The Restaraunt

Lately it’s been raining. Around five o’clock the clouds roll in across the paddy fields and empty. Overhead the sky is changing greys; everything is heavier; it is hard to move about. Ann and I rest together on the cooler behind the bar, put baby powder on our faces and our necks. We watch the motorbikes go by, a slow procession. Almost everyone is wearing ponchos, see-through pink and orange. They look like human-shaped balloons. It’s the beginning of the rainy season, which means that people don’t go out as much.

“Do you think it will be busy tonight?” I say.

“Maybe, maybe not,” she says. Then, with effort, she gets up and grabs the incense off the counter which we light to bring the people in. Round here, smoke is magic. Ann lights the incense and puts five sticks in the dirt of a planted pot. Then, out front, she takes a shot of Sangsom and pours a line of whiskey on the sidewalk.

“There,” she says. “Now they’ll come.”

           

This is how I spend my time, a restaurant in Khon Kaen called DiDines which my friends Josh and Mike bought a couple months ago. Since coming back to Thailand I’ve been working at DiDines from 3 pm to 3 am. I make 300 baht (9.5 dollars) a day, just like everybody else. 80 cents an hour to pour beer, make cocktails, wait tables, mop floors, and deal with foreigners. This is what we do. And Ann is good at it. Really good. Fon and Mae and Luk out front, Jang and Noon in the back, they’re good too. The women here, like most women I’ve met in Thailand, hold the place together.

           

I, on the other hand, am less adapted, especially when it comes to white people. Foreigners have a habit of expecting things to run the way they do in whatever part of the world it is they come from and of treating Thais, especially the women, differently because they’re Thai, which makes them assholes. I feel this personally because until I speak, nobody assumes that I’m American. There’s a certain kind of customer, always white, always male, who lives in Thailand because they can get away with things they can’t back home, because the world is cheaper here, because the country isn’t real for them. Europe is real, America is real, but Thailand, given its inherent differences and eccentricities, its distance from what they’re used to, is less so. And until a person knows I am fully capable of understanding them, customers speak incredibly freely around me, with crassness and candor. And almost always they speak of money, of women, and of the ways that money and women often intersect.

“How much would you pay for that?” I hear them say as one of the girls walks by.

“A few hundred,” I hear them say.

And now I want their blood. If Thailand were real for them, if these girls were real, they wouldn’t talk and act like this, I’m sure of it. What I’m not sure of is how Ann and the other girls are able to deal with this so gracefully, but they do. Perhaps they have always dealt with this. What do I know? I'm predictably protective. There’s one customer in particular, a small troll of a man who owns a nearby bar and who I want, more than anything, to drag by his collar out into the street and beat.

“You can’t do that,” Noon explains to me one night when we’re all sitting around after-hours talking. “You have to smile so you can take their money, but in your heart you fill your heart with hate for them, and they never know it, and then you will always have their money.”

           

This, in many ways, appears to be the sacrifice. One learns to separate the surface from the center, the inner from the outer, and the world continues spinning. What a person does, the performance of external social action, is not synonymous with who a person is. This, for me, is one of the harder things to watch, the women who I’ve come to care so much about at times performing a version of themselves for a community of people whose intentions, attitudes, and general disposition bothers me, a version of themselves for which, I trust, they have their reasons, but which also feels so different to me, so something other than the girls I’ve come to love so quickly and to know.

           

But perhaps it only feels that way. Everyone performs, I get that. We each “prepare a face to meet the faces that [we] meet,” but what that looks like, and what the implications are of that performance, varies from place to place. I get that also. In Thailand it mostly breaks my heart because I let it, a guilt, however well intentioned, that highlights my own real privilege as much as it implicates the foreigners who, like me, create the context in which so many Thais are forced to live and perhaps, realistically, will always live. In this light it is hard to resist the urge to tell the girls which boys aren’t good enough for them because, quite frankly, so few are, but it isn’t my place to make that call, to come to conclusions about a world I can look upon and think about, but never know. Regardless, I can count the boys I’ve met here whose intentions I trust on a single hand. And two of them own the restaurant.

           

About three months ago, Josh and Mike, two American men in their early thirties teaching English in Khon Kaen, unlikely business partners at best, bought DiDines from a French chef who had run the place for as long as any of us can remember. A year ago, it would have been safe to say that Josh and Mike probably shouldn’t, under any circumstances, own and operate a restaurant together. Like most good friends, they have a tendency to drink too much and bring out the worst in each other. They get kicked out of bars. They get arrested. They piss themselves and drive their cars into lakes. If it weren’t for Daow and Guan, the two women in their lives, I’m pretty sure neither of them would still be in Thailand, at least not like this. What Josh and Mike have done with the place amazes me. And it isn’t just the food, which, for the record, is the best I’ve had in all of Issan, and it isn’t simply the fact that the space itself is beautiful, or that the music is good, or that the pool-table, despite its unforgiving pockets, is free, or that it’s the only place in Khon Kaen where a kid from Wisconsin can sit down and buy an IPA and drink it slowly with his whole heart happy, its not just that on any given night the place is filled with as many Thai as foreign customers (a feat of social integration so sadly rare in Thailand), families as well as drunks (equally rare), or that the staff can speak to you in English, can hold a conversation, or that the regulars who come to DiDines appear so glad to be there, no matter who they are or where they’re from or what their story is, the men and women I serve drinks to look and act and feel alive, even the ladyboys who sell their bodies down at Blues Bar. This matters. It matters because one wants one’s customers to be happy and because as long as the bar is filled with happy, decent people, it won’t be filled with assholes. Josh and Mike have gone to great lengths to ensure the energy of the place repels the worst that Thailand has to offer. To their credit, for the most part, it does.

What matters most, however, at least to me, is not the customers, but the staff. When the doors come down at midnight and the lights go out, when the tables are finally in and everyone else has left, we stay. Mike and Noon and Josh buy pitchers of beer for the girls; Ann drinks M-150 energy drinks; Fon buys a horrible minty cocktail we call “Around the World;” Luk goes out and brings back BBQ squid, pork balls, hotdog slices soaked in chilies; and we stay.

           

The other night we took turns holding the pool cue for each other so we could practice stripper dancing.

           

The other night Noon explained to the younger girls how to deal with a man if he starts getting rough by breaking his kneecaps with your heels.

           

The other night Josh drank too much and fell asleep on the sidewalk. I poured water on his face and Jang dried the water off with a bright orange towel.

The other night, on Fon’s day off, she came in anyway and started helping us bring tables in.

“Why are you here, Fon?” I ask her.

“I’d rather be here than anywhere,” she said. 

And it goes on like this.

           

About a week ago Fon was sitting with me behind the bar. She had stolen my favorite hat and was wearing it cocked to the side, which secretly made me happy. Kendrick Lamar was playing on the stereo and she bounced her head and sang along to the words she knew and sometimes she held her hands up and waved her fingers back and forth.

“Fon, I said, “that’s a terrible way to dance.”

“P’ Nick, how come you always laugh at me,” she said.

“Because you make me happy,” I said.

Then she grabbed a book of poems off the counter, Richard Siken’s “Crush,” which I had brought to work that morning, to practice her English.

           

“Close your eyes,” she read. “A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body.”

           

She read: “My dragon-fly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are at a crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty.”

           

She read: “I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen…a gentleness that comes not from the absence of violence but despite the abundance of it…a love that transcends hunger.”

           

This, of course, is what I want for her, “a love that transcends hunger,” for all the girls who work at DiDines, actually, for Josh and Mike and for myself, “a place for it to happen.” Hell, I even want this for the foreign men who fill my heart with hate. But in a country where so much of the love is hungry, where so many of the relationships which are available are tainted by the deeply rooted ways a culture of privilege so often takes pleasure in consuming a culture with less privilege, it isn’t easy. In this context, more than anything, I worry that Fon might not find the person she deserves, that she will, at some point, settle for something less, for someone who will not be as kind to her as she is, but I have to trust her. She, like everybody else, must do their best and work with what there is. This is precisely why DiDines is so important. It is a different place. It changes what is here.

       

           

The Next Big Thing: Melanie Noel's "The Monarchs"

 

 What is the working title of the book?

The Monarchs

 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

California?  The fortune teller in Cleo from 5 to 7.  Yuri Norstein.  Grin Without a Cat.

What genre does your book fall under?

Mime, and poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Yolande Moureux, Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, and Charlotte, from Charlotte's 

Web 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

What is higher innocence?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

about 8 years

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Sounds and second-hand stories of places (Lake Erie, the Arctic and Chernobyl are three; inspire might be the wrong word).   My nephew Evren’s birth, which I witnessed.  Lost things.  Subtitles and images from films inspire me.  Heartbreak.  Conversations and exchanging work with friends, particularly Heide Hinrichs, with whom I talk often, whose work I love (she's a visual artist).

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Heide created the artwork for the cover.  She worked with some of the lines from a painting by another dear friend, Bob Gronhovd.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Lori Anderson-Moseman, the wonderful poet and publisher of Stockport Flats Press, publishedThe Monarchs as a part of her Meander Scar series.  I love the books in the series, and am honored to be included.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

Laura Neuman, Karena Youtz, Cody Rose-Clevidence, Matthew Klane, Giovanni Singleton

The Next Big Thing

     

A friend of mine here in Denver, the poet Serena Chopra, recently tagged me for "The Next Big Thing." This, if you don't already know, is an entire internets worth of poets responding to a specific set of questions about their recent publications. Then, because we're curious, and because we want to help and support each other, and because we require help and support from each other, we ask our friends to do the same. Here, for better and for worse, are answers.

_________

What is the title of the book? 
“North of Order”

Where did the idea come from for the book? 
The book came into itself because I was living in a specific place and point in time, writing for, or rather toward, a specific person in a very different but equally specific place. I wanted to bring both her and the world which kept us distant into reach. The book tries and fails to do this, over and over, without end.

What genre does your book fall under? 
A poem, the book is one long poem.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 
This question is offensive.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? 
This question is equally offensive.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 
Two months, at least initially, but then it took three years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 
The desire, which is human, to listen to and speak of what is (and isn’t) there (“perfectly, in this material”).

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 
Justin Boening, whose own work is incredibly remarkable (really, seek it out), helped me edit the thing in more ways than I can ever give him credit for.  Really, the book was stuck and he got in there and hauled the thing up out of the mud.  


Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 
The book will be published this September by YesYes books, for which I am very, very grateful. 

My tagged authors for next week are Melanie Noel and Nicholas Butler

Hanoi, a Girl on a Motorbike, Poetry and/or Sentience, a Bridge

It’s getting late. At the moment I’m walking on a red bridge with a group of other researchers, looking for our hotel. Under-lit by spotlights, the trees above us turn into their shadows, their shadows turn into the sky. We continue walking. Down below, a cast of branches dip into the water. There, the city lights at midnight blend together into one light, pressed beneath the surface, strangely glowing. I wonder where I am.

“It feels like Christmas,” says Thai, one of the other researchers.  “It’s sooooo romantic.” He takes his camera out and snaps a picture. A young couple, maybe  in their twenties, maybe not, stand with their arms around each other, making out beneath a street light on the corner of an empty intersection. A dark cat crosses quickly in the distance, disappears. It starts to rain again, but no one seems to care; it feels like Christmas. Compared to the places where we're from (Thailand, Laos, the Philippines) its cold here. The mist plays tricks with the light, acts like snow. Also, Hanoi, the city where we’ve been staying for the last few days, brought here by our respective countries to present our work at the Southeast Asian Regional Fulbright conference, is a city surprisingly in love. 

In Thailand couples keep a certain distance, at least in public, but today I saw at least three weddings, new brides with big white dresses dragged behind them through the rain water. Smiling on steps and under fountains and in the shadows of looming European archways, they posed beside their husbands, black hair put up with pins and crowned by pink and yellow flowers. Later, beside the lake, I watched the young couples of the city arrive in pairs to sit on the many benches which look out across the water. Usually, the men were smoking cigarettes and their breath, visible in the cool air, mixed evenly with the smoke and mist of a city perpetually about to rain. Now, with night already fallen, every street lamp wears a halo, a yellow ring which dissipates in fog and haze. The researcher beside me takes my arm and leans into my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my neck. She leads me down the road.

For the most part, the last two days have been spent attending presentations, meeting other Fulbrights, and pretending to be professional, pretending to fit in. I wear a suit. I dry my hair in the mornings with a blow dryer, wear cologne. As best I can I try to act composed, intelligent, interested. I am not succeeding.

“What do you do in Thailand?” another researcher asks me.

“I’m a poet,” I say.

“I wasn’t aware that one could be that,” he says.

“Lucky me,” I say, shrugging.

As one of only a handful of artists blessed enough to be given the time and money needed to work creatively on that which I imagine we’d each be working anyway, without time and money, I’m out of place. There’s my friend Thai who’s translating the Ramakien, Thailand’s great epic poem, into English, a girl studying traditional dance and song who sings her ass off, strums a moon lute, a  sculptress from the Philippines, myself. Mostly, though, the people here are economists, biologists, chemists, ecologists, architects, historians, urban planners. Arguably their work is infinitely more applicable, more directly of and for the place in which they operate, of greater benefit, more helpful. It would be hard to argue this, I think, and so I don’t. Me, I’m working on a book of poems about a boy with a cat inside his chest who finds a dead man asleep beneath a tree of light in which there’s vultures. I’m working with a cartoonist I met in Bangkok, so at least there’s that, but for the most part my work is small and alienating. I sit in a coffee shop all day. I write till five or so, work out, eat dinner, and edit what I’ve written at my kitchen table while listening to music. I read for a while, watch TV. I sleep. In Hanoi, listening to the other researchers, I feel a pang of guilt, a little voice which asks me what it is exactly that I do.

The great anxiety of the artist, or at least one of the many great anxieties of most artists, is the extent to which one’s work exists in actual relation to the world of things around it. This is important, I think, because creation so often happens in isolation, on one’s own terms, in a space set up apart. The trick, of course, is to complete the work and give it back, an offering, a gift. A poet’s work, however, lives primarily in journals read exclusively by poets whose work also lives primarily in journals read by poets. In many ways we inhabit an incredibly insular and self-affirming place, removed from the rest of the world not only by the severity of this insulation, but also by the nature of the art itself in the context of the culture as whole. Poetry is not music. Most certainly it is not popular music, which people listen to. You won’t find it at the movies or the book stands at the airport. It doesn’t live in a museum. People don’t hang poetry on walls. So what is it that we do? And why?

When I was teaching in Iowa, standing before a room of freshman students utterly uninterested in poetry, I would argue, first and foremost, that it is talk by which we are alive. For fodder, I’d give them Oppen:

“If it is that river, that meaningless river in which we are, it is nevertheless talk by which we are alive. If we want to continue to invent life for ourselves and for our children and our friends it might be worth one’s whole effort to find the alternative, some alternative, to this art.”

Here, the “meaningless river in which we are,”and to which poetry (as an act of clarity) is a necessary alternative, lives akin to what Oppen refers to earlier in the same letter as the “art of accident,” the music of un-intention.

At this point, the blankness of my student’s faces would almost always deepen. The idea that it might be abstractions like “language,” or “talk,” by which we live and not utilitarian commodities like food or shelter was usually lost on them. My concession, of course, to them and to myself, is that yes, food and shelter matter in a way that is real, immediate, and tangible. One cannot “live” without that which the body physically requires. Without these things we die, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to live and breathe and fuck and make more life and in the process of doing so it is nice to enjoy these things when possible, partially because it is in us to do so, but also because life matters and is important to us. It’s important that we enjoy and participate directly, even freely, in the lives we live.

If I’m lucky, a typical conversation might go something like this:

“We need food to live, not poetry.”

“But why is it you want to feed yourself?”

“Because otherwise I’d die.”

“What does it matter if you die?”

“Because I don’t want to, I want to live.”

“Why do you want to live?”

“Because my life’s important to me?”

“Why is your life important to you?

“I don’t know, it just is?”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

By this point, again, if I’m lucky, the students are onto me and can see ahead of them the kind of conversation into which I’m trying to gently push them. There is a narrative that exists for us, a story we each make up about our lives and the lives of others and the world in which we operate, a way of thinking and talking about experience—and what it may or may not mean to us—which occurs in the mouth and in the mind where that which finally matters begins to take its shape, articulate its name. Without this conversation we return to the narrative of nothing and accident, “the inhuman event of humans,” as Oppen calls it, “the meaningless river which flows with ourselves and with our talk.”

The second point I try to make is the extent to which our language is always under threat, always on the verge of being turned against itself. If it isn’t taken from us by the forces of politics and commerce, regurgitated back to us and put to uses which do not become us, that seek to define for us the words which point to and bring us into relation with the world we live in, it is being used, by us and toward others, without intention, by accident and habit, which diminishes the act itself, deprives language of its urgency, causes harm. The examples of this are everywhere and students are usually pretty good at identifying places where words no longer live up to their potential, weakened, as it were, by overuse and thereby limited in their capacity to hold together meaning and complexity. Love, for instance, is a concept students seem to care about, and it is promising to hear them think among themselves about the ways the culture puts the word the use. If it is true what Oppen says, if language is indeed the operation by which we live, create, and recover value, the speaker, then, what the world is for her, and thus what she is, diminishes in direct relation to her talk. With a word like love, the stakes are obvious and high. Without it, we’re fucked. Students get that. But it happens elsewhere also, at the level of our diction, our syntax, our grammar. And it is always happening.

The final point I make is the idea that poetry takes language, and the world it points to, seriously. As an art form focused on creation and recovery, its power and capacity exists in the extent to which it takes as intentional the act of paying attention, not only to oneself and others and to things, but to the many different ways of saying and defining those things, and to what happens to the experience of these objects, lives, and relationships when articulated in one manner or another. My first real teacher, the poet Joanna Klink, has this to say:

“In poems, I am trying to find my bearings through a world that at times feels remote and inchoate and struck blank with noise. I would like to place myself in a field of deep attention and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there."

And I believe her. And believing this has made a difference in my life.

In Hanoi, what is here for me, what exists around me at this specific moment at this specific time and place in the world, is the arm and body of another person, a stranger really, a girl I barely know. We’re walking through the night. What I do know is that a day ago we met in a museum in a country I never thought I’d see. We talked in the rain and danced. We stole a bottle of wine and slipped our bodies into a pool and laughed and argued and made plans. What I don’t know, at least not now, not at the moment, is that in just two days I’ll find myself on the back of a motorbike riding in the bright sun through the slow back-roads of northern Vietnam. I’ll have my arms around her waist and her hair will keep blowing back into my face and so I’ll put my face into the space between her shoulder and her neck. Every now and then she’ll scream and point to something far away. Mountains in the distance, grey forms, and the paddy fields that sprawl out green forever to our left. We’ll stop at a graveyard made of crumbled knee high walls and tiny chipped paint temples, also crumbled, large enough to harbor ghosts. She’ll stop the bike, get off. She’ll run with her arms up into the center of a group of cattle who eat dumbly at the grass between the gravestones. They’ll startle when she nears them, scatter, but they will not scatter far. 

My faith, then, at this moment with a girl I may never see again, and in others, is that poetry is the product of the specific, temporary field in which I am, of the attempt to struggle with and understand and with any luck make meaningful what is there. Arrived at through patience, isolation, and attention, poetry, at its best, is the use and effort of a language which brings us closer to that which is, to people and the spaces we erect between us, to objects, to ourselves. Thankfully, it is a giving place, one that teaches us see, to say. I believe in poems because I believe they bear within their strange complexities the capacity to return our words to us, our world. They makes us sentient, I remember someone saying in a letter once, and help us love. They demand we feel alive.