs.

Beetles are coal stunned in sun.

 

That inversion in the third line casts the movement of the syntax precisely “around me.” Here is the entire fourth section of the first movement:

 

You eat with your right hand.

Hold the broom away

from your body. Strike.

A roof of wool, a bed of skin.

A follicle for food. A hand of error

and infliction is given to all.

The left hand heeds prayer beads.

The left hand signals retreat.

What is your good name?

Where are you from?

 

The spareness of Dhompa’s language translates as compactness with this many references to hands, flesh & follicles. The intensity of the two final questions are magnified first by the lingering echo of Strike, a term that does just what it says, as well as by the qualifier good in the next to last line. In particular, good, coming after error, infliction & retreat articulates a gap I experience as halfway between longing & loss. This degree of specificity isn’t accidental. Dhompa knows exactly what she’s doing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Is that the first book of poetry whose title also included an exclamation point?

 

** The political fate of the landlocked is itself worth noting. It is no accident that the former Yugoslavia, the non-state of Kurdistan and barely-a-state Afghanistan all lack direct access to an ocean port.