First Words

Today when I got home from work, Vaughn (our seven-month-old daughter), voiced what sounded like "hi". This was the third or fourth time in the past week or so where she had made this noise upon seeing me. I guess this might be her first word, but that I have to qualify it with "what sounded like"—and that I find the word "noise" an apt description—suggests to me that this is not really it. I thought a poem might come out of this experience, but I really haven't gotten comfortable with writing Vaughn into anything yet. Though she's made appearances in a few decent poems as "baby" and "daughter", the domestic mind/homescape is not one I generally feel able to bring my full attention to. Which makes the works that have been appearing here and there by Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith all the more remarkable. They are really bringing all of their intense, word-musicing, imaginative gifts to bear on their domestic experience.

The key is that their work continues to be in no way domesticated. There's none of the melodrama and (in context) none of the banality which a phrase like "American domestic poetry" might connote. Nguyen's language and Smith's vision are as wild and active as ever. I was particularly impressed with Smith's Black Stone, which is something between a daybook and a serial prose poem. Hell, just writing this much with two kids, and editing an important magazine, and paying the bills (I assume!), is commendable. Posted temporarily on the Possum Pouch, Black Stone ought to be finding a print publisher before too long. Here are first words, primary words, words of the primordial imagination, as Smith rides the black stone through personal and political, sacred and profane, historical past and present: "What minds those first Europeans must have brought to this continent, this 'collection of cosmologies.' How many years does it take to absorb the power of a landmass? We're still finding out, I guess. K spits a rock from his mouth" (from 12); "Water once flowed here, a great coast back in dinosaur days. Now near blackness the president talks on the radio. Haitian rebels promise to surrender their weapons." (from 17)

Meanwhile, Nguyen's poem "[Sopping in juice    melons juicy]" leads off the latest issue of The Canary (which was reviewed on the Verse blog). It's particularly hard to excerpt one of Nguyen's uniquely elliptical poems, because so much of the experience is lost (well, and they also tend to be fairly short, but enough's there to chew on that their length occurs as only an afterthought). Form and content are really built as the poem progresses in a manner not dissimilar, say, to the "bop prosody" of Jack Kerouac. At their best, her poems are jazzy—read jazzy, sound jazzy, go jazzy, do jazzy—but I've never seen anyone describe them as such. I mean, they look like no poem you're likely to read in any of the jazz anthologies. But hear them aloud in your head. It's not bop—it's not Charlie Parker— it's not Davis or Coltrane, but it may be a bit of Sun Ra in the kitchen. . . .

                                                            Hilly
             mamma belly

             Let me in
             roasty        like broiled eggplant        Spun
             angel kisses and salty
                                                            meanderings

             Night is the time all the time        a pulse of pulse
             and digits popping 1 2 3
             Please do not tangle me

                   Hoa Nguyen
                   in The Canary #3

Some Related Links:
An interview with Hoa Nguyen with links to some of her poems.
Poems by Nguyen at Milk Magazine.
A glowing review of Smith's The Flood & The Garden.
A mixed review of Smith's The Flood & The Garden.