Linh Dinh

Hồ Xuân Hương

In 2000, John Balaban published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. On the cover is a bare-breasted woman, presumably Oriental, hiding her face behind a gong or a wok. Introducing her, poet, not the hot chick, Balaban writes that “for her erotic attitudes, Hồ Xuân Hương turned to the common wisdom alive in peasant folk poetry and proverbs,” and that “common people [...] could hear in her verse echoes of their folk poetry, proverbs, and village common sense,” but Balaban never admits that these Hồ Xuân Hương poems are really a part of the folk tradition. I should point out that the average Vietnamese is also unwilling to let go of the legend, the juicy tale of a concubine penning racy and even proto-feminist poetry, but the facts don’t support it. Who was Hồ Xuân Hương?

05.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Linh Dinh

Missoula, Missoula

I hope you’ll enjoy Missoula–it’s an interesting place to live for a lot of reasons, particularly as the locus for various collisions and overlaps– like the “redstate” libertarian / progressive-environmentalist overlap, and the liberal conservationist / hunter-fisher overlap, and the semi-wilderness animal habitat / suburban-urban development overlap, and so forth and so on. Makes the East Coast seem positively banal. [Youna Kwak in a 1/15/08 email]
I think Missoula is a great little town — it’s also where I got the largest audience of my life, debating Baudrillard in front of 600 people. [Ron Silliman in a 3/5/08 email]
Do poetry readings represent the dying or the mourning? Do they affirm the power of community? Or do they affirm the total indifference the world feels towards community, i.e. affirming the futility of gathering? [Brandon Shimoda in a 5/14/08 email]

I just spent four months at the University of Montana as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet, teaching two classes. Before coming to Missoula, population 60,000, I knew next to nothing about it. The temperature was -4F when I arrived, but it was a dry cold and not really that bad. Except for a compact, walkable downtown, the town seemed spread out, a suburban sprawl surrounded by snowy mountains, smooth and moderately sloped, not rugged and vertical like those on Montana postcards. Arriving from flat eastern Pennsylvania, I thought they were dramatic enough. Say Montana and many people will think of General Custer, Evel Knievel and the Unabomber, but David Lynch was also suckled, awed and (de)formed by it. Born in Missoula, Lynch remembers growing up in the Northwest Inland Empire:

05.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Linh Dinh

Some Writings in English by Foreign Poets

The dolphins from your rope
by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl (Iceland, born 1978)

I have come from Europe, bearing the dolphins!
I tell myself: “Oh say can you see, you could have
saved a lot of money – these are mere cinema replicas -
the grocer is korean, the streets are hassidic
and the skyscrapers are huge – the poets
are playing dolphin-God, while showering
in splendour the muffins have arrived”
except of course
if the animated Bambi debate arouses pastoral passions
as dr. Jafre A. Dollar helps you develop godly character
and the movies are cheaper
soothingly, for lo I have come,
bearing you all the dolphins!

05.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS