Linh Dinh

What I Usually Say to my Students

Written at the request of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who’s compiling an anthology of “micro essays about approaches to teaching poetry”:
Hoard your time, since you’ll need it to be alone to think and to write.
Be frugal, since it’ll allow you to work less and have more time to think and to write.
Try, as best you can, to have an overview of what’s possible in writing, the various strategies attempted throughout history, throughout the world.
Identify the writers or works you admire the most, and read them very slowly, as many times as necessary.
Have faith that you will get better at thinking and writing, and that people will notice it, even if stingily and reluctantly, since you’re not entitled to any attention.
Be prepared to be disappointed over and over.

01.01.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Linh Dinh

Faits Divers de la Poesie Americaine et Britannique,

an anonymous blog inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Nouvelles en trois lignes:
In the middle of a reading, the last on his Bretagne tour, M. Antin caught fire. This was at the beach house of Mme Scalapino and family, in the middle of a long sentence. “His reputation as a literary figure is forever assured,” said Mme Perloff, in tears.
According to bystanders, M. Simic was, for unknown reasons, walking and whistling down a dark street in a questionable neighborhood of Nancy. The homeless poet known locally as Fork-Face jumped from the shadows, stabbing him fifty-four times in the legs.
The poet Mme Peacock was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.
A nervous graduate student addressed the Professor: “How is Language poetry really radical, etc. when it’s now the most academically dependent formation since the New Criticism?” Down rushed M. Perelman from the dais, biting off the little rat’s ear.

12.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (82)

Linh Dinh

Write This Way

A while back, I received an email soliciting a poem for a webzine I’d never heard of, but new journals sprout up all the time, some of them even good, and I almost always contribute when asked by an editor. After a week, however, she wrote that she could not print my piece because, well, she had an aversion to certain words. I told her, “Don’t worry about it,” but I was frankly annoyed since she obviously had never read my poetry. If she had, she would immediately see that I embrace every word in the English language, as many as my untrepanned skull can hold, that I freely mix high and low in the same reasonably-fragrant-yet-still-funky tub, that I believe there is the right place and time for every utterance. So here’s a friendly suggestion for editors: Don’t solicit poems from people you haven’t read. Is that too unreasonable? Also: Don’t dictate how a solicited piece is to be written. Poets aren’t advertising writers! I bring this up because a curator recently asked me, for chump change, $200, to write a 200-to-250-word essay, press release to “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” a group show opening on January 23 in Chelsea, Manhattan. “It would function as another art work in the exhibition, creating a loose narrative or atmosphere for the physical objects,” he explained. After I sent my piece, however, he responded, “I fear it may run antithetical to the exhibition, which explores interior and meditative states. It’s true that the world is falling apart and far from calm, but does it not make the desires expressed in Stevens’ poem even more urgent and necessary?” I told him to forget about it. To waste less time, I should learn how to say no more often. My short take on the Stevens:

12.09.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (34)

Linh Dinh

from The Lower Half,

a sustained meditation, symposium on the body’s nether regions:

Judith Schaechter, 2008, pencil on paper.

12.03.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Linh Dinh

Clear Cutting

To do five readings, I went from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Portland, then back to San Francisco. I slept in five homes, two hotels and two trains. I saw old friends, made many new ones. The sweetness and generosity I encountered upset my habitual guardedness. On an Amtrak between Klamath Falls and Eugene, I chatted with Jack D. Fir, not his real name, who worked in a sawmill in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, for 31 years before it went out of business, thanks to the spotted owl brouhaha, he said. “These environmentalists live on the East Coast, never been out here, so they don’t know how much forest we have. Just look for yourself,” he indicated with a nod. “You can cut them responsibly, and they’ll grow back.”
Many old growth trees are already rotted in the center, he explained, his right index finger drilling into a C formed by his left hand, so a storm would knock them all down. Wasted. “Since our logging industry is mostly dead, we have to buy lumber from overseas, from people who really don’t give a hoot about the environment.” With sawmill rotting by the river, Jack got hired by Safeway, but business is down, the town depressed and what’s worse, many people would rather drive 60 miles to shop at a Walmart. The fishing industry is also kaput. Without logging and fishing, the town opened a retirement home, a golf course and a casino, tried to attract tourists, which worked for more than a decade, but thanks to high gas price and the national recession, few people visit anymore. At 60, Jack has two years of mortgage left. “I just hope Safeway doesn’t go bankrupt. At my age, it will be hard to get hired again. I don’t want to move to the city to find another job.”
Sitting in the lounge car, we stared through large windows at the blonde fields, viridian evergreens and another snow-tipped mountain. Canadian geese suddenly infested a small patch of sky. The winding lake seemed short of water. Even at four thousand feet in November, there was no snow, which wasn’t right. “They might just turn me into a wafer, you know, a cracker,” Jack chuckled. “Do you know that Charlton Heston’s film, ‘Soylent Green’?”

11.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Linh Dinh

Reading San Francisco

11.22.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Linh Dinh

Reading Santa Cruz

11.11.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS