One of the first things I noticed in Russia in 1989, besides the lethal callousness of our driver, perfectly content to roar onto the sidewalk during moments of congestion, were the so-called public drinking fountains, which looked a lot like refrigerators, with a plastic cup stationed below a spout where water would pour if one but pushed a button. Everyone shared the same glass, and one did not need a degree in epidemiology to know that this was a bad bad thing. I hadn’t thought of that in a long time – I drank only bottled mineral water while there, so rich in iron that if you left a bottle open for an hour, a layer of rust literally formed on the surface – until I came across this poem on the question of culturally variable hygiene & its risks. The title is its first line:
Cutting hair on the sidewalk
is a means to make money for poor people
and a snobby pleasure for the bourgeoisie
A unique thrill is to have your ears cleaned
a risky bout of comfort
in a historical slumber
Most dangerous is the shaving
a worn out knife expertly sharpened
you must sit still and not have an opinion
Cutting hair on the sidewalk
Remains only in a few countries like Vietnam.
This is the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao, who writes in Vietnamese tho he has degrees in American literature & library science from UCLA. “Cutting Hair on the Sidewalk” is one of the more effective poems in Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, translated by Linh Dinh & just released from Tupelo Press in a deep blue cover.
The cover is not an accident. Blue shows up everywhere in Hao Phan’s poems, just lightly here in “Night in the South”:
A ringing phone on the carpet
a child is calling from the womb
night in the South
women open their doors to flirt
O spittle
the kind of germs belonging to wicked souls
returning to a cultured city
only to see ducks and chickens pecking on graves
shards of stars
encrusted in the deep dark horizon
the blue ocean and the monkish jellyfish
slackers are lining up
to buy cups of ice cream and a dripping night in the south
I walk on my hands
I drive 70 miles on the side of a mountain
the precipice is below
O the women, the jellyfish and the rosy cheeks
all I have is jazz jazz jazz and lots of gasoline in my bloody abyss.
Blue is more central to the book’s title poem:
Night negotiating a plastic spoon
on a table littered with fish bones
all the illusions have been picked clean
Charlie Parker, a piece of bread not yet moldy
a black ocean and black notes
a few million years, a few small changes
at the bend in the road on the horizon
grows a strong type of tree
the black cat is in labor
gives birth to a few blue eggs.
Surrealism is very close to the heart of Hao Phan’s book – he and translator Linh Dinh discuss it in an interview printed as an afterword, where Hao Phan comes close to declaring it a universal:
I think the influence of surrealism has become too vast and deep in 20th century arts. Nowadays you can find traces of surrealism in nearly all modern and postmodern works. To me, surrealism is only the means to see beyond the surface of things, and, more importantly, it’s a method to make associations in poetry. Surrealist associations allow the poet to place next to each other images that do not seem to go together in ordinary life, it allows the imagination to widen, and from there to create a richer reality. Another important element in surrealism is automatic writing, which I think is a very useful poetic device. This creates surprises in poetry, and frees from the narrative task And yet, I still try to build each poem as an integrated whole, linked by a unity of emotion, within the very ambiguity and unexpected shifts of the images. I think surrealism has become an element in contemporary poetry, so it’s only natural that there are traces of surrealism in my poetry.
Yet the root of surreal remains real & Hao Phan’s poems strike me as strongest when they – as occurs in varying degrees with all three of the above poems – remain in some contact with the social origins of their images. Thus the one weak line in “Night in the South” reads the kind of germs belonging to wicked souls as if there a moral component to bacteria – shades of rightwing fantasies about sexually transmitted diseases!?! – and it’s a major difference between Hao Phan’s work in general & Linh Dinh’s, which similarly shares a deep sense of the surreal – I always wonder how much of this might be traced back to the French occupation of Vietnam – but is always profoundly social. Thus a poem like “Night Freedom” –
Geckos are frolicking in a yellow puddle
the street lamp an awakened eye
the night has buried deeply
the tedious hammering sounds of daily life
from the silence of the womb
a child is born
and the insane fellow will begin to bellow
about life floating through dangers
and humanity’s fickleness
alienated from its five fingers
then fly upward during a blessed hour
upward
the yellow moon a ripe guava
the anguishing fruit of freedom of this ebony night
will be seeded tomorrow in the East.
– starts promisingly, the geckos are marvelously concrete, before descending thru remnants of historic surrealism (the streetlamp an awakened eye) into a parable that is mind-numbingly predictable – the metaphor of the moon as a guava the one real moment of relief – before two final lines that strike me as entirely a cliché.
The result is that this is an uneven book, with some really terrific moments & others that raise the age-old “what was he thinking of” flag. In one way, I want to invert Zukofsky’s paradigm of an integral here, to suggest that, in Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, the lower limit is surreal, the upper limit real. I’m interested to see where Hao Phan is going to take all this – the difficulty of an exile poetics is complicated enough & his publications are banned in Vietnam, a sign of pure post-Stalinist stupidity on the part of the government there – but I think it is Phan Nhien Hao who needs to be a far harsher judge of his own poetry going forward.
