Dale Smith: Your work expands on a range of concerns in feminist discourse to include the environments men and women inhabit, desire, and encounter together. You seek a kind of integration of various life capacities. How does poetry let you accomplish these ethical challenges?
Hoa Nguyen: I admire the open possibilities of poetry, how words, phrases or lines can be laid down with a sonic mathematics of sense that can reach a reader in a fractal or patterning way. A reader can assemble the constellations of meaning for herself then; logical units arrange themselves in her understanding and she participates in the production of meaning.
DS: Would you mind giving an example of a poem of yours that accomplishes this “patterning,” and then say some more about how such poetic constellations extend relationships you desire? I’d like to see an example of how you invite participation, because I think this is essential to your work, though I see it more as a ritualistic space: not only between the poem and reader, but between your creative engagement and a larger cultural arena.
HN: We can look at this sonnet; I wrote it in July, 2011:
Rage Sonnet
Rage on the grinding spot
Independence Day Rag laundry day
My boy wears shark pajamas
Mother ran large food trays sore
It’s Independence Day 2011
We may have been poisoned
by “Operation Ranch Hand”
I am not dead yet
Ezra Pound in my D.C.
Charles Olson dream “It is
so much harder to be a poet now”
they say to me Lack of rain and the #30
Bus may run now all the way to downtown1
I’m interested in the resonances of words at the level of the letter — (re-)reading Emily Dickinson earlier this year, I saw that she often dwelt, in her poems, at the level of the letter. Syllable, yes, but also the letter — as in the tiniest units of word-making. So the first stanza opens in an associative way. There is something about “rage” being focused on a single point, being ground in, but also grounded in a specific day (the U.S.’s Independence Day). Which leads to the introduction of a domestic moment in the phrase “Rag laundry day.” What you may notice (or sense at an intuitive or somatic level) is how the lines are populated by words that circle the word “rage” — containing the opening letters of the word rage, reversing them, digressing from the letters, as in:
Rage / Rag / Wears / Shark / Ran / Large / Trays /
Operation / Ranch / Ezra / Charles/ Harder / Rain
I wanted to sit inside of, take apart, and reorganize the word rage by insisting on and reversing its syllable ra — to render it is ar (which sounds like “are”) as well as ra. The patterns are both visual and sonic. This sonnet relates historical, personal, and situational history: a moment, memory, the massive spraying of defoliants & herbicides in the war in Vietnam, a literary dream of struggle, and environmental & civic disorder/order. My sense is that these sound arrays and associative sense-frames allow a reader to receive them for personal noetic, physical, and emotional responses.
DS: It’s extraordinary how you turn the mundane into something completely other. For instance, the purely sonic ra in “rags” and “rage” associates semantically with the Egyptian sun god Ra, and with Ezra Pound’s nickname, also Ra. Along these lines, you mention Emily Dickinson, and I just read a poem of yours that is written after her. I was wondering if you could share it and talk about what you’ve learned from her as a poet. For while you have an abiding commitment to words and their sonic resonances, at times you also speak with a fierce determination about the cultural conditions in which we live.
HN: What I have found in her poems: a lesson in how to pick the right words — words without rhythmic drag, ones that have precision for sound and meaning. I learned a strategy of compression, observation, and syllabic/letter echoing: how to squeeze words and point them directly and indirectly to a social/historical exterior. Interestingly, the poem you ask after is one in which I am considering chemicals made by U.S. and Canadian companies, tested in New Brunswick, and deployed by the U.S. military during the war in Vietnam. The height of Agent Orange spraying coincided with the year I was born — I was born in the Mekong Delta in a town called Vinh Long near Saigon — and I left for the U.S. at the end of the spraying, when I was about two years old.
I encountered Dickinson’s line “the zeroes — taught us — phosphorus” and it recalled for me the fires of “white phosphorus.” White phosphorus was variously used as illumination, as a smoke screen, and as an igniting agent that would allow napalm bombs (a jellied gasoline) to burn for up to ten minutes when aerially dropped.
Agent Orange Poem
After Emily Dickinson
What justice foreigns for a sovereign
We doom in nation roofs
Recommend & lend resembling fragrant
Chinaberry spring
Here we have high flowers a lilac in the nose
“the zeroes — taught us — phosphorus”
and so stripped the leaves to none2
My poems step in her steps in terms of cadence, a kind of solemn hymnal, a hymnal of the damned and the horrible. Chinaberry trees (an Asian native and invasive species) appear throughout my last gathering of poems, As Long As Trees Last. I lived near Chinaberry trees in our adopted city of Austin, Texas for fourteen years. And I feel an affinity with Emily Dickinson in her absolute attention to her locale, the beings that dwell there—plant life. It’s a web of attention that captures a constellation of experience.
In this poem, one of the things I’m doing is using the letter O — playing against it — its fullness in the mouth, the zero or emptiness that its form recalls, and its exclamatory nature — as well as the contradictions — as in the homophone of or/ore.
I’m interested in yoking opposites in poems.
1 As Long As Trees Last (Seattle: Wave Books, 2012), 2.
2 As Long As Trees Last, 4.