OTHER POETRY
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THƠ KHÁC
Khế Iêm
OTHER POETRY
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THƠ KHÁC
A Bilingual Edition
Ấn Bản Song Ngữ
Translator J. Do Vinh
Consulting Editor Richard H.Sindt
Tan Hinh Thuc Publishing Club
2011
Tan Hinh Thuc Publishing Club
P. O. Box 1745
Garden Grove, CA 92842
World Wide Web Site
http://www.thotanhinhthuc.org
© 2009 by Tan Hinh Thuc
All rights reserved
Cover art: Inspired by the poem A Row Of People by Lê Thánh Thư
Cover design: Lê Giang Trần
Printed in The United States of America
Other Poetry
By Khế Iêm
Translator: DoVinh
Consulting Editor: Richard H. Sindt
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009942301
ISBN 978-0-9778742-4-8
OTHER POETRY
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THƠ KHÁC
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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Meaningfully selecting a number of poems from the first phase of Vietnamese New Formalism poetry prepares this form of poetry for a new period of changes. This prepara-tion is necessary so the next generation can create their own styles and contents. As such, each poem in this collection is a small gift for readers, young poets, and old friends with whom we have collaborated and shared our enthusiasm and concern for this new form of poetry. We hereby gratefully acknowledge the contributions of poet and translator J. Do Vinh, editor Richard H. Sindt, poet Stephen John Kalinich, Mr. Michael Estelle, writers Phạm Kiều Tùng and Dương Tất Thắng, painters Đinh Cường, Lê Thánh Thư and Nguyễn Đại Giang, and poets Nguyễn Đăng Thường, Đỗ Minh Tuấn and Nguyễn Hoàng Nam.
Thơ Khác • 8
CONTENTS
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MỤC LỤC
Acknowledgment
8
Thư Cảm Tạ
122
Khe Iem’s Selected Poems: An Introduction 16
Giới Thiệu Tuyển tập Thơ Khế Iêm
123
Frederick Feirstein
Author’s Notes
20
Ghi Chú của Tác Giả
128
New Formalism And A Story
23
Tân Hình Thức và Câu chuyện Kể
130
Boxes
24
Cái Hộp
131
Stairs
26
Bậc Thang
133
Chairs
27
Những Chiếc Ghế
134
Blank Verse
28
Bài Thơ Không Vần
135
The Dining Set
30
Bộ Bàn Ăn
137
9 • Other Poetry
Pages (From a Book)
31
Trang Sách
138
Life Story
33
Chuyện Đời Kể
140
A Saying
35
Câu Nói
142
Illusion
36
Ảo Tưởng
143
A Death On Television
37
Cái Chết Trên Truyền Hình
145
Refrigerators
39
Tủ Lạnh
147
The Black Cat
40
Con Mèo Đen
148
Between Who And Who
41
Giữa Ai và Ai
149
The Woman
42
Người Đàn Bà
150
A Cigarette
43
Điếu Thuốc Lá
151
The Story Of Your Life
44
Chuyện Đời Anh
152
The Afternoon
46
Buổi Chiều
154
The Morning
47
Buổi Sáng
155
Us
48
Chúng Ta
157
Dark-Skinned Girl
49
Cô Gái Da Đen
159
The Girl In The Mirror
51
Cô Gái Soi Gương
161
Suffering
52
Khổ Đau
162
A Row Of People
53
Một Hàng Người
163
Sadness
54
Nỗi Buồn
164
Tsunami
55
Tsunami
166
A Dead Bird
57
Con Chim Chết
168
On The Spur Of Moment
58
Tức Cảnh
169
A Drama
59
Vở Kịch
170
Thoughts
60
Ý Nghĩ
171
11 • Other Poetry
Talk
61
Nói
172
TV Script
64
TV K ý
173
Readings Of “The Song Of A Warrior’s Wife”
66
Đọc Chinh Phụ Ngâm
176
Many Faces
68
Đa Bản Mặt
178
Quatrain
69
Tứ Tuyệt
179
Negative
71
Âm Bản
180
The Poem Searches For The Poem
70
Bài Thơ Đi Tìm Bài Thơ
181
A Celebration of the Silence
by Stephen John Kalinich
74
Ngợi Ca Sự Im Lặng
182
Bud weis er – drawing
78
by Lê Thánh Thư
185
Bud weis er – drawing
77
by Đinh Cường
186
Bud weis er – drawing
79
by Nguyễn Đại Giang
187
Thơ Khác • 12
Khế Iêm – design
80
by Nguyễn Đăng Thường
188
Khế Iêm – drawing
81
by Đinh Cường
189
Introduction To Vietnamese New Formalism Poetry 84
by Khế Iêm
190
Tân Hình Thức Nhắc Lại – 10 Năm
How To Read
95
by Nguyễn Hoàng Nam
200
Cách Đọc
Heaven and Earth Amidst Storms
102
by Khế Iêm
206
Thuở Trời Đất Nổi Cơn Gió Bụi
Biography
122
Tiểu Sử
243
Ghế Và Người
216
Kịch
Giải Mã Thơ
229
Nỗi Khắc Khoải Thời Gian Và Ngôn Ngữ
Đỗ Minh Tuấn
Cover Art
Inspired by the poem of A Row Of People By painter Lê Thánh Thư
13 • Other Poetry
Thơ Khác • 14
ENGLISH
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KHE IEM’S SELECTED POEMS: AN INTRODUCTION
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Frederick Feirstein
Robert Frost said that reading a poem in translation is like kissing a girl through a handkerchief. What is most difficult is not being able to hear the poems in a foreign language. Yet in translation we can get the structure, imagery and meter of the poem, and these will give us a feeling of what the poet is trying to convey emotionally.
This is the case with Khe Iem’s work. Via the Internet, I have heard a few poems of his poems in Vietnamese, which gives me some sense of how lovely are their seven-tone melodies. I wish I had a CD of many more. But what he is doing metrically becomes clear through translation. Interestingly enough, the meter reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations from the Chinese in which he uses the seven- syllable line with the repetitive technique of assonance that he learned from the French. In Khe Iem’s poetry he similarly uses five, seven, eight syllable lines that repeat key words and uses alliteration also for repetition which is very effective in ways poems in Old English (also a monosyllabic language like Vietnamese) can be.
The lines are limited to 5-8 monosyllabic words in four-line stanzas with or without enjambment, which sometimes creates a counterpoint between symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns. The use of enjambment also allows Khe Iem to write short narrative poems which depend on continuity of thought Thơ Khác • 16
and feeling. This flow is made easier by the plain diction he uses which The New Formalism in America considers important.
Khe Iem often deals with the reliability and indefiniteness of the narrator and the reliability of what is being narrated. For instance, he ends “Boxes” this way: “… but i am about to / say, as i have said the things that i have / said, regardless, it is better to have /
been than not to be, but those are not things / that i wish to say.”
In “Chairs”, the poet tells us what chairs are not and are until we lose the word “chairs” in an attempt to find its concrete reality.
Khe Iem accomplishes this by the end of the poem after a whirl-wind of words about chairs: “... chairs that / are not far away, chairs beyond / all things; chairs that are just / what they are chairs.
I am a psychoanalyst as well as a poet and am treating a young poet who was trying to express to me what he had no verbal expression for. He wanted to know if I understood what his wordless experience was like. I read “Chairs” to him, and he said, “That is exactly what I feel.” He then proceeded to imitate the poem himself in various ways.
Three of Khe Iem’s best poems using reliability / unreliability (in a carefully organized book) are “The Dining Set”, “Pages (From A Book)” and “Life Story”. Although he explores the uncertainty of reality where time and space lose their boundaries, he returns us to reality in almost a Zen-like way by the end of these poems.
One of the most moving poems in the book is a narrative, “A Death On Television”, in which “The woman sees the death of her own son / on the screen but does not believe that her / son is dead, and even though the news came like / a storm about the death of her son, she / does not believe what she saw …”
This is all too common an experience for the survivors of trau-ma. Leon Klinghoffer, a family friend, was one of the first public, Western victims of contemporary terrorism. He was thrown 17 • Other Poetry
off the cruise ship the Achille Lauro in a wheelchair. When his wife Marilyn was interviewed about it, she said she had such a sense of unreality when she watched the event on television that she momentarily felt she just was watching a television show.
This experience partly is the result of the blurring of boundaries in our media-saturated age. It is a central theme in Khe Iem’s work done seriously and sometimes even comedically, as in his poem about a Budweiser beer commercial, which il-lustrates the attempts of advertisers to enter our unconscious.
Khe Iem is one of the leaders of his own literary movement in which several poets whose work he anthologizes* follow his style and the ways he perceives reality / unreality. The movement is called Vietnamese New Formalism – the newness partly being the use of colloquial diction in combination with enjambed or end-stopped blank verse. He traces the origin of the term to a name given to an aspect of Expansive Poetry, the movement Frederick Turner and I started to open up American poetry, then restricted to the free-verse confessional lyric. As I have pointed out in my essay “After The Revisionists”, there was nothing new about The New Formalism, that it simply was a return to a tradition discarded by several of the Modernists and Postmodernists. Khe Iem sees this clearly as well.
I have not only disavowed what our imitators have made quaintly formal but have emphasized that Expansive Poetry is simply one historical literary movement like Modernism and Postmodernism.
I expect that Khe Iem, being such an original poet, might find yet another new way to articulate and perhaps expand what he and his followers have been doing. Personally, I would like to see, if they already doesn’t exist, very long narratives which the form allows for. Turner, for instance, has written three book-length narratives.
I am very interested in what Khe Iem’s movement not only is doing in his poems but is explicitly stating in prose. In his “Introduction to Vietnamese New Formalism Poetry”, he has de-Thơ Khác • 18
fined clearly the main characteristics of his movement. He also emphasizes one of its broader goals in saying: “The purpose of New Formalism poetry is to propel Vietnamese poetry onto the international stage. That is why translation is emphasized to seek readers from different languages and cultures.”
From what I have read of his work and the translation of his allies, Khe Iem seems to me to be accomplishing that. He has his own press and is translating some of our work into Vietnamese. He quotes a letter from the website www.thotanhinhthuc.
org that says: “Come join us in this small, yet warm corner of poetry. Let us raise a glass and toast each other in this meeting of minds.” And so my glass is raised and I congratulate Khe Iem on his excellent book, his anthologies, and essays.
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Footnotes
* “Blank Verse”, Tan Hinh Thuc Publishing club 2006, 64 Vietnamese poets. And “Poetry Narrates”, Lao Động Publisher, Viet nam and Tan Hinh Thuc Publishing club 2010, 21 Vietnamese poets.
19 • Other Poetry
AUTHOR’S NOTES
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This is my first collection of poetry translated into English. I had previously published two collections of poetry, Thanh Xuan (rhyming) and Dau Que (free verse), in Vietnamese only. This new collection has an entirely different style. I have always composed in Vietnamese, a language that permits me to express the art and spirit of poetry – it is a language that I love, and my mother tongue. However, as an immigrant to America, I also love my new-found land. And that is my motivation to labor: to introduce American poets and avant guard movements to my Vietnamese readers, to seek new compositions that can easily allow translations, and to effectively introduce Vietnamese poetry to American readers. I have previously written of these techniques and have refined them. I have introduced Vietnamese readers to the theories of Chaos, Fractal Geometry, and the application of Butterfly Effect, feedback and iteration, in that poetry which imbues natural rhythm. Of course, in order to produce works of quality to our satisfaction, a long period of time is required.
Let us look back on American poetry in modern times, from Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and e.e. cummings at the first half of the 20th century, then the later half, with Charles Olson until the avant guard poetry movement of L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e Poetry in the 1980s, which Paul Hoover calls the post-modern American poetry. But I was excited about the New Formalism, Expansive poetry and Slam poetry coming next, and peaking in the 1990s.
Thơ Khác • 20
Expansive Poetry has revived poetic forms to balance the dominance of free verse poetry. Furthermore, Expansive Poetry and Slam Poetry utilize common language and thus has freed American poetry from academia in order to communicate the poetic expression to a wider, more general audience. This development is similar to Vietnamese poetry from classical to modern times; its main function was to serve the nobility and intelligentsia. Thus a revolution was required in order to usher in a new century. Poetry today no longer has the important effects of past centuries because information technology has captured the time and attention of the public with many other things. However, it is ironic that poets have sprung up in abundance everywhere and at all times. I believe that poetry’s hidden potentials have not subsided, but have actually increased because poetry has the ability to bring people back to the realities of life, and to balance out the illusory existence of cyberspace created by the Internet.
Regarding this collection of poetry, there are poems, like “Readings Of The Song Of A Warrior’s Wife” or “TV Script”, which require an accompanying essay in order for the reader to better understand the poems. Some composition could not be translated into English because its essence is grounded in the Vietnamese language, such as the drama “Chairs and People”, an essay about my poetic developments by the literary critic Do Minh Tuan. This collection of poetry is introduced by Frederick Feirstein, to whom I am grateful and honored. It is these small accomplishments that have given us the much needed exposure. These achievements have been the contributions of many: writers, authors, translators and poets who composed in this new form and beyond; also the readers, critics and essayists who collaborated with The Journal of Poetry ( Tap Chi Tho) throughout its 10 years of existence (from 1994 to 2004). I beg your indulgence to allow me to collectively thank you all.
21 • Other Poetry
I am also indebted to and grateful for the contributions of editors Dr. Carol Compton, Angel Saunders, Richard H. Sindt; American poets Alden Marin, Frederick Feirstein, Frederick Turner, Michael Lee Johnson, Rick Stansberger, Stephen John Kalinich, Tom Riordan; English poets James Murphy, Paul Henry, and Australian poet Phillip A. Ellis for their collaborations which have assisted me tremendously.
Thơ Khác • 22
NEW FORMALISM
AND A STORY
While I sit sipping my coffee
on the curbside and telling my
story passed down the generations
telling a story like the story
told by every generation,
about a woman and her sorry
brood (on a corner of a city
known as the place of death, on a
corner known as the place of life),
drawn in by dark lines of charcoal;
broken curves, ugly shadows of
old photographs, like today and
tomorrow and the day after
tomorrow, and that’s about it,
who knows if the woman and her
sorry brood, still telling the story
that has been told by so many
others, nothing different from
the story, the story that tells
itself, even though there is no-
thing beside the story that tells
itself, including the woman
and her sorry brood, stepping out-
side of the story being told.
23 • Other Poetry
BOXES
The trash upon the streets, the rags upon the streets, the thrown-away boxes upon
the streets, that cannot be argued with; and i am about to say the things that i
am about to say but i keep saying
the things that i have said, that i am crowded in a thrown-away box, as i am crowded
upon the streets; unable to step outside of the box, just as the box is unable
to step beyond me; like the boxes that
hold old shoes the boxes that hold old clothes, the boxes filled with vanity items,
the boxes lost and confused, as i am
lost and confused; boxes telling old stories, boxes repeating themselves, retelling
old stories, such images, appearing then disappearing, such realities, appearing
then disappearing, such unfortunate
events, such unhappiness, such pasts, and as such, as such, as such; carton boxes, plastic wraps, soft nylon, personas of cartons, of plastic wraps, of soft nylon like trash, like rags upon the streets, scattered as such, miserable as such; but i am about
Thơ Khác • 24
to say the things that i am about to
say, as i have said the things that i have said, regardless, it is better to have
been than not to be, but those are not things that i wish to say.
25 • Other Poetry
STAIRS
Stairs connecting many floors, stairs leading to many ports, stairs and footsteps; footsteps within me some pigeon-toed, from the city to the open sea; footsteps within me
bleeding a lifetime of nomadic
wandering, though I have never lived
the life of a nomad; this is to
allude to the fact that i am a
fragment of the past, crushed by butterfly wings, cast away to become exiled in
strange lands; no different from the stairs and the footsteps, appearing and then
reappearing, fallen into chaos; because
it isn’t the stairs connecting many
floors, stairs leading to many ports, and footsteps within me still echoing sounds drawing me eerily closer in fact;
I do not wish to speak an iota
more of what I am speaking, the footsteps and the stairs are coming to a close here.
Thơ Khác • 26
CHAIRS
Chairs not of the same colors,
chairs not used for sitting,
the words for chairs, not chairs; chairs that can be touched, chairs that can
be called names, chairs that are
indeed chairs, that are not chairs;
chairs that can never be drawn,
chairs that can never speak, chairs
that can never be had,
because they are chairs that
never change their form, chairs that
can never be misplaced or
lost, chairs that are not present;
chairs, alas, that is what they
are indeed chairs, alas, not
of the same colors, chairs, alas
not used for sitting; chairs that
are not far away, chairs beyond
all things; chairs that are just
what they are chairs.
27 • Other Poetry
BLANK VERSE
In memory of writer Hoàng Ngọc Tuấn (1947-2005) You came to see me every Friday
as if everyday was a Friday and
on other days you went to other friends
as if for other friends everyday
was another day, until one day I
suddenly disappeared, like every
Friday disappeared into another
day, like one life disappearing
into another life, I disappeared
from you, you disappeared from me because I was swept up into a life of exile,
and you were forever lonely, forever
homeless, forever remaining, and I
did