A&E
Make-out poetry and punk rock
By Liz Lvov ’17
April 21, 2016
Tags a+e
To get to Hoa Nguyen’s talk it was necessary to descend into KJ 005, a place marked by a sinister arrow pointing, of all directions, at a downward diagonal (!) with the label surprisingly low to the ground. Here is a space of which people are unaware, a space that is imperceptible in its layout and execution, a space that always feels like an illicit discovery. You have to obey that shocking downward - pointing arrow and walk down the brick stairs and then down a narrow passage, framed by green parallel pipes, and there it is, KJ 005, an airless, fluorescent room where I once attended a mandatory econ review session. Let me tell you when Hoa Nguyen entered that room, her smooth voice filled it up and it felt like the hopeful springtime sunlight was seeping in through the cement. She talked about nerve ghosts and languages not fully lost, and I sat in awe like girl, same. You know a poet when he or she wears all black and glances up from a screen at you to make a quick aside from a beautifully scripted speech that revels in its own artistry and at one point uses a sentence with so many onomatpoeic p-sounds that it feels like a drumbeat inviting a dance or a kiss goodbye. Nguyen doesn’t remember Vietnamese from the first two years of her life she spent in Vietnam, but she read us a poem incorporating every single one of its six tones, and even though she isn’t fluent, her musicality is undeniable. Nguyen spoke of blues music as an act of defiance, as a clinical sample of living minute to minute, “not as moaning but as a learned excellence.” Hoa had a college radio show. Her heart is a coalmine cave-in. Her mom was a stunt motorcyclist.
Nguyen works with art that is messy and disobedient, art that makes use of distortion and force, and she spoke of music as a ritualized remedy. Thank God she found within herself permission to be a poet, because when she read out loud about her friend Wendy’s 10-story fall, I felt the impact of cement in a way that was more a sigh than a scream. Here are some phrases I transcribed in messy ink at the edge of my Lit Theory notes during the reading: trees with heart shaped leaves, piano, pussy, shredded, spiders, dream-scream, let’s leave it at this, vag-bleed, you eat the moon, bell bell mortal. She talked about armless statues and she told us that the past tense of sing is not singed.
Later on at Senior John Rufo’s talk, I leaned over to thank her for her words, tell her of the lost languages in my own throat, and for a few moments we talked of missing a motherland we don’t remember. Nguyen is interested in doubling, and in yolking. I can’t tell you what she said in any significant way because I was too busy feeling every word she said very deeply.
You know a poet when a poet wears all black and one day John Rufo will be famous in a bigger way than he is now. Rufo has a distinctive voice which is ever-present in the audio of his poet interviews; the quick uh-huhs, the yeahs, the chuckles, evidence over and over again that Rufo is an attentive conversationalist and deeply invested in what he does. Rufo understands that technology is important and makes good use of it; he clearly connected with the poets he interviewed on a level that allowed them to speak with the candor and power that they did. Rufo understands that social media is important. He accidentally didn’t record the hour-long phone conversation he had with Bhanu Kapil, but the emails they exchanged thereafter were strange and wonderful and she sent him to a green lake near his childhood home and warned him not to not drink the water there. Rufo’s life is traveling in interesting circles and the audience, for however brief a moment, fell into one of those circles, as Rufo clicked through his multi-media presentation, which included written words on the screen as well as his own reading out loud in the light of a small desk lamp. Sometimes our lives overlap in such lovely ways.