1.
In her 2009 collection Hecate Lochia, Hoa Nguyen posed a question: “Why try / to revive the lyric.” These words conclude the poem “Up Nursing,” but the impulse behind this question reverberates across her body of work. Absent a question mark, the lines are a summative declaration at the end of a poem that entangles the domestic/personal with the global/political. Motherhood and the rites of family care are complexly interwoven in language preoccupied with biological weapons and war. One must sing because thoughts about anthrax and the smallpox vaccine interfere in intimate moments of making tea and looking after a child, the poem suggests.[1] In Nguyen’s new volume, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, April 2021), war and motherhood collide again, rippling across each other with startling effects that confirm an ongoing determination to register the back-and-forth diffraction of the political and the domestic.
Nguyen’s commitment to writing the everyday, the (auto)biographical, the political, and the environmental, often in complex constellations, has given us a suite of collections and chapbooks of singular voice. She operates within a lyric mode that moves fluidly across confession, playful linguistic experiment, and collage, with political investment often in view. These elements combine in Nguyen’s new work to tell the story of an absent beloved; they function not only as elegy but also as optics for viewing more acutely the legacies of the war in Vietnam.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is a fragmentary, prismatic verse biography of Nguyen’s mother, Diệp / Linda, a celebrated motorcycle stunt woman in mid-twentieth-century Vietnam. Individual poems recount the span of her adult life, from her participation in an all-women motorcycle stunt troupe whose members rode round the interior of a wooden barrel-like tower, to her relationships with men, motherhood, and migration to America in 1968. Diệp died in 2019, while Nguyen was completing the book.[2] She carefully characterizes Diệp as a formidable and multifaceted figure,[3] but to read this work as straightforwardly biographical or confessional would be to demand a formal and generic fixity that the poems themselves refuse.[4] While A Thousand Times invites us to read it as “verse biography” (indeed, that is how publisher Wave presents it on their website), it would be naïve to understand Nguyen’s “I” as uncomplicatedly the poet herself. It would be just as reckless to read the depictions of Diệp—sometimes rendered in an objective mode, sometimes through direct address—as historically coextensive with the woman whose photographs populate the volume. These images function at once as illustrations, monuments, and rituals of rhythmic mourning in a text that is haunted by multiple ghosts.[5]
The collection gradually reveals itself as an assemblage of eclectic textual forms, often presented as archival fragments singed by war. We move through dictionary entries, family letters, news clippings, an apostrophic folk opera, an Orientalist fashion forecast from Vogue in 1970. Certain poems stage episodes of language learning.[6] Others, in the form of sonnets and odes, evoke rituals of loss.[7] The effect is often so intense that it animates in the reader states of lamentation, whether keyed to the intimate, the national, or the global. One cannot help but recall and anticipate the deaths of one’s own loved ones while lamenting past outrages and present horrors and anticipating the inevitable dangers ahead. Mobilizing the lyric as form and tradition, Nguyen sings of moving through and beyond loss to arrive at a moment in which the only concrete remainder of the past is the archive of everything we can no longer touch. Her lyric address poignantly evokes those no longer present, and not only her mother. The lost treasure of the title is thus specific, with an inferable addressee, but also general. You have lost, but also you, and she and he and they, but so have I, and we, a thousand times over.
While it is accurate in one sense to call this new volume “a verse biography,” such a description elides its intricate exploration of mother-child relationships, its chilling excavation of American atrocities in Southeast Asia (and their long aftermath), and its interrogation of the persistent racism of white America. The book indeed anticipates a certain genre of hostile response, if not overtly racist then coming to the work with a set of presuppositions about what kind of poetry one might expect from a poet like Nguyen. The poet engages such a reaction with characteristic nuance, leading the reader towards an empathetic attentiveness, inviting a quotient of interpretative care equivalent to the work’s own.
2.
It goes without saying that the lyric’s foundation in song often remains visible in its form. In A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, music and instruments are significant points of reference, locating poems in specific cultural and spatiotemporal contexts. In “Seeds and Crumbs,” the book’s opening poem, Nguyen establishes the formal and aesthetic stakes by invoking a lyric tradition whose continuity she frames as fragmented by time:
scatter the song
clavichord it
the future’s not ours
to see tenderly[.][8]
This echo of the choruses of popular songs—“Que Sera, Sera” (“the future’s not ours to see”) and “Tenderly”—throws us back into the mid-twentieth century while also demanding to be read as more significant thematic framing; it indicates that what follows is an attempt to think temporality with care, to confront foreclosed futurity without rancor. The book both attempts to reassemble the fragments of Nguyen’s mother’s life and to consider these as evidentiary traces of a life. These traces retain a certain ritual power to remind the daughter, through the Doris Day hit, that vatic consolation exceeds human ability.
The “clavichord” performs a suggestively multiple function here. Sound is produced on this early Western European instrument by “the action on the strings of […] small brass wedges” called “tangents.” The etymology of “clavichord” is in “clavis,” or key, which I read as a metapoetic reference to how this collection produces its particular music through a sequence of tangents that are keys to understanding.[9] Clavis is also the root of clavicle, which we might hear alongside clavichord, a reminder that this is a book not only of music but also bodies and bones, of people subjected to traumas of the quotidian domestic-present as well as the horrific national-historical.[10]
In a later poem, “Autonomous Song,” that Doris Day song returns, this time explicitly named:
Refusing the motherland mother role
Delta girl plotting a runaway plot
No waiting-in-shadows life for us
Her love of colonial electric lights
motorbikes cursed roses Xmas
The handsome singing
of “Que Sera, Sera”[.][11]
Despite this foregrounding of voice, I prefer to conceive of Nguyen’s poems as “creat[ing] effects of voicing, of aurality,” rather than as simply “embodying voices,” following Jonathan Culler’s impulse in his Theory of the Lyric. To do so respects the ways many of these poems do not invite us to imagine a specifically embodied speaker, even as other speakers are legible—and audible—in the implied voice of the poet-as-person (or as daughter in particular). I similarly choose to understand the poems in this collection in terms of their complex epideictic qualities. Individual poems tend to operate as “event rather than the representation of an event,” to “subsume representations of past events to an occurrence in the lyric present,” in Culler’s words. Addresses to Nguyen’s absent mother emerge, in each new reading of a poem, as discrete events, whether of mourning, interlocution, or judgment.[12]
Nguyen’s frequent references to song shift the energy of the collection as a whole from narrative (epic) to event (lyric), while retaining a sense of scale that never loses sight of the serious political stakes.[13] In “Learning the Đàn Bầu,” we encounter another instrument, the Vietnamese “monochord,” sometimes “called / ‘gourd zither,’” which is “typically used for lamenting songs / traditionally sung by blind players.”[14] When “plucked,” its “notes are clear and bell-like” with a “pitch [that] rises and falls […] like the Vietnamese voice.” As well as being framed as an instrument of sorrow, that reference to a “bell” recalls a moment earlier in “Naming Assembles You” when the poet, ostensibly speaking to her mother, notes that she was named “Bell,” an act of translation but also the registering of the musicality of lyric identity.[15] However, at just that moment when it feels as though “Learning the Đàn Bầu” might remain in an anthropological register, a single line intervenes to describe the đàn bầu as “old as war old as epic.” We are told that it is also “[a] poor person’s instrument,” which, when connected to an amplifier, “you can make […] sing / Welcome to the Hotel California.”[16] How to express what is happening here? The poem offers a subtle description of an instrument that many of Nguyen’s readers may not have encountered, then shifts to remind us that the instrument cannot escape either national context or global history. Both of those qualities make its potential to “sing” the Eagles’ 1976 song, released in the near aftermath of the war in Vietnam, arrestingly melancholic.
A poem about an instrument of lamentation itself becomes a song of indirect grieving, whose citation of another song is keyed to being caught in a state of inescapability. The “monochord” echoes that earlier “clavichord,” suggesting if not a line of continuity between Southeast Asian and Western/European artistic traditions, then at least an analogy that energizes circuits of global connection across time and culture. Elsewhere, in the found poem “From On ‘New Music’ (Tân Nhạc): Notes Toward A Social History of Vietnamese Music in the Twentieth Century,” Nguyen borrows the language of an ethnomusicological essay to outline categories of Vietnamese song that all involve “a cosmic yearning […] that is tragically inaccessible,” whether the object of desire is “a love relationship,” “a beautiful time,” or a “homeland.”[17] In “Oxbow Lake” Nguyen even invokes the banal “Happy Birthday” as a tangent for reflecting on her mother’s final years and the aftermath of her death:
I might forget the long slow
buildup and cornball delivery of HBD
the remix sung years old
answering machine
[…]
the hard final years were hard years going
blind no going outside
or hardly and then to doctors
bebop de bebop boom radio
of the sketchy pastoral on romance-y
bolster covered in American toile
and in her handwriting
the notebook full of figures
“Jonathan $200” etc
and that one that said
“My Treasures”
orpheus butterflies ebony jewelwing[.][18]
Song is removed from the domain of the beautiful and resituated to do multidimensional memory work. We might imagine the “cornball delivery” of “Happy Birthday” as a message left by the mother on the poet’s answering machine, a trace that lingers after death in the way that such recordings do, as fragile ephemera. Such archival traces are inadequate reminders of the person lost, even as they produce reassurance that the voice—the actual rather than the remembered voice—might be retrieved and carried into the future, a bulwark against that fear of forgetting precisely how the beloved sounded. The poem is itself a citation of such an archival trace, representing it at one further remove. It transforms the trace’s implied playback into an event that allows us to imagine the voice of the lost mother who no longer sings except through the archive, and through those poems built upon that archive’s fragmentary records.
The intrusive radio of doctors’ waiting rooms also presents song as something other than affectively monolithic. A song as cloying as the “sketchy pastoral” scene on a toile-upholstered bolster (which could belong to the same medical waiting room as the “boom radio” but might also sit in a more tangible archive of items left in the wake of the mother’s death), appears as a not-quite treasure found alongside the reckoning of debts. But it is distinct from the registration of what appears actually precious—in this case, a butterfly species from the Philippines and a damselfly from North America. The flight of these winged treasures metonymically suggests processes of human migration, journeys that involve both loss of home and new wonders discovered in places of arrival and resettlement.
3.
Loss and address are entangled throughout A Thousand Times; in addition to Nguyen’s daredevil motorcyclist mother, other absent figures’ lives compel mourning and remembrance. “Sings the Wishing Well (The Ghost Well Cared-For)” narrates another ghost’s story, anticipating the poem’s movement into ritual:
we sing her story beyond time
wield feathers and clouds of her
a melted floating love gem
our tears mix with tears
I have no sacred rites for you
saving the sacred
grove you grew[.][19]
Imagery of flight is counterposed with grief as the poem shifts to a direct address that is magically indeterminate. While it could be either the ghost or Nguyen’s mother for whom there are “no sacred rites” except “the sacred / grove” grown by the addressee, this mode of address propels readers into a space where it is possible to respond empathetically to a woman we are told “grows ill in the fields dies / is arrayed in a field of flowers.”[20] Other forms of loss reverberate in “We Run on Trash Grass,” in which we learn of the poet’s deceased sibling, “the first Hoa.” There is the loss of a photo and “burial site locations,” but also the loss of the language of loss itself:
Lose the word lose
in its original shape
You lose every other
word as in most words[.]
The poem then pivots from cataloguing loss to a performance of ritual mourning, burning incense and offering “Ghost Money” to the “encompassed spirit / mirrored emblem mirrored emblem.”[21] Later, in “Sing Ding (Ghostly),” we return to “[t]he first Hoa,” finding her
gone to ground (buried
in Mekong mud)
dead unknown years
drowned in lung matter
The first Hoa had not medicine
I got it
(the medicine)
and got the golden visa
and the ash hair
and breathings
lashings to a raft life
lashed to life the blonde
joke of
pull eyes[.]
At its end, the poem imagines a possible supernatural reunion between predecessor and poet: “in heaven where the perfume is // I say I’ll meet you / there Hoa.”[22]
This fluid movement through registers, addressees, and modes of address is a hallmark of the collection. The spaces left open in place of internal linear punctuation unsettle meaning, engaging the reader in a process of identification and interpellation that Culler might describe as “the wish … that entities addressed might in their turn respond.”[23] The mother, as now-absent figure of power, is often the most immediate addressee. But in each moment of direct address to Diệp, the “you” on the page situates the reader transiently in her place, creating the lyric phenomenon Culler calls “‘triangulated address’—speaking to listeners” (or readers) “through an apostrophic address to an absent power.”[24]
In “Naming Assembles You,” Nguyen glides in the space of six short lines between what is legible as direct address to her mother—“Bell you called me / bell / ‘captive and able’”—and a more distanced description of Diệp, “her cuffs fancy leaning / with umbrellas / and dark pink feathers.”[25] Such unmarked transition between addressees—the poet’s mother, an implied reader or audience—establishes early on that the terrain, both formal and spatiotemporal, is always shifting. By the time we arrive at the later poem, “Netting (Language Ghost),” Nguyen makes the question of address explicit, asking herself—asking us—“to whom do I speak?”[26] Writing about the poet in 2016, Stephanie Burt noted that, contrary to anticipating “readers who are only students, Nguyen proposes […] collaborative work” in her writing, thus “impl[ying] that our presence is […] necessary” to the meanings of her poems.[27] This active engagement with the reader opens poetic spaces in which it is possible for us to participate in the creation of aesthetic states that might approach closure without necessarily ever reaching it.
To come to A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure expecting either formal or narrative closure would be to misunderstand a project that is instructively open-ended. As a method for writing the life of another—even the life of a parent—its focus on process not only leaves Nguyen’s mother textually alive, allowing the reader productively to fill in the blanks of Diệp’s life, but it also feels, in Nguyen’s hands, like the only ethical way of writing about the absent beloved when many details of that person’s life remain out of reach. In this respect, Nguyen’s contribution to the genre of verse biography moves in a similar spirit to another great example of the form, Anne Carson’s Nox (2010). Nox likewise offers a salutary alternative approach to the affective writing of life and loss.
Nox is also composed of assembled fragments of text and voice, including the voice of Carson’s brother (the biographical subject). But unlike Nguyen’s book, which movingly addresses the mother herself, Carson leaves her brother almost entirely unaddressed except indirectly through a translation of Catullus 101—a poem addressed to another deceased brother.[28] Carson often seems instead to be addressing the reader directly or, if not the reader, then herself, and so indirectly speaking to us. The book is framed explicitly as an elegy, but the grief in Nox’s tone is compounded by the ultimate unknowability of her brother’s life. Nguyen’s volume offers a more varied affective and formal range, in which questions of address are fundamental to its poetics and the event-ness of individual poems is often palpable. This is due in part to Nguyen’s alternation of the present and past tense at the level of the line.[29] Past and present, the sundering of time, mark the spectral accompaniment of the beloved in the present as the poet flies backwards into the future, gazing upon the fragments of a life dispersed by time and trauma. For Carson, such dispersal is occasioned by her brother’s flight into exile. For Nguyen and for her mother, the cause is the catastrophic rupture of war and the upheaval of migration to America.
4.
A mother is a ghost. If we are lucky enough to have decades with a mother who is loved and loving (even in complicated ways), we live, as time passes, with the anticipation of the mother’s absence, her ghost state beyond the edge of an always advancing present. Nguyen’s poem “Tones in the Vietnamese Language” reveals how mother and ghost, horse and tomb, and the words for “but” and “rice seedling” are all compressed into two letters: “Ma.” Variable diacritical marks and accompanying differences in tone (“level,” “high rising,” “low falling,” “low constricted,” “dipping rising,” or an interrogative “low dipping”) produce radically suggestive shifts in meaning and a poetic condensation of association. The mother who is also the tomb, the ghost unsettled, the horse that labors and carries us, the seedling promising new life, and the “coordinating adversative conjunction” of “but”[30] weld together concepts that might initially seem incommensurable, but on closer inspection reveal natural tangential connections, like a single string plucked at different points to produce a sequence of notes joined in song. A mother, the poem says, is all of these things: the woman who carried each of us, but also a rice seedling, a horse, a tomb, a ghost, and an indispensable part of speech.[31]
Like the tones of Vietnamese, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is a collection whose language spirals. In “Mud Matrix,” the poem immediately following “Tones in the Vietnamese Language,” there is a sudden density of “m” sounds (“mud,” “Mekong moon story,” “river moon,” “moving mouths / as the nine dragons move more,” “amoeba thin,” “Mother gone to mud”), as if the force of the mother has been set free to occupy additional actions and entities.[32] “Mud Matrix” is arranged on the page in a form that suggests twisting, torsion, even spinning round a barrel, its language evoking ascent, being airborne, but also descent, being thrown off a “gangplank,” drowning in a flood and “burrowing” under the earth.[33] A mother’s life in relation to our own is irreducible to biological connection: that relationship is always in a state of radical overdetermination. To seek to understand one’s mother is to begin to register the imprint of her life on all aspects of one’s own.
Nguyen’s body of work offers a chronicle of kinds of learning: hers and ours. Here Nguyen is learning about the life of her mother through a collection of visual and textual fragments. Sometimes that learning is implicit; at other times it becomes literal, as in the poem “‘Language Points,’” which draws from a volume entitled Colloquial Vietnamese to suggest the experience of the poet trying to reclaim the language of her mother and birth country—the literal mother tongue:
I can speak Vietnamese only a little
That’s it, I will not talk anymore!
Expressing ability:
to do
to go
I can speak Vietnamese.
I am able to speak Vietnamese.
I am unable to do it.
I am unable to go.[34]
Located in a series of poems more directly depicting the energies of the mother-daughter relationship, the frustrations and possibilities of language acquisition dramatize an effort to learn a skill that promises stronger filial connection and recuperation of a past self. This effort also marks a moment early in the collection when the lyric present and the poem-as-ritual come to the fore to destabilize the “now” of the poem. The tone here suggests both the adult reduced to the status of a child struggling to learn a language, and the child (Nguyen) refusing to speak a language that both invites and refuses her entry into its world.
Language and the maternal relationship become both impediments and doorways in a cogent series of meditations on and interventions in the history of Vietnam in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the legacies of the war remain live issues in American society. These meditations are frequently interwoven with reference to Nguyen’s mother’s experience as stunt rider, mother, and exile. In “Failed Tower Ca Dao,” metaphors of rising and falling, home and exile, are overt:
myth and history twist
exile into a tower structure
also called “mouth”
that feeling of headlong
the site of mother
my longing in language
see my eyes rubies red I feed
on toxic flowers kiss one
or any flower rise clean from
mud water row a petal boat
absurd longing to sing the sun
to exist and live an island of [.][35]
Myth and history contort exile into a tower “called ‘mouth.’” It is also, ostensibly, “the site of mother” who produces “longing in language,” suggesting submerged allusions to the Tower of Babel. This tower stands in association with other explicit tower structures in the collection, including a cursed one in “Vietnam Ghost Story: High School Clock Tower,”[36] and in “Overseas Vietnamese,” “the massacre tower // The sniper tower.” This allusion to the clocktower at the University of Texas at Austin (in 1966, an ex-Marine went on a shooting rampage from the tower, killing more than a dozen people) frames a recollection of Diệp / Linda visiting Austin, where Nguyen lived for several years. Asserting that her mother “told me her memory ghost / dreams,” the poem ends with the proleptic conclusion: “She will die ordinary / rehearse the story // we be we / transcend history.”[37]
Here, transcending history might be understood to be both as simple and as profound as surviving the traumas of war or creating new lives in another country. That this other country is the one whose actions are vividly interrogated in a number of this collection’s most compelling poems adds to the work’s political potency. “Napalm Notes,” the tenth poem in A Thousand Times and the first explicitly about the war in Vietnam, clarifies the chemical agent’s institutional origins (“Developed in secret / at Harvard” and “produced // by Dow Chemical”), as well as the utter banality of the economics that drove its production and use:
An efficient incendiary formula
perfected on Valentine’s Day
1942 A thickened
gasoline Can be
dropped from planes
(napalm bombs)
also flamethrowers
8 million tons of bombs
in Vietnam […]
Very sticky stable
also relatively cheap[.][38]
Markers of efficiency and economy are juxtaposed with visceral and horrific details—napalm’s texture, and the fact that it burns at a temperature “1/5th as hot / as the surface of the sun.” It is difficult to read such a poem without thinking of Arendt and the “banality of evil,” or indeed the “shot made of lead” shot “level and true” in Celan’s Todesfuge.[39] Survival is an outcome here, a subjective state marked by the opportunity and even ethical imperative to write about evils integral to the American military-industrial campaign. Nguyen’s accomplishment in this collection is to do so while standing in a position of endurance that allows her both to lament the dead and criticize the discursive gambits of those who persist in excusing or rationalizing American martial strategy and foreign policy.
In a metatextual turn, “Napalm Notes” returns later, referenced in “Made by Dow” as a poem Nguyen reads “in a warehouse space” at a poetry event. At the end of the evening, she encounters a “white woman rather thin with a cinched / vintage coat” who “shared a Bic lighter by tossing it / at me—or toward me,” a throw in the form of “a side-wrist slinging […] with velocity,” while saying about the lighter: “Made by Dow”:
She linking the Bic to the poem
and the line where she got it
from my reference to napalm[.][40]
The poem demonstrates how a progressive impulse to name corporations and institutions responsible for the production of chemical weapons might itself be weaponized. The woman, who Nguyen thinks of as “Pillbox,” turns her realization that a utilitarian object originates from the same corporation called out in a poem into a not-so-micro act of racist aggression against the poet. What did “Pillbox” think she was doing? Did she imagine she was being funny? Did she not believe such a statement would land as a blow? These are the wrong questions, Nguyen suggests. The more urgent question is how to respond to such acts of assault and provocation, and the answer is the poem itself: make the violence you experience into a work of art that stages the risks of art being weaponized against itself and its creators. Make work that cannot be co-opted by the oppressor. A Thousand Times achieves this both in poems that are explicitly political and those in which political energies are present only by implication.
In “Exercise 14,” another found poem drawn from Colloquial Vietnamese, a series of questions for translation begins in a register of the tourist-quotidian: “What have you come here for? [….] Are you a tourist or a businessman?” It then shifts to pointed questions about the past: “What did you do during the war? / Were you an American military officer during the war in Vietnam?”[41] Just as Nguyen’s collection is not uncomplicatedly a biography of her mother, so it is nuanced and complex—sometimes direct, other times tangential—in its treatment of the war and its aftermath. Alert to the expectations and responses of a range of possible audiences, the poet imagines a reader who might not care “about […] Asian North American experience anyway // if I write flowery and incomplete” (“Crow Pheasant”).[42] Later, in “Unrelated Future Tense,” Nguyen envisions an implicitly white American reader who “will ask about my language” and “even without food in the poems / they will smell fish sauce and phở.” Such readers, or listeners, will “ask about ‘the war’ which is to say / about men fathers and soldiers / about white Americans what / about them / about them.”[43] Resistance to the expectations of readers like these activates a space of indirect address, one that requires the white American reader in particular to interrogate family complicity in the larger sociopolitical structures that allowed such wars to occur in the first place. It also invites such a reader to ask: “what is it I expect when I open a book by an author with a name like this?” The collection’s use of indirect address compels readers to think these questions by propelling us into a variety of subject positions. Some of the poems work to implicate us in structures of power and oppression and require (especially if we are white and male) that we critically consider our own situatedness and expectations about the poetic work. Other poems invite the reader to produce an abundance of empathy, provided they remain open to the process. If the poems themselves are events that generate a ritual effect, then the experience of reading them draws the reader into a state where the event is lived with an affective intensity that transforms one’s political consciousness.
In “Transplants,” Nguyen reckons further with these energies, asserting “I don’t want to conduct / Mỹ Lai research and produce it / for you here / Dear Reader.”[44] The collection resists an instrumentalizing gaze that expects Nguyen to perform certain acts of predictable cultural performance. This opposition takes place at the level of language as well as subject matter; it involves a naming of what will not be done as much as a singing of what is offered to us in place of such limiting expectations. This produces a powerful sense of poetic agency fully realized as the poems individually and collectively struggle against either book or poet being rendered object.
Seizing agency in art is framed as a family practice, even an inheritance. In “Durian Sonnet,” Nguyen describes her mother, addressing and reminding her:
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 [….][45]
The point about choice is crucial: it is Diệp who intensifies the performance of her daring in order to contest the camera’s objectifying gaze and reassert her own agency. Shortly hereafter, in “Spoken Through the Cracked Eye,” Nguyen returns to that imagery: “to be free and alive // arms out like wings on either side.”[46] Several photos included in the book show Diệp in versions of this pose, making it possible to imagine Nguyen’s mother herself as Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” “wings […] spread,” seeing not “a chain of events” but “one single catastrophe.”[47] If Diệp is the visual embodiment of such an angel of history, Nguyen herself might be understood as doing that figure’s work, wishing “to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” even as the storm “that we call progress” blows her backwards into the future.[48]
In “The Problem,” from her 2009 collection Hecate Lochia, Nguyen wrote: “Death is the return to the mother / return to the wet place.” While such locations might be “stagnant” and polluted with nitrates and phosphates, just as other wet places, the Gulf of Mexico for instance, suffer from a “massive phyto-plankton / & algae bloom” to create a “Hypoxic zone […] Sized larger than New Jersey,” it is still possible to look up “from the stoop” where one stands, to view the falling flames of “August Perseids.”[49] This is not a trite echo of Oscar Wilde lying passively in the gutter and looking up at the stars. Rather, it speaks to a state of dynamism and awareness: a consciousness of where we are situated, whether poet or reader, working actively to consider all that is wrong around us, all that threatens to sink and submerge us, while never losing sight of what remains possible—the ascent we might achieve, arms flung wide, a marquee smile on our face, flying to the top of the world’s barrel with all the panache of a motorcycle stunt woman. A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure illuminates the stakes of Nguyen’s ongoing poetic project and distills its core investments: it is as much a continuation of territory the poet has been charting for more than two decades as it is exhilaratingly new.
Author’s Note: Hoa Nguyen and I were fellows together at MacDowell in May 2019 and have continued to correspond since then. I am grateful to Andrew van der Vlies for reading and commenting on this essay. Thanks, too, to Chicago Review editors Lily Scherlis, Adam Fales, and Jack Chelgren for their scrupulous care and insightful prompts to further thinking.
[1] Hoa Nguyen, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 (Seattle: Wave, 2014), 101. Andrew Epstein has suggested that “the implicit response” to this poem’s question is “to give life to the everyday experience of women and mothers in the contemporary world.” See Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 183.
[2] Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Seattle: Wave, 2021), 113. See also the poem “The Flying Motorist Artist,” 10-12.
[3] In Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings, she recounts a meeting in which Nguyen asked her about her mother; in Park Hong’s account, Nguyen said, “You have an Asian mother [….] She has to be interesting.” See Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition (London: Profile Books, 2020), 118.
[4] In Epstein’s compelling discussion of Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia, elaborated in relation to Bernadette Mayer’s poetic of the “maternal everyday,” he notes Nguyen’s practice of “collag[ing] bits and pieces of found language, quotidian detail, pop culture reference, and image, […] assembl[ing] them in delicate, charged, mobile-like constructions that are highly attentive to sound.” See Epstein, Attention Equals Life, 179-87, 186. Timothy Yu and others have also compared Nguyen’s work to Mayer’s. See Timothy Yu, “Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s,” Contemporary Literature, 52:4 (Winter 2011), 818-851; 845. Brian Glavey has described Nguyen’s work operating in a mode “inspired not only by Mayer’s thematic incorporation of motherhood into poetry, but also by the forms of conceptual and constraint-based writing with which she sought to give shape to such experiences.” See Brian Glavey, “Poetry and the Attention Economy,” Contemporary Literature, 58:3 (Fall 2017), 423-429, 427.
[5] See also Hoa Nguyen, “Midnight Saturn Bass Note: Afterword to A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure,” in Black Warrior Review, 41:1 (Fall/Winter 2020), online: https://bwr.ua.edu/47-1-feature-midnight-saturn-bass-note-afterword-to-a-thousand-times-you-lose-your-treasure-by-hoa-nguyen/. Even as I refer here to Nguyen and her mother, I leave open an implied space between the historical figures—the people in fact—and the people on the page. As Jonathan Culler explains in his helpful discussion of Käte Hamburger’s theories of the lyric: “There is a logical identity between poet and the lyric ‘I,’ but this does not mean that the experience reported is that of the biographical person.” Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015; 2017), 106. In the context of a sequence of poems presented as a daughter’s biography of her mother, I would argue that this is the case even when the daughter-poet appears as her own subject.
[6] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 41.
[7] See Epstein, Attention Equals Life, 179-87.
[8] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 1.
[9] “clavichord, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/33990. Accessed 7 March 2021.
[10] For Nguyen on writing the body, see Reb Livingston, “A Conversation with Hoa Nguyen,” We Who Are About to Die, May 2010, online: https://wewhoareabouttodie.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/a-conversation-with-hoa-nguyen-part-1/ and https://wewhoareabouttodie.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/a-conversation-with-hoa-nguyen-part-2/.
[11] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 7.
[12] Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 35, 37.
[13] Culler, writing about Horace, argues that the long history of the lyric has always allowed for the possibility of writing war in a lyric mode, and that while Horace “defines lyric against epic” he “reserves the right to include all manner of references to war, the gods, and politics in the poems presented as lyric.” Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 57.
[14] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 18-19.
[15] See “Heartlessness,” later in the collection, in which Nguyen writes: “I rename myself a bell to ring / having been given the dead girl’s name / The dead becomes my face / the dead of my face.” Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 93-94.
[16] There are, in fact, multiple videos online of đàn bầu musicians doing exactly this.
[17] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 38.
[18] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 42.
[19] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 97.
[20] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 96.
[21] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 8. See also “Offerings for Souls,” 68.
[22] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 31-32.
[23] Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 13-14.
[24] Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 15. Culler further argues that “[a]ddress to someone or something gives the poem a character of event” (188) and “the triangulation” of the poet “ostensibly address[ing] a beloved” functions “as a way of speaking indirectly to the audience” (201).
[25] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 4-5.
[26] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 14.
[27] Stephanie Burt, “Is American Poetry Still a Thing?,” American Literary History, 28: 2 (Summer 2016), 271-287; 278.
[28] Anne Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), np.
[29] “[L]yric present,” to use Culler’s formulation about such “moment[s] of address,” “permits a more vivid expression of feeling” that includes “an active questioning of the process in which [the poet] is engaged.” Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 207-8.
[30] “but, prep., adv., conj., and n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/25316. Accessed 10 March 2021.
[31] Nguyen’s earlier poem “Eurasiacan” explores variation in the meaning of “Ma” depending on diacritical difference. See Nguyen, Red Juice, 115-16; A Thousand Times, 25.
[32] I am grateful to Andrew van der Vlies for pointing this out.
[33] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 26-27.
[34] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 6.
[35] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 83. The syntactic fragment operates in Nguyen’s verse in ways that might best be understood using Derek Attridge’s concept of “extrinsically segmented verse,” which he describes as “poems that have their being simultaneously in the aural and visual medium, and cannot be experienced fully in only one of these.” These are poems that “[hover] between page and voice, eye and ear,” offering complexly intertwined and contrapuntal effects. Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; 2015), p. 213, 220. Culler helpfully glosses Attridge’s concept of extrinsically segmented verse as a “lineation […] not prompted by syntax or phrasal structure but […] externally imposed” such that “visual arrangement is crucial to the effect.” See Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 163.
[36] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 33.
[37] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 64-65.
[38] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 17. See also “Notes on Operation Hades” which offers a catalogue of “‘Rainbow Herbicides,’” including not only “Agent Orange” but also Agents Pink, White, Green, Purple, and Blue. In war, hell comes in all the colors of the rainbow. The poem ends with two lines that need no further elaboration: “Monsanto Corporation / Dow Chemical.” Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 45-46.
[39] Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000; 2001), 30-33.
[40] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 88-89.
[41] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 41.
[42] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 40.
[43] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 57. See also “Can’t Write White and Asian,” 60-61.
[44] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 78.
[45] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 54.
[46] Nguyen, A Thousand Times, 62.
[47] Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, “On the Concept of History,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003; 2006), 392.
[48] Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 392.
[49] Nguyen, Red Juice, 210-11.