CSI: Poetry would find my fingerprints on Linh Dinh’s great new book, American Tatts. There is my blurb on the back, a dead give away. I may even have been the soul who put first Chax Press onto the idea of looking at Linh’s work. I’d readily plead guilty. Absolutely none of which explains, even partly, my excitement at reading this book.

Dinh is hardly the first foreign-born American poet to bring the experience & tone of the immigrant experience to his work, nor is he the first even to do so with a decided sensitivity toward class & all of its trappings & consequences. And he is hardly the first to write with an ear toward the post-avant. He may, however, be the first to do all of the above simultaneously, and to do so in ways that are new with regard to each of these realms at once. Consider this poem, whose two-word title is not a typo:

Vertigo
Vertigo

He has a muscular torso
With a thousand erections
Lighting up the night sky
But none sticks up more
Than the twin cocks.

(And yet)
Who would think of going all the way
Downtown to castrate
With two knives ablaze?

A muscular story ends.
He now speaks differently
And cannot look into the void
Without flailing.

To say that this is a poem about the World Trade Center is to miss much of what is going on in the poem. This is, by far, the least sentimental & most brutal treatment of this particular subject I’ve ever read – and just possibly the most pained & emotional as well. Dinh has an exceptional ear for codes of language beyond the normative – there is a long poem entitled “Pentameters” written almost entirely in the discourse of instant messaging – Y were u surprised that I knew / The reasons y u wore a skirt? – and another that contemplates the omnipresence of the S word, almost to the point of percussion, in an otherwise “super clean” country. He is careful to put the poem entitled “Go Boo Hoo Hoo” entirely in quotation marks:

“You’re a rich little white girl.
People don’t give a damn
About you. They only care about
The poor people, the minorities,
Those less fortunate. Go boo hoo hoo
To Daddy and buy some diamonds.
I’m sure you’ll wake up tomorrow
And feel like the million bucks
That’s stuck up your ass.”

He does not, however, use the same device for “It Was True”:

She yanked his pants down
To see if it was true, and my God,
it was true: he was wearing his mom’s
Old ladies’ panties, the pink color fading
A little after so many years but still vibrant,
A loose thread here and there dangling, but
Otherwise the effect was not unbecoming.

In the comments stream to my note the other day on Ubuweb, Kirby Olson & Ian Keenan both mentioned the films & photography of Larry Clark & there is a side of Dinh that is not unlike the Tulsa chronicler of America’s youth in both its focus & rawness of detail. At the same time, however, Dinh reminds me of another poet – superficially quite different – who also blended his political vision with a postmodern palette, in fact the very same poet who first told me some seven years ago that I needed to check out the work of Linh Dinh – the late Gil Ott. Dinh isn’t as committed to the lyric as a form as Ott, at least unless you consider the poems above to be lyrics, and Dinh is much more cynical – in that respect, he reminds me more of Kathy Acker – but actually all three, Dinh, Ott & Acker, are & were profoundly moral artists, deeply disaffected by the world’s state of affairs. Like Acker, Dinh has a gift for penning direct, confrontational texts that would be at home in Exquisite Corpse as well as Jacket or Shampoo. That’s a pretty unique gift, one we would be wise to appreciate fully.