Commentary |

“Poets Recommend” — Part III

Rebecca Morgan Frank on A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen

 

Who wouldn’t want to crack open a collection of poems about a woman who was a “flying motorist artist”? The artist is poet Hoa Nguyen’s mother, whose compelling story is the center of Nguyen’s fifth full-length collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a follow-up to Violet Energy Ingots, shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Nguyễn Diệp Anh was a young member of Hùng Việt, an all-women stunt motorcycle troop in Vietnam that toured from 1955-1961. The book opens with a photograph of her balanced on a motorcycle, one foot propped on a pedal and the other up on the front of the bike, her elbow resting on that knee, hand under her chin. This suspension serves as visual metaphor for the narrow and fragmented perchings in Hoa Nguyen’s shorter lines, such as in “Tryouts for the Flying Motorist Artist Team, 1958,” in which Diệp auditions for the troupe on a bicycle:

 

Push and pedal

Climb high banked sides

 

to try again and fall

to try again

and fall

 

(running blood)

 

The poems are at times slippery in their narrative lens, effectively capturing a sense of the living moments of oral histories. In “The Flying Motorist Artist,” the third person narrator is disrupted by a speaker, but not the speaker we were expecting:

 

At twelve Diệp didn’t have a half cent

: entrance fee

to see the circus performance

 

When she was twelve

Three motorcycle performers

traveled from Thailand to Cần Thơ

 

I thought they were

from the Philippines?

No Thailand

 

The dialogue between mother and daughter carries on in “Durian Sonnet,” in which the daughter asks the mother about the photographs of the troupe that are included in the book:

 

I lost this sonnet once     I may lose it again

I wore the design described as concealment

and surprise.  The split sides and hugged features

you had to lift your arms out for the poster

 

photograph.  You had to leave your arms out

to show your Circus Daring  to say you chose this

To say you are flying     flying      fucking flying

on the small French motorbike     Hair

 

also flying and a glamour shot smile    I ask Diệp to tell

me who they are.    The women pictured in black & white

colourful stripes.    5 in the all-women motorcycle troupe

(Durian translates as “private sorrow”). She says

           

Hm, I think she’s dead. I don’t know what happened to her

She killed herself.  I don’t know what happened to her

 

Diệp, however, is a survivor, the flying motorcycle years just one chapter of her life. In the poem “Mexico,” we learn of her post-touring endeavor, a fruit juice stand named Mexico, which leads to a pregnancy and a son handed over to the father’s wife with relief: “and then she was free.  And didn’t see / him again.” Diệp continues to define her own life, despite the potential consequences of pregnancy outside of marriage for her, as captured earlier in the collection with “In Vietnamese Ghost Story: High School Clock Tower,” in which the source of the haunting is a pregnant teen who has committed suicide.

The larger background of Diệp’s formative years is the Vietnam War, but as the speaker says in “Transplants”: “no I don’t want to conduct / Mỹ Lai research and produce it / for you here /Dear Reader.” The collection does, however, navigate continued cultural invasion and environmental destruction with allusions to McDonalds, Victoria’s Secret, Dow, and Monsanto, the corporate entities that affect bodies and landscapes; corporate culpability informs poems such as “Napalm Notes” and “Operation Hades.” Further documentation of the world around Diệp includes found poems with sources including a 1967 newspaper scrap; letters;  Colloquial Vietnamese; a text on new Vietnamese music, and Vogue magazine.

The prose found poem “from Vogue Magazine 1970” begins “This is the year of the orient … of the Shanghai Express, the kimono” — and ends, after a list ranging from  “the Korean rice picker” and “the Manchurian white forehead” to the “coolie hat,” with “all of which appeal to our fantasy in search of the lost paradise …” The juxtaposition between the fetishizing Orientalism of Vogue magazine and the real Vietnamese women of the motorcycle troupe that pre-date the article contextualizes the realities for Diệp as she enters the United States in 1968, changes her name to Linda Diep Lijewski, and raises a girl.

For there, at the heart of the book, is the daughter, the speaker herself. She offers us these songs of her mother, complete with her own investigations of language as both subject and practice, and her many musical allusions, which reveal the speaker has always used these to effect: the speaker references singing for her mother “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” The response: “she was not impressed.”  As an adult poet, she faces, and addresses, a different kind of audience response, such as in the story of a white woman’s response to a poetry reading in “Made by Dow,” or in the imagined reception of these poems in “Unrelated Future Tense”:

 

people will ask about bar girls

even without food in the poems

they will smell fish sauce and pho

ask about ‘the war’ which is to say

about men fathers and soldiers

about white Americans what

about them

about them

 

This compelling new collection from Hoa Nguyen instead gives us the dreams, documents, stories, and photographs of the women in this collection: the fearless troupe of Vietnamese motorcycle artists, the poet daughter, and her mother, Diệp, a woman who, in the late 1950’s in Vietnam, managed to fly.

[Published by Wave Books on April 6, 2021, 160 pages, paperback]

 

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Judith Harris on Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell

 

Atomizer, Elizabeth Powell’s new volume of poetry, represents her most exquisite work on our intricately intertwined fate, probing the reality of mortality and the desiring female subject trying to make sense of an increasingly polysemous world. Divided into three sections, each in accordance with the molecular composition of perfume dispensed through a spray atomizer — top notes, heart notes, and base notes — Powell constructs her poems openly, only to find herself on the margins of a gender-identified system in need of transformation through art. Camus said that the absurd is the separation of the artist from her life, and Powell’s humor demonstrates her conviction as a feminist academic to overcome complacency regarding limits and distortions imposed by a male-dominated system. Masterful at improvisation, Powell dramatically reinvents herself from poem to poem, each one still touching on the notion of the atomizer.

A spray bottle used by flappers in the 1920’s to vaporize liquid perfume, Powell’s atomizer is handed down to her by the matriarchs. For Powell, the hegemonic system that once controlled women has been overrun by a “new regime” — a revisionist overhaul of outmoded ideas and values dating back to the expulsion from Eden and stressing the inevitability of appropriation in any creative work. While extrapolating from the central trope of the book, the scent of perfume seducing the senses, Powell also plays with the idea of first causes. One reads a poem as words traced on the page, but those words signify an absent referent. Powell’s good-natured reach back to the origins of the scents (which represent elusive desire)  brings her back to the prelapsarian garden: “Indeed, our desire to smell pleasant things is from our lost garden.” What she smells is the resonance of a lost paradise that is the soul’s destiny whether forward or back, but repetition, even from mother to daughter, is essential.

From the first lines of the title poem “Atomizer,” Powell asks, “Is it right to write about love during the new regime” / … I hold my atomizer like a lightsaber. I am learning the kung fu of demure / I have mastered the koan of coy.” The atomizer is a female weapon, rival to the male equivalent, the “atomic” bomb. The poems in section one, “Base Notes,” are loosely organized around a the poet’s childhood and early adulthood. The section opens with “The Girl from Ipanema,” about the lure of seduction that women are raised to identify with femaleness, something that fascinates as much as it dismays her. “When the Insemination Man Comes to the Farm” reads like a spoof on early pastorals, an age of poetry’s innocence, when farmlife is idyllic. However, that age is long past and in this seriocomic poem, artifically inseminated cows are conflated with women nursing:

 

I’ve spent a lifetime not saying what I mean

in order to say what I mean: the art of woman hood in my time,

but I’ve tried to make it sound serious and smart,

and so I’ve written letters to the governing body of Starbucks

because everyone knows they make baby formula for grown ups.

 

We like our yummy milk, and when

we have lactose intolerance or morals

we make it out of nuts or oats or beans.

 

Poor cow.

 

And later, the poet finds just the right trope to reflect the presentness of the past:

 

Angelic cows watch over me still, the neglected

child who has forgiven and been

forgiven and been forgiven. All summer has every other summer in it,

like all our hay has alfalfa in it.

 

The confusion of gender roles is a motif throughout the book, and here it informs how the speaker identifies (or dis-identifies) with the desiring subject of the poem, finding it almost reprehensible for a woman not to reject these male-assigned codes of conduct. As the poet writes, “Before this, other ‘70’s mothers exposed their frilly white  / panties, as was the fashion, from under their tennis skirts.”

In the next section, “Base Notes,” Powell presents a series of narrative poems that puts the poet’s persona center stage through a kaleidoscope of roles that comment on the hypocrisy of a patriarchal culture confining women to stereotypes. The speaker floats above caricatures that depict people set in generational places throughout Europe, rollicking in a pageantry of misgivings and dark humor. As she writes in “In Vilnius”:

 

I don’t like the past

how it crashes down on the land,

a meteor, yet the hours have made me,

a refugee’s descendant, I am looking at

my great grandparents’ apartment

house. I am on vacation,

it was frequently noon …

I kept telling myself not to age.

I kept at it, and was it, and wasn’t it.

 

In these poems, the poet’s voice shifts from one subject position to another, taking on a pattern of expectation followed by deflationary defeat and bringing everything to bear on personal experience.

Looking back on her grandparents, the speaker relives the trauma of their religious and ethnic persecution: “I had a map of the Old City … /  I had a log of all the names related / to my name: Issac Shalit, Rose Brazil … / I was resourceful, I was curious. I was alive …”  Another poem, “Poem With Atoms in It,” references the book’s organizing allegory of human history, a dystopian vision, distilled into a vapor intended to lure the reader into reconceptualizing the universe with regard to physics, philosophy, and aesthetics. In the final section, “Heart Notes,” the focus shifts from autobiography to a tableau of art works from the 19th century modeled by women. Here, Powell revels in the grace and timelessness of each frame captured in the narrative. Powell’s expansive imagination stuns me with the breadth of her vision and her consummate craft. I cannot recommend Atomizer more highly than to say this book will never disappoint, and no matter how tragic its contents, it will never fail to stimulate and even make one laugh.

 

[Published by LSU Press on September 9, 2020, 108 pages, $19.95 paperback]

 

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Matt W. Miller on Her Body Out of Time by Dorsey Craft

 

Recounted as red haired and hot-blooded, Anne Bonny was one of the only known female pirates to menace the Caribbean in the 1700’s. Born illegitimately in Ireland in 1700, Bonny and her father, William Cormac, moved to London where he dressed her as boy and raised her as a lawyer’s clerk until he was cut off from his wife’s allowance. After father and daughter ended up in the Province of Carolina, she married James Bonny and, when her father disowned her in disapproval, it is contended Anne burned down his farm. Moving to Nassau, a haven to pirates, with her husband, Bonny took up with pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackman. Bonny dressed as a man to sail on her lover’s pirate ship until her pregnancy forced her to come ashore in Cuba to give birth. In 1720, she and her shipmates were captured by captain Jonathan Barnet. Angry that her lover and his men were too drunk to fight, she told Rackman, “Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hang’d like a dog.” An again pregnant Bonny managed to get a stay of execution by “pleading for her belly” and then, it seems, was released to live out the rest of her life.

The pirate Anne Bonny’s life is the stuff of legends, salacious novels, tent pole movies, bingeable cable series, and even first-person video games. But perhaps nowhere does the inner life and legacy find as much focus and fire than in the poetry of Dorsey Craft. Winner of the Mary Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, Craft’s debut collection, Plunder, revels, reimagines, and even refutes the legend of Bonny and weaves it through our 21st century context of binge watching, football games, and sorority initiations, without ever losing its historical roots of a woman who was both of her time and out of time. From the opening poem, “The Pirate Anne Bonny Say She’s Not the Madwoman in the Attic” Plunder is lush with a language and music as tactile as a ship’s keel scraping across a barnacled reef:

 

So you think you’ve dipped your toe

in the icy clatter of my diamond?

That you’ve tamed the facets

and caught the bulk of vampire,

 

a hyena in duty lace? Infection

in the sentence breeds, so fever me

 

up in green, scrawl you thickness

across my shoulders, calligraphy

 

of septicity around my throat

like the language of an adder.

 

Don’t imagine me demure:

I’ll tell who I’ve been, and who

 

I’ve since become in the yellow

smacks of lightning across the face

 

of gutless sky, in the sweat that laces

the lip of a girl torn up with a switch.

 

With that opening, the reader feels the trade winds catch the sail as the voice and stance of both Bonny and the poet narrator behind her, neither “demure” or ”gutless,” set of from the lee shore. These are woman wrapping fingers around pommels and pens, putting necks to ropes, and whatever else it might take to remain and “I” in a world determined to typecast and generalize them. In “The Pirate Anne Bonny Speaks To Orlando (after Virginia Woolf)” Craft asks, and then answers, what it means to claim voice and body in world dominated by misogyny:

 

How does one become a poet or pirate?

Not by fawning in armchairs, throating the soft giggle,

 

nor by erasing your sweet excess from the page,

your oka tree becomes a forest on the sea floor —

 

the starfish nest upon the branches as you fold

your robe for evening prayers. Orlando, I would see you

 

armed, you’d fight with us, the nots and bruises

decorate your forearms like embroidered sunbeams.

 

There are 18 “The Pirate Anne Bonny” poems woven through this book that at times consider Bonny’s role as lover, as mother, as a body misgendered, or her need to be in league with other icons of female power, as when she gives advice to Jane Eyre:

 

And I can wide your eyes to the rough

reverse, leather holsters and sun-bleached boots

 

that coarse my hair to a tangle of red,

a thick of fish a man might grow

 

and almost the shadow of a beard

along my neck. Jane, it is not so intricate

 

as your sketches.

 

or when she reverses and recasts the traditional story of Perseus and Medusa:

 

The brute who dreamed he snipped

your neck, defiled soil with what slipped your veins,

 

her decorates your cabin now, foolish shield a dish

for olives and mice — the feeding of your mane

 

a daily fever of squeal and crunch and uneven

curls as I comb the lumps of their bodies through

 

each strand that lapses grateful as a bear hound

at briny air.

 

As the reader navigates the many harrowing straits of the book, the spin of image and language continues to surprise and delight, like an ill-gained chest of cursed gold that leaves you booby trapped by your own greed, suddenly struck by an unslakable thirst for more. Once baited on these shimmering hooks, the poet’s intricately crafted sentences widen like Ophelia’s soaked dress in intricacies of syntax that spill out longer and yet longer until the hook is too deep to spit out.

Yet as the book pulls us along, we realize these Bonny poems are no fishing lines, but the mooring of some spider’s web. Woven between them as a kind of viscid thread are poems coming out of the poet’s personal narratives. In these poems, too, we see a woman both of her time and yet out of her time, one who can be at once a Sappho and a debutante, a daddy’s girl and dangerous lover, who’s equally at ease slinging similes as she is slide tackling on the soccer field where she would “turn / girls with an elbow or shoulder dug / into ribs.” In the wonderful long poem “Memos to My Mother,” we see a girl becoming a woman who must reconcile not just the world but all the parts of herself, of her role as wife and daughter, lover and artist, and still maintain her sanity:

 

Mother, I am searching for our breed
in the catalogue you keep by the bed.
I try not to pound the coffee table
when I argue with my husband, I keep
my voice so low and steady, and when
I break and scream and stamp I wonder
if I am fighting you, and if two women
fighting cannot be a kind of love, too. I try
to love my excess and my stillness
and I long to curl warm as the bird dog
does against you, to have you examine
my pointed teeth, want you to write my simple
story, the one where I open my arms and know
the punishment will end with feeding.

 

Beyond even the narrative turns and lyrical tempests, the reader thrills in the many selves that Craft contains and maintains, which perhaps speaks to all of us and our sense that our truth is outside the scripts we are handed in our own lives, roles we have either acquiesced to or have been forced to play. Poet and pirate both revel in their multitudes, which is probably why Bonny has a poem in which she wishes Walt Whitman a happy birthday.

As fraught with the book is with the dangers of and complexities of being a woman and artist, there is also great humor, eroticism, and playfulness. In “Ode to Sex and the City,” the narrator arrives late to the popular show, bingeing on that which predates binging. The southern small-town poet imagines the grandness of New York, an empowered Carrie smoking a cigarette, as the characters become harpies turned feminist heroes, tearing men apart in their nests:

 

Predicted Plot Twist: the ladies grow claws
and beaks and rip intestines from unworthy
suitors in broad daylight, then rendevue
at chic rooftop venue for chai lattes or whatever
they were drinking in early-aughts New York.
Season Four takes place entirely feathered
and nests are lined with two-hundred dollar
haircut clippings. Occasional verse for egg
smashings and ripples in street puddles.
Can you tell I’ve never been to New York?

 

The title of the collection, Plunder, as may be imagined, is ever at play as well. It is at once the booty reaped by a pirate’s theft as well as the poet plundering the historical pirate for her story. At times Anne Bonny serves as inspiration, sounding board, cautionary tale, alter ego and avatar. In “The Pirate Ann Bonny and I Plunder a Cruise Ship,” Bonny becomes a kind of Tyler Durden for the poet, a projected conspirator in her own acts of piracy, escaping bourgeois domestic trappings of husbands and in-laws for “something golden that won’t be missed.” But the plunder is also of the way women are robbed of their selfhood or destroyed for trying to embrace that identity. The final poem in the collection is entitled “The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella.” Italian folklore holds that once bitten by a tarantula, the victim, referred to as the tarantata — who was almost always a woman of lower status — would fall into a fit in which she suffered heightened excitability and restlessness. In this poem, pirate and poet, both tarantula bitten, become one (“your velvet joints / skitter down the soft throat of the dancer / and you merge”), the nictating hunter spider throwing her lines into a world that would execute her for spinning herself against a time and territory marked by men and for refusing to be another’s prey: “Your eyes roll white” writes Craft, “as the cotton slip sliding over your thighs” suggesting both a shark’s eyes rolling back to feed with as well as sexual trespass. And finally the poem and the collection end on an execution of the mortal body that hints at the birth of something immortal, something that only lyric and legend can lend:

 

the men trick their thumbs inside their pockets

at your abandon and the slashes in your arms,

 

your knees, the sides of your necks, the shards

of your body scraped away and forgotten

 

like the broken strands of webs that sway

like mourners when shredded by boots,

 

the sucked-dry insects still embalmed in wind.

When your spasming cease, hair a red drench

 

across your breasts, the release rises in them,

unfurling like the wet lashes of a new corpse.

 

Craft takes Bonny out of her own time and brings her to our own, to a time where woman and artist are still beset by those who rob her of her flesh and independence. To journey through Plunder  is to be captained by a swashbuckling woman as she emerges from the mythologies and the expectations of gender, of sexuality, of how the artist is supposed to think and act. She claims her own body and voice with a poetry that is ever exhilarating. And yet there is this narrative arc toward wisdom, adulthood, and sense of self that is as equally wonderful to sail though, often as crew, sometimes as nemesis, and occasionally as co-conspirator on the main deck of some bone-flagged galleon.

 

[Published by Bauhan Publishing, April 22, 2020, 128 pages, $16.00 paperback]

Contributor
Judith Harris

Judith Harris is the author of three books of poetry, Night Garden (Tiger Bark, 2013), The Bad Secret (LSU, 2006) and Atonement (LSU, 2000), and a critical book, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing. Her next book, Poetry and Grief in Romantic and Contemporary Elegies, is forthcoming from Routledge.

 

Contributor
Matt W. Miller

Matt W. Miller is author of The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry), Club Icarus (University of North Texas Press), selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems (Loom). The recipient of poetry fellowships from Stanford University and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Miller teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy where co-directs the Writers’ Workshop at Exeter. He lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire. 

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