There is an inevitability implicit in the directness of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s poetry that leaves the reader quite unprepared for the sudden leaps in reality it then proposes. Consider:

 

The first drop of blood

appeals to a past. We learn

to love the land of our

fathers and mothers because

we love them.

Walk on your forehead.

Where you are

is who you are.

 

That first line can be understood so many different ways. The second half of that first sentence – and at least one possible reading of the entire second sentence – seem to take it in one direction. Then comes the one line that is also a complete sentence in the poem, which literally stands our comprehension on its head. The final couplet suggests a radically different emotional content than the one toward which we’d first imagined ourselves heading. It’s a shocking, even brutal experience & yet the poem retains its simple direct tone throughout. The result is a dense & complicated eight lines, posing as the simplest stanza you ever saw.

 

In a sense, this is the polar opposite of “traditional” surrealism – which revels in its dream landscapes, which can be either gaudy or stark, but nonetheless inevitably noir – yet a poem like the one above is much closer to what surrealism originally promised: direct access to alternative worlds. The enjambments at the end of the third & fourth lines serve only to soften those lines so that the ones that follow – the whole second half of the poem – will hit us harder & harder.

 

I’ve written of Dhompa before, who, as the first Tibetan-American¹ poet to receive any substantial distribution, opens U.S. poetry up to new modes of possibility in almost anything she does. She would be important historically even if she wasn’t a very good poet. And she is a terrific one, on any terms.

 

The poem I’ve quoted is the seventh in a series entitled “A matter not of Order,” which originally appeared as one of Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides – the very sequence that first got me to pay attention to her work – and which will open a new full-length book, In the Absent Everyday, forthcoming from Berkeley’s Apogee Press. Apogee also published Dhompa’s first book, Rules of the House, likewise excellent.

 

Many of the poems in Absent Everyday adopt a longer line with softly modulated breaks just this side of prose poetry. Their quietness – very much like Dhompa herself the one time I met her – requires careful attention, as if in fact what she was presenting was in any usual sense normal:

 

Betty goes downtown

 

In any given situation the illusion of an alternative comes later.

Opening avenues suddenly as though prudence and wisdom

were always there to be consulted. Or experience, if relevant.

But here again Betty, the family fish, bangs into her reflection

all day long. She is forgetful we say. Perhaps she likes herself too much.

And this is our love, sending our sons and daughters to war

so they can learn to serve this country, president, car.

Someone we know is always falling in love with a charlatan.

He is happy, he is happy, he says. We say rogues know happiness

or how to present it. What does it matter in the end?

In the end is not a place. In the end is the curl in the lover’s smile

contemplating a secret that does not accommodate

his love. It is hatching its own code. Its unavoidable error.

 

What keeps bringing me back to this poem is that rhymed couplet in lines six & seven, which at first glance seems askew within this tale of doomed romance. Rereading, tho, I’ve come to see it really as the topic sentence, connecting as it does everything from “the illusion of an alternative” to the “unavoidable error” mentioned elsewhere. The off-rhyme of car rings so flat after war that it deliberately jars, the “unavoidable error” indeed. What starts out as a poem about love is in fact a text on the problems of patriotism, a reversal on the order of which really only Jack Spicer has seemed able to carry off in the past half century.² That is as deft a move in a poem as can be done, and if it wasn’t for that little dissonance, you almost wouldn’t notice it – but when you do, it turns the whole of the poem inside out.

 

Dhompa, it would seem, isn’t just about bringing some new strands of thread into the American literary tapestry, she’s out to reweave the whole thing. We all stand to be far richer for that. But we’ll have to pay attention.

 

 

¹ She was, in fact, born in India, but into the Tibetan exile community there. She has also lived in Katmandu & could be characterized as the first Nepalese-American poet of consequence as well.

 

² The way Spicer, in Language, uses the Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 to focus instead on the “death of John F. Kennedy.” This week, it seems impossible to read that poem, tho, without noting that Spicer expresses empathy for the “Eskimo villages” destroyed in the quake with no mention whatsoever of the western half of Crescent City, California, just up the coast from Mendocino, that was wiped out in the ensuing tsunami.