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.