Where were we

Where were we? I was sitting with my back to the windows that line the south wall in the dining room. Back to the gray light on the rainy noon. Vaughn sitting across from me. KC sitting to her right. Dash in his high chair to the right of KC. Between me and Vaughn, the tuna casserole she helped her mom make. Different this time because they used elbows instead of bow-ties. This is as good as it's ever come out. We talk about how we haven't had it in a while, and how maybe that's why it seems so good. Or maybe it's because we're all so hungry. KC cuts up tiny pieces to feed Dash. As much tumbles out of his mouth as stays in. He likes it too. It's quiet, now, across the street. In the lot being excavated in preparation for a new two-family house. Rain coming down hard enough it forced the work to stop. The rain as benevolent force. Vaughn's through and ready for dessert. Today she chooses Edy's orange & cream low-fat fruit bar. What we used to call a popsicle. I get it for her before either KC or I are done with our meals because she's been good today. She'll be upstairs setting up a party for her stuffed animals before KC and I start on our dessert. But now, where were we? We were all at the table and KC was shooting glances at me as Vaughn was chatting away at us. KC could tell I wasn't registering a word. My mind more than half elsewhere. I'm thinking of Dale Smith's Black Stone: "What we are to each other is locked into language—" and there may be a sense in which that's true, that bears closer inspection. Language may be, as Heidegger had it, "the house of being," but I refuse to believe we're locked in. On a hot day, where I'm sitting, I can feel the sun through the window behind me as its heavy rays shawl my shoulders. I could turn around in my chair and see the house next door, the rain flowing out the gutter, dropping to the driveway and running down garageward. I could see the cars blurring by over the glossy black pavement with its shiny yellow demarcation, blurring by under branches with deep green leaves drooping under the weight of too much water. I could see the empty, muddy lot across the street where more and thicker trees used to be. I could turn knowing that KC and Vaughn and Dash are turning with me, and it's not quite because of language. They are with me inside me, beyond where words can go. What if we could kick down all seven doors in the house of being, what would it be? Now what about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry?

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.