How do you write a ‘Vietnamese’ poem? Nam Le’s defiantly cerebral verses shuffle the deck of identity, belonging and being
- Written by Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie University
Flying in the face of much contemporary poetry, Nam Le’s first collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is defiantly cerebral, relishing the polysyllabic, the latinate and the esoteric. This is not to say that there aren’t notes of utter beauty and great feeling, just that Le is not afraid of being difficult. The difficulty is part of the collection’s aesthetic.
In an interview, Le said that he dreamed his work could sustain a “cold read” as easily as an “academic assault”. These are severe yardsticks for a poet to write by, so it is little wonder that his poems are exacting, sometimes peremptory in tone.
Review: 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem – Nam Le (Simon & Schuster)
Underlying even the most comic or lyrical of moments in the book is a seriousness and a woundedness that tips into anger and sorrow. Because the poetry is meticulous and skilled – the work of a poet who has lived with poetry for the longest time – the anger, the woundedness and the sorrow are directed and purposeful, not confessional, not easily sincere or authentic.
With poem titles including [16. Violence: Autologous], [18. Inter-Analectional] and [30. Asymptotic], there is no quick or easy reading. The square brackets suggest domains outside of poetry – linguistics, coding, mathematics – but brackets also embed a phrase or idea more deeply within a sentence or an already parenthetical idea.
The effect is of a mise en abyme – an infinite regression – that resists the impulse to classify and order. The bracketed and numbered titles make the process of referencing a poem from the collection, whether in a review or elsewhere, more laborious and exacting. This is a kind of play – serious play, but play nonetheless.
That each title is adjectival is a reminder that each poem refers outwards. It is not an end, but a “way” to a larger poem – perhaps but not necessarily the elusive, impossible Vietnamese poem of the title.
Imagination, emotion, intellect
Nam Le has won prestigious and lucrative prizes. He studied at Harvard, where he was fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and has published a book on David Malouf as part of Black Inc.’s “writers on writers” series.
But he is best known as the author of The Boat, a collection of short stories that includes the award-winning eponymous story about Mai, a young girl who is smuggled out of Vietnam.
Many of the poems use avant garde techniques: fragments, quotations, collage, lists. There is the typographic play of footnotes, grey shading and the blacking out of lines. [26. Erasive] takes bureaucratic violence to task, semi-obliterating official reports, leaving only a trickle of letters to be pieced together in the tradition of Blackout Poetry.
Le is as concerned with visual appearance as with semantics. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he is serious about the way form produces meaning, and is often complicit in political violence and oppression.
Lines are often dense – wordy mouthfuls where syntax is distorted, broken up or down. Words are chosen as much for their sound and percussive qualities as their meanings. This concern with materiality of language means that in the most turgid of lines, or lines where diction teeters towards bombast, even outright bathes in it, there is a reward in the sounds of “smashed-together consonants” and the “tonguing” required for articulation.
Reminiscent of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, [31. Nautical] is the most experimental of Le’s poems. Typographic symbols are arranged down the page, organised around the capitalised and bolded word “ARCHIPELAGO”. The layout invites alternate thought-routes and encounters, presenting the poem as much as a visual artefact as a semantic packet.
It is important to note that not all of Le’s poems are difficult or highbrow. Idiomatic speech and profanity are important parts of his arsenal.
Mother country mother tongue motherfuckers on the runeat their words and white bread, son earn your white man’s tongue.
These lines are from [19. Oral-metaphorical], where bathos and vulgarity abound. As Le riffs on the concepts of mouth and tongue, an alternative anatomy of speech emerges. The mouth is described not only as the apparatus of speech, ingestion and eroticism, but “the true / soul’s window”.
Lines and words of Vietnamese are sparingly and strategically placed throughout. They are integral to the experience of the book, as they redraw the boundaries and territories of English with forms and words and concepts that make the language strange and new to itself.
Le takes English to task as a language of empire and capitalism. He challenges its grammar, its generative racism and inherited prejudices. Latin, untranslated, is as present as Vietnamese – even more so. It serves as a reminder of how idiotic it is to think in terms of purity of language, and who speaks what.
This is especially the case in [15. Dire-critical], where English’s lack of tonal variation is foregrounded as poverty. Diacritics signalling the rise and fall of voice are essential to Vietnamese (and so many languages). They are figured here as both endangered and precious.
In a superb final stanza, a Vietnamese body burned by napalm compounds pregnant grief and intergenerational trauma into a single, loaded, “future-tensed … dot”.
In [5. Violence: Taxonomic], racist taxonomies and translations are formally flipped. The first half of poem runs through the Latin of Linnaeas’s binomial system, ending strategically with the infamous “varietas” of humans classified by colour of skin.
The second part of the poem hinges on the motto “Nosce te ipsum” – “know yourself”. Every skin colour Linnaeus identifies is fed back to him, as though he were the specimen, from his “yellowish” sallowness to blood irrigated by “black bile”.
Read more:
The case for David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life
Difficulty and artistic sovereignty
Part of the point of making poems difficult is that they don’t talk to everyone. The difficulty resists a populism that devalues expertise. At at time when people seem increasingly unable to read in any way other than literally, satire and irony are also risky. 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem shows that Le is not risk-adverse.
Difficulty slows the reading down. It makes the reader either accept a partial understanding or inspires them to work harder to decode and understand. It resists simple causal readings – the kind of readings that would see an event in the writer’s life as the explanation for an event in a poem or a book.
Artistic sovereignty is something Le admires in the work of David Malouf. In an essay in Granta titled A Great Lake, he argues that Malouf’s writing has refused to follow a particular trajectory. It has not followed the trajectory of Malouf’s life, nor has it stuck to a few recognisably “Maloufian” themes or topics. Cutting his own artistic path, irrespective of market demands or literary trends or publishing expectations, Malouf “seems to have preserved – with natural lightness of touch – this personal, artistic sovereignty for himself”.
Sovereignty comes with the power to name, to call the shots – to decide what is war, what is terrorism, who is beautiful, who isn’t, who speaks, who doesn’t, who belongs, what matters, whose stories dominate.
The moments in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem that appear unguarded are few, but they are also sovereign. Like the small knapsack of cut diamonds in the collection’s 32nd poem, they are unexpected, worked for – and the work matters – and designed to give old ways new currency.
Authors: Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie University
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