The Brooklyn Rail

I’m in An Bình, an island across the Mekong River from Vĩnh Long, a mid-sized city in Vĩnh Long province, Vietnam. I am out of place, out of routine, seeing things vividly. So, this is perhaps a good place to reflect on pleasure in writing, the pleasure of its activity through me. Or how it feels to be an instrument of that activity. I often connect place to writing, or the relation of my body to place as the writing happens, because the atmospheres or environments of where I am somehow slip in, and I take great pleasure in that slippage, even if often it’s unnoticed at first. Because there’s a kind of forgetting going on, too, in writing. Time suddenly goes away. There’s a movement between observable phenomena, interior imaginings, sonic directions, and rhythmic urgencies all working simultaneously. I don’t know how else, except perhaps in music, to invite that occasion of openness and attunement, and, yes, the pleasure I find in this making.

afternoon beers
school kids out of school
after we arrived
outdoor canopy              making English
block of ice in glass mugs

I think of a poem as a kind of festival space, though its many moods do not necessarily celebrate—instead, there is a kind of ecstasis, a going out of the body. The poem’s occasion in me comes from the many realities of my every day, but writing shifts those realities into something that goes closer to the real world of song or story. The poem is an archaic structure, and its magics have endured through religious and secular orders, flexibly receiving those other powers but never losing the animistic strength of its origins. My voice, or voices, what I see or how, enlarges through the elemental webs of that archaic structure. It’s a kind of improvisation—a letting go of myself to find another self or selves already there, waiting, in what Robert Duncan called the poem’s field.

we made pictures of Cửu Long light
and ourselves framed
in that quiet
making words, too, we are faces of
this wobbly instant
and “dumb” bombs, the second bullet
Paul Landis, Secret Service, took
from Kennedy’s limo, Dallas, TX
facts in mind, to be in mind of
such terms the globe counts real
as immediately now, green bamboo
catches light moving by porch rails
boats creak in their wooden textures

“Time is ignorance,” says physicist Carlo Rovelli, and I like that statement as a starting point to pleasure because it enlarges my sense of time far out of the countable time-space we are told we live in. Play brings me in poetry outside of the clock-time, digitized temporal world. Pleasure is in leaving that world for a little while. Going to the things and sounds and tempos that keep measure in strange and new ways, improvised for each occasion. That other world, where Kennedy died, and everything after it became what it became, and being born into it, I became it, too, that world is here. You don’t resist that. But there is a pleasure in announcing certain refusals. “Ruinous increase,” Edward Dorn called it, threatens a quiet loosening of self.

after the ferry returns us from the city
order tofu lemongrass, salt, pepper, lime
an untethered nowness of looking
between the thing, the term, the word
moments gone, and go
back on myself        language
and ciphers or runes                karaoke
tunes      gecko on the table

The other day, school children were laughing and cutting up with us at a roadside café. My wife, Hoa, and my sons, Keaton and Waylon, we drank our beers and coffees while the children came by to say hello, and clowning. I asked Google Translate to tell one boy in green soccer shorts that he was a “goofball.” But Google’s AI translated “goofball” to “idiot,” which is not at all what I meant. What is the right idiom? How is it that idiom, context, shape, and form—social and spiritual form—carry over linguistic impulse, mutating or opening it more usefully? We took great pleasure in searching for words we might use through our translation device. For a moment, you find pleasure in brokenness, a distance taking you where you dream to have been. There is no “after the war,” no “if only Kennedy…” Simply, we are here.

drink fresh coconut water in the late (now)
evening of kitchen sounds
fisher people pull in their nets, and boys
dive for silt in brown water
An Bình is known for its thriving fruit orchards
at night in the country-side you hear scooters
and voices     the smells too of burning rice husks
coconut shells and other things
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