Linh Dinh
in Richmond, VA
September 2010

Readers of this space will recall that I have been an advocate of Linh Dinh’s work for some time now, and this note will mark the third consecutive year that I’ve written positively about a book of his poetry. Indeed, some of what I will say could almost be lifted from my two previous notes, even tho Jam Alerts, his new book from Chax, is easily his finest, “most mature” volume to date. This is because Dinh is a writer with a vision, a very specific story to tell, and his books each are manifestations of this drive.

Dinh’s tale is about our future, but he’s not a science fiction writer – at least not yet – so he tells it through our present. I’ve compared him in the past, indeed even on the blurb on the back cover of this book, with William Burroughs, another writer operating out of very similar terms & compulsions. In both cases, the tale is bleak, dystopic. What happens at the end of empire is not pretty, it’s not a matter of genteel decay, but rather ongoing denial that becomes increasingly shrill & delusional. With the potential for horrific violence always simmering just below the surface. Dinh’s tradition, to call it that, includes the likes of Bosch, Brueghel, Blake & Lautréamont.

Our time is past. That is the essence of Dinh’s poems, every one of which feels like a warning of some kind, some humorous, others ominous. That we don’t know this yet creates a gap between what we do and what we think we do. Our lives are carried out within this gap & repeatedly Dinh finds the contradictions that we demand in order to keep going.

There are two works in Jam Alerts that use time as a structural element. One is a fake blog, in reality a suite of prose poems that go on for 14 pages, the longest sustained work in the book. The other, even closer to the volume’s end, is entitled “Recent Archeo News”:

20 February 3006 – Ancient toilet
Discovered in Boston, lid missing.

8 February 3006 – 30 billion scraps
Of well-preserved, well-made plastic
Accidentally unearthed in Athens.

30 January 3006 – 3-foot-long
”COSMIC EXPANDING” toy sword
Excavated in outskirts of Beijing.

24 January 3006 – Large glass menagerie
Recovered just off-shore, near Key West.

22 January 3006 – Post-modern poem
Found in dog’s grave, tucked in anus.

16 January 3006 – Tattoos, salacious,
Shed light on 21^st Century Tokyo.

14 January 3006 – Plastic barrettes, polyester scrunchies
And rare titanium navel ring shaped like lovely butterfly
Interred with disturbed skeleton of teen-aged girl.

13 January 3006 – Chubby male mummy
With lots of loose change, buried erect
In well-preserved peep show cubicle.

9 January 3006 – Miraculous city of Dubai
Discovered nearly intact in deserted desert.

1 January 3006 – Oxidized brass
Trumpets and cornets found bobbing
in New Orleans waters.

24 December 3005 – Tire tracks, chewing gum,
Bolts, pegs, screws, pins, nails and human hair
Detected in ancient asphalt driveway.

17 December 3005 – Plethora of megalomaniac
And glib sculptures in corporate spaces offer
Abundant proofs that 20^th century man
Was prone to lead poisoning.

15 December 3005 – Nasty skull hookahs
And dead head bongs excite experts.

I don’t know of any other male poet today who has written about scrunchies, recognized them as integral to the texture of our lives. That is so typical of Dinh, who so often seems to be inventing poetry from scratch, as tho he didn’t know the form itself existed & had a history before, just by looking intensely, noting what’s really there in front of him. The elements listed for the driveway reminded me of how ground up remnants of the Cypress Superstructure, the section of freeway that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake in Oakland in 1989 were pulverized and turned into landfill for a roadside berm along highway 580 in San Leandro, and how quick grass grew over that rubble that had taken the lives of several dozen people, pancaked by the rotting infrastructure as it caved in. It reminded me of Michael Gottlieb’s great elegy for the dead of the World Trade Center, “The Dust,” which likewise notes the presence of human remains everywhere in the air & on everything in the aftermath of that event. At the same time, this poem is full of little jokes, moments of tenderness.

This work in some ways is “classic” Dinh in that it’s brilliant & also partly doesn’t work. The reader gets the “gimmick,” the structural premise behind every entry pretty quickly. Some of them are, indeed, brilliant. But the one about New Orleans is a gesture to the topical that feels curiously out of place here, or at least does until you have read enough of Dinh to recognize that the “out of place” is a major issue in/for all his writing.

Both “Recent Archeo News” and the false blog, “Fortunes,” use time in the same fashion – it appears in reverse, so as not to promise a future even as it gives us what sound like sound bites or headlines of a news page on the web a millennium from now. As mechanistic as each entry is, Dinh foregrounds the aesthetic by choosing to capitalize the left-hand margins. When he reads, he pauses more distinctly at linebreaks than any poet since Robert Creeley, really forcing the recognition that these are first of all aesthetic decisions being made. Unspoken in all this text is the premise that everything about our lives has been lost & has to be recovered by specialists in a very different future, one in which Dubai sits in a desert. The cataclysm itself is everywhere precisely because it is silent & assumed.

We find time again at issue in the volume’s final work, “Beloved Alone”:

Standing in deep snow, don’t look forward to the late bus
Swinging around the corner, at last, don’t look forward to Friday,
5 o’clock or the end of your unjust sentence, don’t look forward
To the landing of this numbing, trans-everything flight, thank you
For your patience, don’t look forward to the return of your daddy,
Because, for every second of each long day, you must remember
What DaVinci said: “A man who looks forward to Spring
Is looking forward to his own death.”

Dinh was born in Saigon in 1963 & came to the U.S. in that hectic period after the fall of the U.S. colony in 1975. Which is to say that he was at an impressionable age right at the moment when the pretense that the South Vietnamese government was anything other than a hollow shell imploded. He knows in some deep internal way just what the fall of empire looks & smells & sounds like. He hears it now, feels it, in instant messages & on YouTube & in the streets of Philadelphia & London & Rome. Again like Burroughs, he is at heart a satirist, which means holding up a mirror for his readers. What we see there is ourselves, as unadorned as we have ever been.

Another new-poet-to-me in Bird Dog 2 whose work catches my eye is Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a Tibetan-American poet who grew up in exile communities in Nepal & India before coming to the U.S. According to the contributor’s note, she also was the focus of an issue of A•Bacus, which the Potes & Poets website informs me appeared just three issues prior to the one by Richard Deming I looked at last Thursday. Her first poem, “Just the Tools” is brief enough to quote in full:

He writes a language still unknown to him. Looks up each word

in the dictionary when he cannot use his hands to show what he really means.

He can lick the surface of her skin, taste its tingle and wonders what good words

would make of the gesture. That he could want more is impossible. He wants

more. In the end his words are more or less. In my heart, he says, are many rivers.

They all flow in the same direction. He sits at a desk every night in case he is needed.

This is his job. Still waiting to become happy – night after night at the desk watching

TV. He does not wish for the good when so much else is closer. Once after a cup

of chocolate, he pushes his tongue against hers to show he is the greatest. He counts

the seconds. Imagines everybody climbing stairs into their rooms to hide a secret.

The lines here are so long that I have to think about whether or not this is a prose poem when I retype it here. Because the first line is noticeably shorter than the others, I decide that it most likely is verse. Long as they are, the lines are still shorter than those I find in the review section at the back of Bird Dog.

There is a gentle surrealism here, so quiet that it seems possible to miss it as such altogether. Its most evident in the leaps this small fable takes – from using the dictionary to licking “the surface of her skin,” from sitting at the desk to not wishing for good, from counting the seconds to hiding secrets. All these little leaps are very much in keeping with the ambiguity between prose & verse.

What is even more interesting, from my perspective, is that a surrealist impulse should show up here at all. In my own mind, I can never fully dissociate surrealism from its European – and especially French – roots. Even today, 69 year’s after Breton’s “What is Surrealism?” there remain strong Francophile aspects to the surrealism tradition in America, felicitous when they encourage a Ron Padgett to translate work from a Duchamp or Apollinaire, less so in the hands of the Chicago Surrealists, such as Franklin & Penelope Rosemont or Paul Garon who mostly seem determined to bludgeon nuance into submission. Europeanism also appears to have been an important aspect of the attraction of the prose poem as a form to Japanese poets such as Miyoshi Tatsuji & Anzai Fuyue in the period immediately prior to World War 2.*

Arriving in the United States as boy at the end of the Vietnam War, Linh Dinh – who in recent years has lived both in his native Vietnam & more recently in Italy – employs a far harsher mode of surrealism, visible in “A Reactionary Tale”:

I was a caring husband. I bought socks for my family.

My swarthy wife liked to wear these thick woolen socks that came up to her milky thighs.

I had a lover also. People could see me walking around each evening carrying a walking stick.

My most vivid memory, looking back, is of a pink froth bubbling out of my infant’s mouth.

Not everything was going so well: one morning, malnourished soldiers marched down our tiny street, bringing good news.

When good news arrives by mail, the cuckoo sang, tear up the envelope. When good news arrives by email, destroy the computer.

When an old friend came by to reclaim an old wound, I said to my oldest son: Go dump daddy’s ammo boxes into the fragrant river.

To reduce drag, some of my neighbors were diving headfirst into a shallow lake.

We were rich and then we were poor. A small dog or maybe a cat now pulls our family wagon.**

Here surrealism invokes precisely the colonial tone & history of Indochina. It also negotiates marvelously between the contexts of oral history, folk wisdom & the contemporary post-Stalinist culture that became embedded in a regime shaped by decades of war. But the sardonic wit is as American as apple pie. For a poet who once edited a journal entitled Drunken Boat, Dinh evidences virtually no Euro-nostalgia.

Nor does Dhompa.*** Hunting around for more of her work on the web, I came across a piece in Vert that excites me even more than the two pieces in Bird Dog. It’s entitled “City of Tin”:

Politeness prohibits saying what I really think.

Viaduct: a code for a feeling. Like mauve,

over the street of tarmac: a grave summer day

offering clean streets and a leg longer by perspiration.

Or gannets in sight. That women are said to speak so much

of feelings; as though to clarify would mean its end.

It never is. Clarification I mean. To indicate trust I tell you

the fish is who I look at most these days. For love, for love.

Endings happen. Words I use because I like who I become.

Summer resolved of mysteries. Give me nothing. Tiny, tiny

pebbles used as prop. Tilted and tinted glasses. City

of my desires has lines rigged at the waist. One minute

of sleep at a desk might bring it all down. Words you find

under my nail. (S)wallow. Some night owl effusion.

I love the rapid changes in this piece, the way in the last line wallow emerges from swallow, “s,” “w,” “o,” & “l” all reappearing in “some night owl,” perfectly setting up that final word. The Creeley allusion (For love, for love) leads not to the literary, but to set up the later use of reiteration: Tiny, tiny. One can still see the evidence of a surrealist impulse here (the fish is who I look at most or Words you find / under my nail), but it’s just one layer here among many.

More than a few poets of my own age cohort have demonstrated a considerable interest in (influence by) the surrealists: Barrett Watten, Ray Di Palma, Alan Davies, Lynn Dreyer, Alan Bernheimer & – perhaps the master in this regard – the late, great Jerry Estrin, all come readily to mind. While it’s easy enough to see that these poets have stayed free of the Euro-fetishism that entangled earlier generations of Yankee surrealism, it’s harder for me to discern if there is something deeper these writers share in common in their relationship to that heritage. And it both intrigues & delights me to see the surrealist impulse showing up again among younger poets, coming now literally from a completely different direction.

* Tatsuji’s classicist approach led to a poetry that was at once surreal & yet completely devoid of European allusions. The relationship of Europe to the history of Japan is of course particularly complex. Miyoshi Tatsuji would go on to become one of the six poets involved in the 1942 “Overcoming Modernity” symposium. [NB: that link opens an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.]

** This poem comes from the exquisitely designed chapbook a small triumph over lassitude.

*** & yet Dhompa has been criticized by in the Kathmandu Post for a desire “to forsake the local for the sake of pleasing the global communities of the world.”