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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Let Light Form

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Let Light Form." In 2008, the writer Nam Le came out with his debut, a short story collection titled The Boat. In the opening story, the main character reads like the fictional alter ego of Nam Le himself. They're both Vietnamese, Australian, and, at one point, a writing student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. In the story, a friend at the workshop tells our fictional Nam Le, "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. You could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time." So, in the rest of the collection, Nam Le sets out to do exactly the opposite. The stories are about people whose lives are about as far as possible from his own. A Colombian hitman tasked with killing his friend. A young women's rights activist who returns to her native Tehran. A little girl in Hiroshima trying to survive after the bomb took her family. And then, by the time you no longer expect it, Nam Le delivers what his friend at the workshop said he should: A harrowing story about Vietnamese boat people. It's now 16 years later, but Nam Le is still chewing on his friend's advice. "It is good marketing," people kept assuring him, "if you, a Vietnamese Australian writer, write about Vietnamese things, especially about trauma. Your books will sell." But what does that even mean, "writing about Vietnamese things?" He decided to find out in a poetry collection titled 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem. In these poems, Nam Le writes about language and history and trauma, but also about math and glaciers. And why not? Because, as he writes in one of his poems, "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not, you won't let me not." The poems start with Vietnamese identity, but quickly open up in a vast field of questions. What does it mean to be a person? How do we know ourselves? How do we tell the story of ourselves? And how do we let this story go? And when finally ourselves have been ground back to cells and fallen apart into atoms, who do we become then? But before we dive off the deep end, let's start in a more prosaic place. I was curious to know how Nam Le made his way from his debut collection of short stories 16 years ago, to the collection of poems he published today. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: You know, your first book, The Boat, was just such a runaway success and it was translated everywhere, and it was everywhere. And you became this name. And I don't know how you feel about fame and stuff you know, but the fact that you chose to write a poetry collection next, I wonder, was that deliberate? Like, did you want less attention?

Nam Le: Well, I guess the thing that I can say, which will not be very controversial in our household, is I am a contrary person. (LAUGHS) I don't like being told what to do, what to think. I don't like to do what other people are doing, certainly not for the sake of it. And I think when I look back, you know, when everyone was writing novels, I was writing short stories. And when other short story writers were writing linked collections or novels in inverse, I went for the hodgepodge approach, the dog's breakfast approach, to structuring a collection. And nowadays, as I'm sure you know, so many poets are moving into prose, into novels and essays and memoirs, and I'm going very happily into the other direction. So, you know, clearly I'm following the market and where the energy and the capital is by writing a book-length poem. But it is a hard question. And the basic answer, I guess, is just that I'm slow, and writing is hard, and I'm hard on myself. I demand certain things from my work. I haven't stopped writing. I've written a lot and continue to do so in different forms. But I certainly didn't wanna publish something just for the sake of it. And to me, the whole line of questioning veers—by talking about success and, you know, following up the success, and the tacit expectation of readers, etc., legitimate expectation or otherwise, or annoyance or irritation that I've taken so long— it's also, to me, the language of the market you know, of optimizing returns or capitalizing on brand, the vocabulary of commerce. And I guess you're right, in the sense that I try as much as I can to quarantine the work that I'm doing away from that, and sort of concentrate on the imperatives of the work, which are hard enough on a first principle level, I always think. That it takes so long to actually put down into words, something that approximates what you mean, and comes as close to getting that across as you can. And it's very carefully calibrated. It's like a balancing act with ambiguities and contradictions and antinomies, and it's all overlaid, and it's very unstable. And for me, talking about that stuff has always been really, really difficult, because it just feels like a completely different register of thing. And it feels like it endangers the thing, to a certain extent, too.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like you have to explain yourself for the fact that it's been a few years?

Nam Le: You know, it's funny, I do, because it's come up in pretty much every conversation that I've had about it. And I find that interesting in many ways, because as we said before, it certainly invokes an expectation, which I think is one that is somewhat at odds with the process and the imperative and the timeline of art. You know, art is something that takes its own time. And also art and the body of art that an artist does, to me, it's not only what is extruded into the public sphere, normally via commercial apparatus. It's also everything that happens between, beneath, and during that time, as well. Everything that an artist writes or makes, and everything they read and every discussion that they have, that all is absorbed into the body, the corpus that is the art. So for me, it is a bit strange. I found it stranger in Australia, to be honest, because maybe there's just less . . . There are fewer examples of writers who have taken their time between books. And a friend of mine said to me, "You know, you would never ask someone, 'why did it take you so long to get married?'" But people feel very, very, at ease, sort of asking a writer you know, why you took so long to publish your next book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, but that's why I find it so interesting. Because I did not ask you that question. I didn't . . . I mean, I had the question somewhere, and then I scrapped it because I was like, you know what, there is no way to ask that without it sounding accusatory, you know what I mean? You didn't disappoint me! So, like, I didn't mean to accuse you. And so I thought, let me just not even ask the question, because there's no way. The only reason that I had the question was it was sheer nosiness. It was not like, "what took you so long." But just . . . it was actually exactly what you say, like, that other things than, like, you know, output is also art-making. And so can you tell me about a few of the things that were really nourishing to you in that time that ultimately helped you write the poems that you did?

Nam Le: I have been nourished by writing, you know, I've continued to write. I'm writing a novel that I've been writing for some time, but every time I looked at what I'd written, I would always find a reservation or a niggle that something was not fully honest or sincere or laid out in a way that felt right to me about what I was doing. But I'm well past the point of striking while the iron is hot or anything like that—like it matters to me—and it matters to me that it sort of represents where I am in my head when I'm writing it. And there was a long time where I was being pretty tough on myself about not writing other things. So, after the collection for a few years, my head was in short story mode, and so I would find ideas and impetuses and immediately sort of you know, put them through the conversion machine of, you know, how might this sort of work in a short story? And then I realized, you know, I've got to stop doing this if I'm gonna be writing this novel, because there are different cadences, rhythms, structures, etc. And the same thing with poetry, I think I was too harsh on myself and I sort of said, hey, you know, just cut that out, dude. So that changed when I became a father, when I had Tess, my eldest, in ’16, and I just . . . I didn't have the headspace for quite some time, for the sustained long-form slog of the novel. And so I thought, look, I still need to engage really seriously with writing and with language, and I can't just get it through reading. And so I sort of let myself off the hook. And I started writing poems again. And in some ways, I think it saved my connection to writing, because I was doing things at the same intensity and the same level of application and seriousness. But I also got, like, the little payoff at the end when a draft of something was actually done. And then, lo and behold, it might even get published somewhere. And that sort of gave me that little fillip of energy to sort of . . . OK, this is doable. And, you know, these little nuggets of energy along the way are actually pretty useful for a dad of two young kids.

Helena de Groot: Hmm. Yeah. Do you want to read a poem?

Nam Le: Sure. Yeah. Do you have one in mind?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was thinking we could start with the poem on page eight, "[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]."

Nam Le: Got it, OK. Hang on, let me just find it.

Helena de Groot: And just . . . Sorry. I'm just gonna say one last thing. You mentioned the Fall, which you will not hear in the audio. It is capitalized. So, it's like the Fall of Saigon, right?

Nam Le: That's right. Yeah, in April 1975. That's right. But of course, it also . . .

Helena de Groot: Yes, the Bible.

Nam Le: Exactly. OK,

"[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]."

You can't go far wrong with violence.

You'll go far, my boy.

You'll cross oceans, my man.

Start with the Fall, go back or forth,

Through bombs or boats,

Across all the killing fields of thought.

You can't make it up

Because it's all yours — by blood.

By right. By wrong done to your blood.

Hold to trauma.

Even if it never happened to you

You may claim it.

Your blood contains it.

What happened to them —

Your parents, theirs, all their kin —

Who don't talk about it

Because of what happened to them —

Is yours to take and tell.

Their harm, your hurt.

You may write it. For it is written

In the very walls of your cells.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. So, in this poem, you know, it echoes some of the themes that were in the opening story in your collection. You know, where the main character is in this writers’ workshop, and a friend is like, "Oh, you could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. You could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time," you know? And, yeah, I'm just wondering what it was like to sit with that question, or sit with that sort of unease that you felt then and that you feel now, but sit with it in a poem. How was that different?

Nam Le: Yeah. For me, that question of how do you write about something that is yours in a way that is so complicated and barbed, namely the experience of your ancestors, the trauma that you may not have experienced directly, but that has sort of found its way into your lane, so to speak. And the infrastructure within which that story becomes a mode of accruing capital and credentials you know, is really interesting, and I think one of the things that has surprised me is that it's still very much a live point. And that when I wrote that story back in, it would have been 2004 or 2005, if you would ask me, you know, 20 years on, would this still be, you know, a live issue, I would have been surprised if you'd told me that it would, and in some ways, even more live, because that question, as we talked about before, of instrumentalization of the market, has become really, really activated. You know, like the very last line, for example "You know, it is written in the very walls of your cells," speaks to the difficulty of what we know and how we know. You know, there are studies out there that show that trauma can epigenetically change genetic expression through the generations, and that change can actually be seen and studied in the cellular makeup of offspring of trauma survivors. But a cell is also a thing that can constrict you and contain you. And I think that simultaneity, of something being so deeply intrinsic to you, being the captive apparatus within which you're meant to work, and then that work being conditioned by and rewarded. As long as it's sort of moving along those tracks. I think that's a really interesting bind that we've put ourselves in and that we're put in, and it's one that is still very much alive, as we say. And so to go to your question, I think what you can do in a poem is potentially enact these contradictions in a way that becomes a contained process of destabilization. So what I would hope most for is for a reader to come to this and to feel that they understand what the project of the poem is, and what the tone and the attitude of the poem is. And that might be different to different readers at the start. Some might say "oh, it's clearly satirical and snarky," and others might say "well, no, actually this is like, unbearably earnest." But then as we sort of go along, and maybe through second and third reads, hopefully, readers will sort of come to like a more, you know, inchoate and confused sort of apprehension of the thing.

Helena de Groot: I'm so glad that you bring up tone and attitude, because I had that question. With so many of the poems in your collection, I kept going back and forth and doubting my own initial reactions.

Nam Le: Oh, great.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah, because I do feel like in this poem, when I read it on the page—so without your intonation—I did read it more as satire. I did read it more in the vein of that guy in that short story who goes, you know, you could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing, you know, like I did read it more like that. But subsequent poems in the book, they went so far in the other direction, and I don't like using that word, "earnest," because it sounds like a negative thing, like you would only say earnest if you think it shouldn't be . . .

Nam Le: Maybe "sincere," because that's a word that is excavated as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. That word, "sincere" [is used] several times in your collection. But, you know, some of the poems . . . So, here it's almost like the way I read it, it was like well, "Can't go far wrong with violence. You know, you can always do that. If you want to write stuff, you know, why not just do that? You can write about the bombs, the boats, the killing fields, you know, like all that." And then in subsequent poems, you actually do that, and you do it so unflinchingly, and with such precision that, like, any semblance of a mocking tone or sort of a sardonic subtext were gone. And not just that they were gone. But I felt uncomfortable for ever having thought that you might have, you know, mocked something or made light of something. Do you know what I'm saying?

Nam Le: I'm so glad to—I'm so glad to hear you say that. The intention—and this is one of the reasons why it's been a really difficult book to extract, or to publish poems individually or separately, or even to read or talk about them separately, because none of the poems exists in isolation, like they all exist in the constellation of the other poems that exert pressure and influence and, you know, catalyze changes in them as they go along. And if there's anything that I can sort of, you know, throw up to the universe by way of what I would love in terms of readers coming to this book, is exactly what you've described. It's a process. It's not ever a settlement. It's not ever a certainty or a fixity. It's a process that is completely changing its positionality with each line, with each poem, certainly. And that changes everything that's been written before, and that is to come at the same time. And so that sense of being unsettled, it's not my prime intention at all in, you know, in writing anything like this. But I think it's a necessary—psychic field, you know, to almost sort of go in and irradiate yourself, so that you can sort of come out the poems accepting conflict and accepting, again, the simultaneity of different things, the antinomy of something being earnest and sardonic at the same time. Because this is how things are, you know, this is the experience of this project, of 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, is occupying all of these antonymous, contradictory, and uncomfortable sorts of spaces. And I guess the only honesty that I would sort of ask of myself through my writing life, I guess, is that I have to now also be honest with myself and with the readers about this whole ecosystem, you know, and not exploit or take advantage or free-ride on any of its valences without being really honest about it as well. So that, like you say, you sort of have to earn—I don't really like that word because it has transactory connotations—but you do have to earn the right to then say the thing that, in isolation, might have just been didactic or Hallmarky.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to a poem where the tone is different. You know, where the tone is much more, or at least was, in my experience of it, much more earnest and much more yeah, like, unflinching in that way. I was thinking of that poem called "Dire critical," which is—you have become a dad. It is very clear this is a dad joke. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: It's a good one, though. It's a higher-order dad joke. But it is . . . (LAUGHS) Yeah. So, I was thinking about that one. But if you think, no, there's actually another one where I feel like that you know, that's a better example, I'm open to suggestions, too.

Nam Le: No, actually, I'm very glad you chose that one. OK, shall I just go into it?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Nam Le: OK.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, one last thing. So, you know, because different languages use diacritics for different reasons. So, in Vietnamese, diacritics are about the tone?

Nam Le: That's right. That's exactly right, yeah. Each comes with a different sort of inflection or intonation.

Helena de Groot: And how many do you have in total?

Nam Le: It's complicated.

Helena de Groot: Oh, OK. OK. Sorry. Alright. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: I don't wanna, like, you know, bring disgrace to my race. So, there are just briefly, there are, I think there are five diacritics of tone. There are differences between North and South. And then there are like different letters that are permutated with different diacritics as well like that are attached to the letters. And so there are four of those.

Helena de Groot: OK.

Nam Le: I think. But here we go.

"[15. Dire critical]"

All in the tone.

Give us each day our diacritics — our low and high, fall and rise, our horns and holds:

Flat we are without.

(You like that, no doubt.)

Give us our dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng:

For ours is not your flat euphony

Your squeezed, frictioned speech

But full mouth music:

Tripping of water over stone-carved lingas

Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth

Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains
or reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies
along the Baie d’Along

Coloratura descant of US bombs

Scintillae of mother’s ivory comb as it falls
in the ivory mirror
as if through water
as if through silk
through your long black hair.

Má (high rising) is mother; is also cheek, as in slack of flesh

made gaunt, sallow from malnutrition, as in from agent orange,

from yellow rain, from grief, as in to which

I turn my face. As in turn the other.

Now grave your voice: mà falls to but, fell conjunction

breaking what it binds — negating — making negative —

glyph fallen away now as ma becomes ghost, as in hungry,

as in of your unborn child — my unborn sister —

by defoliants consumed — body burden negating body

burden — in your corrupted womb.

And devil too, as in turn that famous photo

of Hồ Chí Minh’s face upside down to see: a cipher,

see, as signed by the tilde in mã. As in we are,

all of us, hooked, gaffed, dipped long and held down

into the always end — mả — tomb.

To me, though, in the south that is my name, mother is mẹ.

The dot below signifying nặng, as in heavy.

The voice, beginning at creak, at bottom, staying down,

at the edge, or mé, of low stridor: it is my son’s wheeze

(my son, whom I named peace)

after ingesting sesame, mè, which makes him hard to breathe,

and his tongue revolts. His skin revolts. It blisters into welts.

To say mẹ is to speak with a smile while from above

smiling white devils splash you with dioxin, with napalm,

setting the palms on pretty fire —

and you see your own mother’s lifelong poise

crack — mẻ — like lacquer on a burning mask,

you feel her seed of a daughter going hot inside you

and you feel her whole body foreign, future-tensed,

gathered to its fast, heavy, unhatched dot.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, it's so interesting how the language sort of slips into the violence like by free association. That before you know it, you're from this language lesson to this history lesson.

Nam Le: So, you're saying you read this as a straight sort of tonal application of what you were describing before?

Helena de Groot: I mean, yes and no. There's that part in italics, "Stone-carved lingas, rising tang of early season mango in the mouth." You talk about "silk curtains," "rice paddies," "mothers," "ivory comb," "long black hair." I read that—and forgive me if this is not how you meant it, and on top of that, insulting—but I read that as a cliché. (NAM LAUGHS) I was like, oh, these are all—you know how Roland Barthes has this essay in Mythologies where he sort of writes about like, oh, God, why is it always that, like you know, when they make a movie about—"they" meaning Europeans—make a movie about a country, a place, any place in Asia, why is it always like the fishermen are not people who are trying to make a living and do that in very specific ways, but it's always, like, all fishermen who are like on this placid lake, and there's like always some sort of explosive sunrise, and everything is sort of eternal and without context or history.

Nam Le: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And he sort of makes fun of that tendency of just sort of essentializing this kind of, like, Asian aesthetic or whatever, you know, and so this "rising tang of early season mango in the mouth," you know, like the way that there's this food writing, and then long hair and water and rice paddies. I was thinking, like oh, maybe this is sort of you hinting at, like, this is how we usually get—"we," another problematic word—get portrayed. But let me tell you that there is—I don't know, I feel like I'm talking myself into a hole here. But that's how I read it. So, I read that as, like, that is still sort of a part that is mired in irony. But around it emerges this kind of furious litany. Or that's at least how I saw it. You know . . .

Má (high rising) is mother; is also cheek, as in slack of flesh

made gaunt, sallow from malnutrition, as in from agent orange,

from yellow rain, from grief, as in to which

I turn my face. As in turn the other.

Anyways that's how I thought that—that it's almost like you get pacified by this gentle cliche, and then, bomb, you know, smacked with reality.

Nam Le: Well, Helena, just let excuse me (HELENA LAUGHS) while I, you know, swallow my offendedness over here.

Helena de Groot: I'm sorry. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: No, not at all. I am so grateful that you saw that. Because, for me, it was really obvious. And I sort of signposted it by putting it in italics. And obviously, the rest of the long poem returns to some of these tropes and identifies them as such, but also complicates them, or at least reclaims them, seeks to in different ways. You know, there was a time—I'm not proud of this particular thing—but there was a time when I would sort of refer, with my friends, to certain kinds of ethnic writing as mangolicious, because . . . (HELENA LAUGHS) As you say, you know. There was always a nice signpost. And apologies to anyone who has written, you know, serious and profound mango works . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I know it's so fraught. I feel like I can't say it. Yeah, totally. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: (LAUGHS) But at the same time, you know—and this is always everything at the same time—at the same time, these are profound, beautiful images, conceptions, self-conceptions. Because, of course, a lot of these cliches have been sort of drawn into and transmuted by "us," to use, you know, to use your pronoun, into a certain conception of self as well. And so that shouldn't be something that is automatically disdained or derided, either. This poem, to me, is really interesting in terms of its reception, because the few readers that I sent the poems out to—when they were done, but way before they were taken by any publishing house—people who I trust and respect to the nth degree, to sort of unpack all of the different valences and attitudes and registers of the poems, I think this one was one that really divided in terms of reception between Asian readers and non-Asian readers. I think for Asian readers—and I might be sort of being tendentious when I say this—but for Asian readers, for example, the notion of structuring a poem around tonality, around the sort of phonetic difference between an Asian language, or some Asian languages, and the English language, is a really easy, tired trope. It's almost—it's similar, in some ways, to just you know looking up a word in the OED, looking up all of its sort of etymologies and its usages, and then sort of just like easily.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, and there you have your lyrical essay, yeah.

Nam Le: And it's so easy to do. And that's not to say that there aren't extraordinary poems that are done that way. And I've taken great pleasure in diving deep into the OED. But, you know, among poets, there's this kind of a little bit of an eye-roll reaction to sometimes to that as being you know, the angle of profundity. And I think tonality is something like that to a lot of Asian writers as well. So, you know, you could take any word, any syllable, and just look up its different definitions depending on which tone it has. And then, just using the tools that you have in your hardy toolbox, just make a—really not that difficult, you know, collation or collection where you sort of, like, have those things coexist and, you know, "There are so many tensions, but there is a felicity of you know, simultaneity of meaning here. And you know, what about this and the other meaning?" You know what I mean? Like, it's quite . . . So, that was interesting to me. And I think the other thing which was interesting was that, you know, even in that section you just read for me, just packing it on, packing on Agent Orange and the yellow rain, you know, and yellow rain, obviously coming from, you know, not even that part of where I'm from, but sort of across the border in the same way that the stone-carved lingas are in a different part, like they're in Cambodia, and, you know, the yellow rain is on a different sort of border altogether. And to me it's kind of like, ah, you know, it's a mockery of where the untouchable or the taboo subjects of someone writing about their own pain really resonates. Those bits are always the most interesting bits to me. The bits where people feel like they can't question whatever is being asserted. When someone invokes a certain thing that is theirs, you know, however, that sort of deemed and posited. And so in the first story of The Boat, like, me using the My Lai massacre, I thought was really obviously also signposting, that this was the single event that means and signifies so much to a certain kind of American, you know, and it signifies you know, a watershed moment, but also a whole panoply of emotional cadences that then sort of had historical and policy effects afterwards. And so I thought that that was really obvious. But, of course, most non-Asian readers would never think to question that, and never did question that, because it was seen to be, you know, you don't, you don't fuck with that. So, in this case, I thought I was stacking on, you know, Agent Orange, yellow, yellow rain, grief. (HELENA LAUGHS) I thought OK, I'm making it very obvious. And then I'd talk to my friends and they would say . . . "Oh, no, I read that straight." And I thought that that was really interesting. None of which is to say that the poem is not straight, either. Like, the poem is extremely raw and does go there. You know, like I'm putting myself in my history and my story and my family in this poem. But to me it feels more, to use an outdated word, more honorable, just for me, that is, to do so with the carapace and a sense of the knowingness around it. You know, the stone-carved lingas and the mangoliciousness.

[BREAK]

Helena de Groot: Your work, you know, both your poetry collection and your short stories, it's clearly very well-researched. Like, a lot of work has gone into facts and knowledge. Whether you write a short story about an activist in contemporary Tehran, or an orphan right after the bomb on Hiroshima, or a hitman in Colombia, like, you get the lingo and you get the sort of the images, and a lot goes into that. And so I'm wondering, like . . . Well, I have so many questions about this, especially because it's so fraught, right? Like wow, you're just setting trap after trap for yourself. Like, you can so easily stumble, like you can do all the research in the world, but someone who's from there will probably see things that you don't see, or will see mistakes that you didn't see, despite all the research. So, let me ask you, how did you go about this? Since you know better than most people how fraught it is to say anything, you know, and have different people with more knowledge than you have read it too. How do you come to a standard that you feel OK with, without spending the rest of your life trying to verify these facts?

Nam Le: Yeah, I mean, it's a vexed question. Both, you know, internally and externally. Nothing—nothing— can survive a hostile or suspicious raid. Especially when the grounds of that raid are, you know, "this is not real" or "this wouldn't happen," or "this is something that is coming from the outside." And I think that when I think about what I'm interested in and where my sort of mind goes—and when I also think about what reality is, what representation is, what authenticity is—I find all of those terms so problematic. You know, the reason why I've written 36, 37 poems, talking about what a Vietnamese poem is, is because to me, there is no unity, there is no coagulation that is then able to be promulgated as the truth. You know, what is the voice of Vietnam? What is the voice of anything? You wouldn't say that America has one voice. You wouldn't say that confessional poetry has one voice. You wouldn't say that avant-garde poetry has one voice. So, for me, it's so important to try to preserve as much of the reminder that we are multiple and all capable, and that to read something through a suspicious or a gotcha kind of mindset is to A). completely eschew any chance of reading it as art, and B). it's always going to be a fruitless exercise, because it always reverts back to type. You know, when someone says, "Ah, well, an x person wouldn't say or do this or that wouldn't happen," aside from, you know, really obvious factual errors, what that does is it sort of just reverts to a median kind of representation or a sense of essentialization. And the secondary thing that I would say, is that when you write something, the great translation, the great transposition that happens is from whatever that thing is, into language. And language is so idiosyncratic, and it has its weird slants, and its weird rules, and it's steeped in, you know, violence, to be frank, and prejudice and bias. And it is so imperfect. It is so difficult to say anything that really approximates anything at all that is true, in my experience. That it doesn't matter, I mean, that's the big chasm that we're never successfully crossing, not the chasm of "Oh, well, W. 33rd doesn't actually have a 33rd because it skips from 32 to 34," or you know what I mean? Like, because they seem to be just completely different registers of understanding and reading.

None of this is to say that there isn't a responsibility, and an ethical responsibility, and a moral responsibility. But I think that responsibility is not only to a sense of veracity and a sense of, you know, researching things to make sure that is evinced in the work. But I think that that responsibility also has to redound to the writer thinking about the conditions of their writing, thinking about the conditions of the infrastructure around their writing practice and their writing industry. How they imagine things will be received, what clout or coin they might receive, or cultural capital by saying things in certain ways. What they're expected to say or assume to say. I think if a writer is not honest about that, then it's very, very difficult for them to not import some of that false consciousness into crossing that chasm of language.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm, yeah, and I mean, you know, you hint at this thing—like, of course it's hard to say something accurate about someplace that maybe we've never been, or we didn't grow up at least, or something. But, you know, then it's hard, as you said, you know, to say anything that's true at all, even about things that we supposedly are the experts on, like ourselves, you know.

Nam Le: And even if you were to just, say, a place, for example, let's say, you know, the local bagel shop down the corner, your experience of that bagel shop is guaranteed to be different to the next person's or the next person's or the next person's. What they notice would be different. What they remember would be different, and in many cases, probably inaccurate. So, to me, it's ludicrous to sort of think about, like, well, this is the essence of that bagel shop. And anyone who's not like a habitual, you know, customer of that bagel shop has no right to write about this. And if you're reading someone else, who you think you know has not been to that bagel shop writing about it from that lens, then you will never have a generosity of reading that would admit that there might be anything worth saying from that person's account at all.

Helena de Groot: But it's so attractive, right? Like, we so love doing that and feeling superior like that, right?

Nam Le: Yeah, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: I'm thinking of, there's this Belgian, you know, foreign reporter who lives in New York. So, he works for the Belgian broadcaster or like the Flemish broadcaster, but he lives here. And at some point, you know, he moved and he made this little audio story about the new neighborhood where he moved to, and he mispronounced the name of the neighborhood. And like it took everything I had—like, my mom sent me this, you know, she was like, "Look how nice." Like, you know, "you should listen to this, this is so interesting," you know? And I listened to it and I was like, I don't believe anything he says because he can't even pronounce Bed-Stuy correctly, you know? (LAUGHS) I mean, all I'm trying to say is, like, don't we just love that, you know, pointing out that someone else is wrong . . .

Nam Le: Because it's, I mean . . .

Helena de Groot: It's a deeper pleasure.

Nam Le: I'm not saying that you're doing this, but, I mean, I think there is a . . . How do I say this? I mean, you know, obviously, there is a notion of authority. And we like to pull it in for ourselves. We like to credentialize through our knowledge and through our experience. And, of course, that's part of who we are. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But then there's also an idea of, you know, tribalism, of using certain things to exclude, and also like this vexed notion of authenticity. And maybe that's at the heart of this, so . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Nam Le: You know, when I think about authenticity, I think authentic Thai cuisine or authentic merch from a particular company, etc. And, like, relatedly, the second context would be in the context of something being fake or forged, right? And so from the very, very start, you're dealing in a language of commerce and suspicion. And it's the perfect condition for dominance behavior and for exploitation. And that's, you know, without being honest about that or without sort of at least trying to . . . I mean, ideally, you would sort of move out of that register altogether, and sort of take the thing as it is. But if you can't do that—and who of us can—then at least be honest about, you know, who you are and where you're standing as you're coming to something.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, we’ve firmly landed in the stoner portion of this conversation. (NAM LAUGHS) So, I'm just going to go there. But, you know, what you're saying also about the slipperiness of self-knowledge. Like, are we even experts on ourselves? And do we ever feel solidly in command, you know, of any body of knowledge, even if that body of knowledge is us, you know? And one of the things that made me think of is, what happens to our sense of self when we change really radically? Like, for instance, in your case, you used to be a lawyer, and now you're not, and "lawyer," like it has a certain type of dress and it has a certain type of thinking about time, in a way, because you have to bill by the, whatever, 15 minutes or I don't know however long, you know what I'm saying?

Nam Le: Six minutes.

Helena de Groot: Like, there's all of this sort of culture around what it means to be a lawyer and to think of yourself as one, however at odds you are with that identity. And then, when you change, you know, and you're like, "I guess now everyone sees or thinks of me as a writer," where is the continuity? Am I still me? You know, like what? You know, was I not me then? Just looking back on sort of the radical changes that you've gone through—to say another thing, fatherhood. What is a period in your life when you most realized that you did not know yourself?

Nam Le: Jeez, Helena. There's no period, it's just all of it, all of the time. You know, I never really reposed too much of myself in lawyerdom, so it was not difficult to tear away from that. I guess just temperamentally, I've never really been too much of a joiner. I have liked to sort of preserve my ability to move, and in many cases my marginality. Again, it's really hard to think or talk about self without moving into the terrain of identity. And then identity is so closely linked now to a sense of brand as well. Not to be derogatory about identity, per se, but the sense of, like, always being aware that one has a public-facing self that is there to exploit and be exploited, to trade, to transact, and that the more unified and coherent that self is, the easier it is for that commerce to be transacted. And it's also more comfortable, because for yourself and for the people who engage with that, with that self or that brand or persona or a character or whatever it is, for the most part, people don't have an enormous capacity to dwell in the chaos and capriciousness and changeability of other people's souls. You know, that's just not something that we tend to spend a lot of time doing. We're not really practiced at it. So, I find it difficult to talk about strong senses of self for me. What I can relate to you is that it's terrifying to me how quickly I'm losing my memories. Not in a neurological way, touch wood. But just, you get to a certain point and you realize that there's probably less, you know, in front of you than before you. And you start reinterrogating, often through no volition, the stuff that you've already been through. And I am, you know, I've lost so many of the memories of things and people and experiences that have meant things to me when I try to recall them, they're, you know, invariably patchy, incomplete, and usually inaccurate if I care to verify them. And the reason why this is so hard for me is because, you know, I think we are all so assailable, you know, we think of ourselves as being sort of coherent, consistent and sovereign, you know, self-willed. But jeez, you know, a cloud floats across the sun, and that changes our mood, which changes, you know, the trajectory or the velocity of our trains of thought.

We're so assailable to—I mean, advertising, the most, in many ways, the most primary colored of influences, is all-powerful. You know, none of us are immune to it. Music, light, temperature. And so when I think about myself, I guess I am thinking of sense memories. I'm thinking of moments when I'm drifting off and I remember a certain angle of light or a certain, you know, feel of a certain velocity of wind against my skin, as wanky as that sounds, or a smell, a feeling, a presence, a memory of something that might be a memory of something else. And it just feels to me like, you know, when I actually question what that self is, I think about yesterday, last week, last year, or whatever. I'm just living in a hall of shadows, you know, and it's so murky and you're just blown around. So, you do cling to certain formulae of identity and they're important. But that by no means, the true core or skeleton of self to me, you know, like fatherhood would be one example that you brought up. I do cling to that when I think about who I am and how I am. But I know for a fact that my sense of fatherhood, as similar as it may be on many, many sorts of grounds to other people's experiences, does consist of those moments and sense memories and interstitial realities, I guess, that no one else knows about, and that I'm going to forget, and have already forgotten.

[BREAK]

Helena de Groot: Given that it's so hard to say anything true, what is your relationship to, you know, writing and self-knowledge? Do you feel like it gives you more self-knowledge?

Nam Le: Well, I think as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, that's in some ways—and maybe this is the most self-indicting, instrumentalized way of all—but in some ways, for me, writing is the ultimate crucible. It's the ultimate proving ground of what feels true to oneself, you know? If writing is—and I think it is—an articulation of consciousness, and if consciousness is, as we say, this very, very difficult thing to pin down, then, writing is the only test that I can think of where I can reliably—usually through the via negativa, to be honest, like what doesn't feel true, what rings false, what is quite a little bit alloyed or off . . . But, you know, when I'm trying to figure out, like, what it is like to be me and not just, you know, the slice of me that is expected or assumed, or there's still an ability of writing to ring true to oneself. And that can change, and sometimes it needs, you know, a whole larger constellation to hold it kind of in place, which is kind of what I've done in this book. But that's the only thing that works, in terms of that interrogation, in terms of that testing. And for me, that's why it just seems like a no-brainer that if you're in it seriously, then, of course, you're only doing it to say something true to you, and to be really honest about what that means, and when it's not happening. And that something, invariably, has a greater hope of speaking beyond the moment. And it can be something that you can stand behind, even as you know how provisional that you is.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm, I mean, one of the things that I love so much about poems, is that poems can be so weird. Like it's allowed, you know? And being a person is also very weird. So it seems like the correct tool for the occasion. You know what I mean? Of saying something true about what it's like to be me, to be a person.

Nam Le: I think that's right.

Helena de Groot: And especially, you know, I was sort of reminded that when I was reading the last poem in this collection, number 37, which is funny . . .

Nam Le: Spoiler alert.

Helena de Groot: Because it's—yeah. Oh, sorry.

Nam Le: Close enough, as they say.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, I sort of don't want to say anything about this poem. I want you to say something about it. Or if you don't want to say something about it, just read it. But, like, I would be happy to first hear about it, because it is such a profoundly weird, and, you know, it takes that idea, I feel, of—oh now, I'm saying something, I'm not saying anything, I'm shutting up now.

Nam Le: What can I say about that poem? I will say that when I had finished it, I felt as though it was the best thing that I'd written. And I used to be a huge fanboy of Tennyson, and still am in many ways, and there was a poem that he wrote called "Crossing the Bar" that he said he wanted to be the last poem of every collection of his work. And it's about, you know, crossing the bar, crossing into death or into afterlife. And in some ways, when I wrote this poem, I had the same sort of feeling about it. It's a poem that takes certain logics to their extreme. And it takes perspective by zooming way, way out. And the extremity of the logic and the perspective shows you something that is both completely barren and stark, and at the same time full of beauty and hope and capacity. And that also happens to be the place where life can start, can restart. And so to me, the idea of an outwash plain, I guess, to use the term, was one that both as a metaphor but also as a concrete thing—because I went up to the Arctic, to Svalbard, and saw some, and it really just . . . Yeah, it struck some sort of deep harmonics in me that I'm still trying to work out.

Helena de Groot: When did you go to the Arctic?

Nam Le: Jeez, I'm not quite sure, but some time—this is what I'm talking about—sometime in the last ten years, I'd say.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, and were you with a group or were you alone or how?

Nam Le: Yeah, it was this weird thing. It was an expeditionary residency, so it was sort of half scientists and half artists, and it was on a three-masted brigantine tall ship. And so a replica of, you know, tall ships from ages past. And so we were actually on this thing circumnavigating Svalbard from the north of Norway. Yeah, it was nuts.

Helena de Groot: And if you're in a place where everything is so different. Like English was not made for that place, let's just say.

Nam Le: Yeah, I think I mean, the cliche obviously is, you know, the further north you go, the more words for snow there are and . . .

Helena de Groot: Right, yeah, I don't know if that is true or not. Anyway, we don't have to talk about that. But, you know, like, I wonder what, you know, when you're there on that boat and you're looking and you're trying to take it in, did you come up to the limits of your own capacity for, not just description, but as a result seeing? Did you feel limited?

Nam Le: Yeah, I mean, all I felt was limited up there, to be honest. Like I—it was really interesting. And I love what you're saying about how culture shapes the capacity of language and the shape of language. You know, one example that I can think of in terms of just whiteness, I guess, is when there's commerce involved, when you need to sell paint, for example, then suddenly there's a proliferation of different words for white, because there's, you know, there's an impetus behind that. And some of the words are gorgeous . . .

Helena de Groot: Eggshell and ivory.

Nam Le: Right, but there are literally hundreds, you know, depending on which company and which paint swatch you're looking at. And so I was very much struck by, I think when I was up there—as you say, like you're looking out at this thing that gives either very little back or that fiercely reflects, you know, in every sense possible. What you're looking at, and all you end up doing or I end up doing, is thinking about representations, images, emotional conveyances of the Arctic, you know, while looking at the thing and thinking, should I be somehow trying to evacuate myself of this thing? Like there was one, there were moments when we would land, and every single artist on the residency would sort of dot themselves at a distance from each other. As long as you were in range of the guide with the rifles for polar bears, if that were to happen, and then everyone would, like, face out with their 45-degree slant of point of view. And then imagine that they were the only ones there. So, you know, you're there and you're in this weird, artificial sort of situation and moment. and you sort of somehow intuit or, you know, it's determined, deeply, culturally, the expectation that you need to have a solitary experience with the Arctic. And so everyone has positioned themselves to have that. And I remember looking out in my own little sort of slice of solitude. And I kept on thinking, I'm in a Coke ad, like, this is—I don't know what I'm meant to be thinking. I'm obviously meant to be having an experience of the sublime or some sort of transcendental something, but my mind was just like moving around, and as you say, like, I didn't have the language either. Like, I love the language of geology and topography, but I didn't have the language then. And partly what this poem was doing was me looking for that language, and what becomes true, I found with everything, became true in the writing of that poem, and also informed my experience in the Arctic, which was the more you look at something, the more you see. And it wasn't just a case of being able to name things and processes, but it was that sense of, you know, seeing a forest in a leaf. You know, you were there and then suddenly you would see this is a repository of time and light. And these are things that don't really do things by our human timetables. And it was in that sense looking sort of back through secondary lenses, it was boring for me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, do you want to read the poem?

Nam Le: Yeah, sure.

"[37. Post-racial / -glacial]"

If I must be something

let me be outwash plain

lowland

past glacier’s margin, glacier’s edge

thaw and drift convene

breathtaking arguments of light

over me

where what matter was argued

has long evaporated

Let what’s left be

left on me

spill spoil residue

sweat & naked chill

once passion has dragged

over —

Let me have been loomed

over, overwhelmed

and left and still

Here where the perfect thing’s

been and gone away

let me stay

I will accept anything

You

know that I know

my place, silt, sand, gravel, clastics,

clay — I am an open mouth

for Your waste

Glad I am O Lord Glacier

of Your leavings

fast-hold sediments scoria

sequences of laminae

all that long-held deep-time till

moved by Your own weight

You lay Your burden down instead

in slow flow / throe on rhythmite beds

I can be where You forget

Your reason unlearn Your compaction

of snow (which is breath) to firn

ice (which is rock) —

there is order beneath Your face

of frozen rock —

I can be entropy mine the cross-

reasons counter-actions the erring

(dis)orders of erosion

Well come all

and by any transport

out of irresistible

increase to slack stark

space

out of symmetry to splayed mess

take the air take the light see

the outer spread-out stars

and by any process

Melt and calve basal lodge

phasal sublimation

how could You who accumulate

but to ablate

apprehend all my forms of loss?

Stands of verglassed breccia

glisten like viscera

Dead-ice in disintegration

moraines maimed kames eskers

All the forms of collapse

present fluvial surficial

pock and pit

snowmelt sprawls the sediment flats

like dazzling lines of errata

See: if You let me

I will be a field of deposition

with things in it

for You for (un)sorting for strata

No that silver thaw

is sclera

and the glacier (come to think)

one glaucomatose blue eye

rebuffing every wave of light

its blue shy inlit paling —

like an error of sky exposure —

ghosting the iris as if

arrested by murder

Let what’s pure be

perturbed in me blue

gone keen in nervy brightness

imprismed by black brown

coils my ice-keeps ice-hoards

salted loess yellow

my distal drainages scored

tea green by rock flour ground

steeped at the wastage zone

Not what turns away light to see

but takes it in too washes its feet

changes

(its sheets) for it if You are eye

let me be aperture the clear

all-accommodating blink

that takes in flow retreat thaw

refreezing all of it all here

and — too — what all of it’s for

Nothing escapes me

I am the escape

the vast secular sweep where nothing

need mean more than itself

(let) light form land form liquid

life itself labile microbial

seethe grouse & auk I am (let me be)

because You left (now leave) and what’s left’s

work and more than enough

Helena de Groot: Nam Lee is the author of the poetry collection, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem, as well as the collection of short stories titled The Boat, for which he won the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for literature, a Pushcart Prize, a US National Book Foundation “5 under 35” fiction selection, and it has been translated into 14 languages. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena De Groot and this was Poetry off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Let Light Form

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Let Light Form." In 2008, the writer Nam Le came out with his debut, a short story collection titled The Boat. In the opening story, the main character reads like the fictional alter ego of Nam Le himself. They're both Vietnamese, Australian, and, at one point, a writing student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. In the story, a friend at the workshop tells our fictional Nam Le, "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. You could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time." So, in the rest of the collection, Nam Le sets out to do exactly the opposite. The stories are about people whose lives are about as far as possible from his own. A Colombian hitman tasked with killing his friend. A young women's rights activist who returns to her native Tehran. A little girl in Hiroshima trying to survive after the bomb took her family. And then, by the time you no longer expect it, Nam Le delivers what his friend at the workshop said he should: A harrowing story about Vietnamese boat people. It's now 16 years later, but Nam Le is still chewing on his friend's advice. "It is good marketing," people kept assuring him, "if you, a Vietnamese Australian writer, write about Vietnamese things, especially about trauma. Your books will sell." But what does that even mean, "writing about Vietnamese things?" He decided to find out in a poetry collection titled 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem. In these poems, Nam Le writes about language and history and trauma, but also about math and glaciers. And why not? Because, as he writes in one of his poems, "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not, you won't let me not." The poems start with Vietnamese identity, but quickly open up in a vast field of questions. What does it mean to be a person? How do we know ourselves? How do we tell the story of ourselves? And how do we let this story go? And when finally ourselves have been ground back to cells and fallen apart into atoms, who do we become then? But before we dive off the deep end, let's start in a more prosaic place. I was curious to know how Nam Le made his way from his debut collection of short stories 16 years ago, to the collection of poems he published today. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: You know, your first book, The Boat, was just such a runaway success and it was translated everywhere, and it was everywhere. And you became this name. And I don't know how you feel about fame and stuff you know, but the fact that you chose to write a poetry collection next, I wonder, was that deliberate? Like, did you want less attention?

Nam Le: Well, I guess the thing that I can say, which will not be very controversial in our household, is I am a contrary person. (LAUGHS) I don't like being told what to do, what to think. I don't like to do what other people are doing, certainly not for the sake of it. And I think when I look back, you know, when everyone was writing novels, I was writing short stories. And when other short story writers were writing linked collections or novels in inverse, I went for the hodgepodge approach, the dog's breakfast approach, to structuring a collection. And nowadays, as I'm sure you know, so many poets are moving into prose, into novels and essays and memoirs, and I'm going very happily into the other direction. So, you know, clearly I'm following the market and where the energy and the capital is by writing a book-length poem. But it is a hard question. And the basic answer, I guess, is just that I'm slow, and writing is hard, and I'm hard on myself. I demand certain things from my work. I haven't stopped writing. I've written a lot and continue to do so in different forms. But I certainly didn't wanna publish something just for the sake of it. And to me, the whole line of questioning veers—by talking about success and, you know, following up the success, and the tacit expectation of readers, etc., legitimate expectation or otherwise, or annoyance or irritation that I've taken so long— it's also, to me, the language of the market you know, of optimizing returns or capitalizing on brand, the vocabulary of commerce. And I guess you're right, in the sense that I try as much as I can to quarantine the work that I'm doing away from that, and sort of concentrate on the imperatives of the work, which are hard enough on a first principle level, I always think. That it takes so long to actually put down into words, something that approximates what you mean, and comes as close to getting that across as you can. And it's very carefully calibrated. It's like a balancing act with ambiguities and contradictions and antinomies, and it's all overlaid, and it's very unstable. And for me, talking about that stuff has always been really, really difficult, because it just feels like a completely different register of thing. And it feels like it endangers the thing, to a certain extent, too.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like you have to explain yourself for the fact that it's been a few years?

Nam Le: You know, it's funny, I do, because it's come up in pretty much every conversation that I've had about it. And I find that interesting in many ways, because as we said before, it certainly invokes an expectation, which I think is one that is somewhat at odds with the process and the imperative and the timeline of art. You know, art is something that takes its own time. And also art and the body of art that an artist does, to me, it's not only what is extruded into the public sphere, normally via commercial apparatus. It's also everything that happens between, beneath, and during that time, as well. Everything that an artist writes or makes, and everything they read and every discussion that they have, that all is absorbed into the body, the corpus that is the art. So for me, it is a bit strange. I found it stranger in Australia, to be honest, because maybe there's just less . . . There are fewer examples of writers who have taken their time between books. And a friend of mine said to me, "You know, you would never ask someone, 'why did it take you so long to get married?'" But people feel very, very, at ease, sort of asking a writer you know, why you took so long to publish your next book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, but that's why I find it so interesting. Because I did not ask you that question. I didn't . . . I mean, I had the question somewhere, and then I scrapped it because I was like, you know what, there is no way to ask that without it sounding accusatory, you know what I mean? You didn't disappoint me! So, like, I didn't mean to accuse you. And so I thought, let me just not even ask the question, because there's no way. The only reason that I had the question was it was sheer nosiness. It was not like, "what took you so long." But just . . . it was actually exactly what you say, like, that other things than, like, you know, output is also art-making. And so can you tell me about a few of the things that were really nourishing to you in that time that ultimately helped you write the poems that you did?

Nam Le: I have been nourished by writing, you know, I've continued to write. I'm writing a novel that I've been writing for some time, but every time I looked at what I'd written, I would always find a reservation or a niggle that something was not fully honest or sincere or laid out in a way that felt right to me about what I was doing. But I'm well past the point of striking while the iron is hot or anything like that—like it matters to me—and it matters to me that it sort of represents where I am in my head when I'm writing it. And there was a long time where I was being pretty tough on myself about not writing other things. So, after the collection for a few years, my head was in short story mode, and so I would find ideas and impetuses and immediately sort of you know, put them through the conversion machine of, you know, how might this sort of work in a short story? And then I realized, you know, I've got to stop doing this if I'm gonna be writing this novel, because there are different cadences, rhythms, structures, etc. And the same thing with poetry, I think I was too harsh on myself and I sort of said, hey, you know, just cut that out, dude. So that changed when I became a father, when I had Tess, my eldest, in ’16, and I just . . . I didn't have the headspace for quite some time, for the sustained long-form slog of the novel. And so I thought, look, I still need to engage really seriously with writing and with language, and I can't just get it through reading. And so I sort of let myself off the hook. And I started writing poems again. And in some ways, I think it saved my connection to writing, because I was doing things at the same intensity and the same level of application and seriousness. But I also got, like, the little payoff at the end when a draft of something was actually done. And then, lo and behold, it might even get published somewhere. And that sort of gave me that little fillip of energy to sort of . . . OK, this is doable. And, you know, these little nuggets of energy along the way are actually pretty useful for a dad of two young kids.

Helena de Groot: Hmm. Yeah. Do you want to read a poem?

Nam Le: Sure. Yeah. Do you have one in mind?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was thinking we could start with the poem on page eight, "[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]."

Nam Le: Got it, OK. Hang on, let me just find it.

Helena de Groot: And just . . . Sorry. I'm just gonna say one last thing. You mentioned the Fall, which you will not hear in the audio. It is capitalized. So, it's like the Fall of Saigon, right?

Nam Le: That's right. Yeah, in April 1975. That's right. But of course, it also . . .

Helena de Groot: Yes, the Bible.

Nam Le: Exactly. OK,

"[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]."

You can't go far wrong with violence.

You'll go far, my boy.

You'll cross oceans, my man.

Start with the Fall, go back or forth,

Through bombs or boats,

Across all the killing fields of thought.

You can't make it up

Because it's all yours — by blood.

By right. By wrong done to your blood.

Hold to trauma.

Even if it never happened to you

You may claim it.

Your blood contains it.

What happened to them —

Your parents, theirs, all their kin —

Who don't talk about it

Because of what happened to them —

Is yours to take and tell.

Their harm, your hurt.

You may write it. For it is written

In the very walls of your cells.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. So, in this poem, you know, it echoes some of the themes that were in the opening story in your collection. You know, where the main character is in this writers’ workshop, and a friend is like, "Oh, you could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. You could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time," you know? And, yeah, I'm just wondering what it was like to sit with that question, or sit with that sort of unease that you felt then and that you feel now, but sit with it in a poem. How was that different?

Nam Le: Yeah. For me, that question of how do you write about something that is yours in a way that is so complicated and barbed, namely the experience of your ancestors, the trauma that you may not have experienced directly, but that has sort of found its way into your lane, so to speak. And the infrastructure within which that story becomes a mode of accruing capital and credentials you know, is really interesting, and I think one of the things that has surprised me is that it's still very much a live point. And that when I wrote that story back in, it would have been 2004 or 2005, if you would ask me, you know, 20 years on, would this still be, you know, a live issue, I would have been surprised if you'd told me that it would, and in some ways, even more live, because that question, as we talked about before, of instrumentalization of the market, has become really, really activated. You know, like the very last line, for example "You know, it is written in the very walls of your cells," speaks to the difficulty of what we know and how we know. You know, there are studies out there that show that trauma can epigenetically change genetic expression through the generations, and that change can actually be seen and studied in the cellular makeup of offspring of trauma survivors. But a cell is also a thing that can constrict you and contain you. And I think that simultaneity, of something being so deeply intrinsic to you, being the captive apparatus within which you're meant to work, and then that work being conditioned by and rewarded. As long as it's sort of moving along those tracks. I think that's a really interesting bind that we've put ourselves in and that we're put in, and it's one that is still very much alive, as we say. And so to go to your question, I think what you can do in a poem is potentially enact these contradictions in a way that becomes a contained process of destabilization. So what I would hope most for is for a reader to come to this and to feel that they understand what the project of the poem is, and what the tone and the attitude of the poem is. And that might be different to different readers at the start. Some might say "oh, it's clearly satirical and snarky," and others might say "well, no, actually this is like, unbearably earnest." But then as we sort of go along, and maybe through second and third reads, hopefully, readers will sort of come to like a more, you know, inchoate and confused sort of apprehension of the thing.

Helena de Groot: I'm so glad that you bring up tone and attitude, because I had that question. With so many of the poems in your collection, I kept going back and forth and doubting my own initial reactions.

Nam Le: Oh, great.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah, because I do feel like in this poem, when I read it on the page—so without your intonation—I did read it more as satire. I did read it more in the vein of that guy in that short story who goes, you know, you could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing, you know, like I did read it more like that. But subsequent poems in the book, they went so far in the other direction, and I don't like using that word, "earnest," because it sounds like a negative thing, like you would only say earnest if you think it shouldn't be . . .

Nam Le: Maybe "sincere," because that's a word that is excavated as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. That word, "sincere" [is used] several times in your collection. But, you know, some of the poems . . . So, here it's almost like the way I read it, it was like well, "Can't go far wrong with violence. You know, you can always do that. If you want to write stuff, you know, why not just do that? You can write about the bombs, the boats, the killing fields, you know, like all that." And then in subsequent poems, you actually do that, and you do it so unflinchingly, and with such precision that, like, any semblance of a mocking tone or sort of a sardonic subtext were gone. And not just that they were gone. But I felt uncomfortable for ever having thought that you might have, you know, mocked something or made light of something. Do you know what I'm saying?

Nam Le: I'm so glad to—I'm so glad to hear you say that. The intention—and this is one of the reasons why it's been a really difficult book to extract, or to publish poems individually or separately, or even to read or talk about them separately, because none of the poems exists in isolation, like they all exist in the constellation of the other poems that exert pressure and influence and, you know, catalyze changes in them as they go along. And if there's anything that I can sort of, you know, throw up to the universe by way of what I would love in terms of readers coming to this book, is exactly what you've described. It's a process. It's not ever a settlement. It's not ever a certainty or a fixity. It's a process that is completely changing its positionality with each line, with each poem, certainly. And that changes everything that's been written before, and that is to come at the same time. And so that sense of being unsettled, it's not my prime intention at all in, you know, in writing anything like this. But I think it's a necessary—psychic field, you know, to almost sort of go in and irradiate yourself, so that you can sort of come out the poems accepting conflict and accepting, again, the simultaneity of different things, the antinomy of something being earnest and sardonic at the same time. Because this is how things are, you know, this is the experience of this project, of 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, is occupying all of these antonymous, contradictory, and uncomfortable sorts of spaces. And I guess the only honesty that I would sort of ask of myself through my writing life, I guess, is that I have to now also be honest with myself and with the readers about this whole ecosystem, you know, and not exploit or take advantage or free-ride on any of its valences without being really honest about it as well. So that, like you say, you sort of have to earn—I don't really like that word because it has transactory connotations—but you do have to earn the right to then say the thing that, in isolation, might have just been didactic or Hallmarky.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to a poem where the tone is different. You know, where the tone is much more, or at least was, in my experience of it, much more earnest and much more yeah, like, unflinching in that way. I was thinking of that poem called "Dire critical," which is—you have become a dad. It is very clear this is a dad joke. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: It's a good one, though. It's a higher-order dad joke. But it is . . . (LAUGHS) Yeah. So, I was thinking about that one. But if you think, no, there's actually another one where I feel like that you know, that's a better example, I'm open to suggestions, too.

Nam Le: No, actually, I'm very glad you chose that one. OK, shall I just go into it?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Nam Le: OK.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, one last thing. So, you know, because different languages use diacritics for different reasons. So, in Vietnamese, diacritics are about the tone?

Nam Le: That's right. That's exactly right, yeah. Each comes with a different sort of inflection or intonation.

Helena de Groot: And how many do you have in total?

Nam Le: It's complicated.

Helena de Groot: Oh, OK. OK. Sorry. Alright. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: I don't wanna, like, you know, bring disgrace to my race. So, there are just briefly, there are, I think there are five diacritics of tone. There are differences between North and South. And then there are like different letters that are permutated with different diacritics as well like that are attached to the letters. And so there are four of those.

Helena de Groot: OK.

Nam Le: I think. But here we go.

"[15. Dire critical]"

All in the tone.

Give us each day our diacritics — our low and high, fall and rise, our horns and holds:

Flat we are without.

(You like that, no doubt.)

Give us our dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng:

For ours is not your flat euphony

Your squeezed, frictioned speech

But full mouth music:

Tripping of water over stone-carved lingas

Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth

Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains
or reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies
along the Baie d’Along

Coloratura descant of US bombs

Scintillae of mother’s ivory comb as it falls
in the ivory mirror
as if through water
as if through silk
through your long black hair.

Má (high rising) is mother; is also cheek, as in slack of flesh

made gaunt, sallow from malnutrition, as in from agent orange,

from yellow rain, from grief, as in to which

I turn my face. As in turn the other.

Now grave your voice: mà falls to but, fell conjunction

breaking what it binds — negating — making negative —

glyph fallen away now as ma becomes ghost, as in hungry,

as in of your unborn child — my unborn sister —

by defoliants consumed — body burden negating body

burden — in your corrupted womb.

And devil too, as in turn that famous photo

of Hồ Chí Minh’s face upside down to see: a cipher,

see, as signed by the tilde in mã. As in we are,

all of us, hooked, gaffed, dipped long and held down

into the always end — mả — tomb.

To me, though, in the south that is my name, mother is mẹ.

The dot below signifying nặng, as in heavy.

The voice, beginning at creak, at bottom, staying down,

at the edge, or mé, of low stridor: it is my son’s wheeze

(my son, whom I named peace)

after ingesting sesame, mè, which makes him hard to breathe,

and his tongue revolts. His skin revolts. It blisters into welts.

To say mẹ is to speak with a smile while from above

smiling white devils splash you with dioxin, with napalm,

setting the palms on pretty fire —

and you see your own mother’s lifelong poise

crack — mẻ — like lacquer on a burning mask,

you feel her seed of a daughter going hot inside you

and you feel her whole body foreign, future-tensed,

gathered to its fast, heavy, unhatched dot.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, it's so interesting how the language sort of slips into the violence like by free association. That before you know it, you're from this language lesson to this history lesson.

Nam Le: So, you're saying you read this as a straight sort of tonal application of what you were describing before?

Helena de Groot: I mean, yes and no. There's that part in italics, "Stone-carved lingas, rising tang of early season mango in the mouth." You talk about "silk curtains," "rice paddies," "mothers," "ivory comb," "long black hair." I read that—and forgive me if this is not how you meant it, and on top of that, insulting—but I read that as a cliché. (NAM LAUGHS) I was like, oh, these are all—you know how Roland Barthes has this essay in Mythologies where he sort of writes about like, oh, God, why is it always that, like you know, when they make a movie about—"they" meaning Europeans—make a movie about a country, a place, any place in Asia, why is it always like the fishermen are not people who are trying to make a living and do that in very specific ways, but it's always, like, all fishermen who are like on this placid lake, and there's like always some sort of explosive sunrise, and everything is sort of eternal and without context or history.

Nam Le: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And he sort of makes fun of that tendency of just sort of essentializing this kind of, like, Asian aesthetic or whatever, you know, and so this "rising tang of early season mango in the mouth," you know, like the way that there's this food writing, and then long hair and water and rice paddies. I was thinking, like oh, maybe this is sort of you hinting at, like, this is how we usually get—"we," another problematic word—get portrayed. But let me tell you that there is—I don't know, I feel like I'm talking myself into a hole here. But that's how I read it. So, I read that as, like, that is still sort of a part that is mired in irony. But around it emerges this kind of furious litany. Or that's at least how I saw it. You know . . .

Má (high rising) is mother; is also cheek, as in slack of flesh

made gaunt, sallow from malnutrition, as in from agent orange,

from yellow rain, from grief, as in to which

I turn my face. As in turn the other.

Anyways that's how I thought that—that it's almost like you get pacified by this gentle cliche, and then, bomb, you know, smacked with reality.

Nam Le: Well, Helena, just let excuse me (HELENA LAUGHS) while I, you know, swallow my offendedness over here.

Helena de Groot: I'm sorry. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: No, not at all. I am so grateful that you saw that. Because, for me, it was really obvious. And I sort of signposted it by putting it in italics. And obviously, the rest of the long poem returns to some of these tropes and identifies them as such, but also complicates them, or at least reclaims them, seeks to in different ways. You know, there was a time—I'm not proud of this particular thing—but there was a time when I would sort of refer, with my friends, to certain kinds of ethnic writing as mangolicious, because . . . (HELENA LAUGHS) As you say, you know. There was always a nice signpost. And apologies to anyone who has written, you know, serious and profound mango works . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I know it's so fraught. I feel like I can't say it. Yeah, totally. (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: (LAUGHS) But at the same time, you know—and this is always everything at the same time—at the same time, these are profound, beautiful images, conceptions, self-conceptions. Because, of course, a lot of these cliches have been sort of drawn into and transmuted by "us," to use, you know, to use your pronoun, into a certain conception of self as well. And so that shouldn't be something that is automatically disdained or derided, either. This poem, to me, is really interesting in terms of its reception, because the few readers that I sent the poems out to—when they were done, but way before they were taken by any publishing house—people who I trust and respect to the nth degree, to sort of unpack all of the different valences and attitudes and registers of the poems, I think this one was one that really divided in terms of reception between Asian readers and non-Asian readers. I think for Asian readers—and I might be sort of being tendentious when I say this—but for Asian readers, for example, the notion of structuring a poem around tonality, around the sort of phonetic difference between an Asian language, or some Asian languages, and the English language, is a really easy, tired trope. It's almost—it's similar, in some ways, to just you know looking up a word in the OED, looking up all of its sort of etymologies and its usages, and then sort of just like easily.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, and there you have your lyrical essay, yeah.

Nam Le: And it's so easy to do. And that's not to say that there aren't extraordinary poems that are done that way. And I've taken great pleasure in diving deep into the OED. But, you know, among poets, there's this kind of a little bit of an eye-roll reaction to sometimes to that as being you know, the angle of profundity. And I think tonality is something like that to a lot of Asian writers as well. So, you know, you could take any word, any syllable, and just look up its different definitions depending on which tone it has. And then, just using the tools that you have in your hardy toolbox, just make a—really not that difficult, you know, collation or collection where you sort of, like, have those things coexist and, you know, "There are so many tensions, but there is a felicity of you know, simultaneity of meaning here. And you know, what about this and the other meaning?" You know what I mean? Like, it's quite . . . So, that was interesting to me. And I think the other thing which was interesting was that, you know, even in that section you just read for me, just packing it on, packing on Agent Orange and the yellow rain, you know, and yellow rain, obviously coming from, you know, not even that part of where I'm from, but sort of across the border in the same way that the stone-carved lingas are in a different part, like they're in Cambodia, and, you know, the yellow rain is on a different sort of border altogether. And to me it's kind of like, ah, you know, it's a mockery of where the untouchable or the taboo subjects of someone writing about their own pain really resonates. Those bits are always the most interesting bits to me. The bits where people feel like they can't question whatever is being asserted. When someone invokes a certain thing that is theirs, you know, however, that sort of deemed and posited. And so in the first story of The Boat, like, me using the My Lai massacre, I thought was really obviously also signposting, that this was the single event that means and signifies so much to a certain kind of American, you know, and it signifies you know, a watershed moment, but also a whole panoply of emotional cadences that then sort of had historical and policy effects afterwards. And so I thought that that was really obvious. But, of course, most non-Asian readers would never think to question that, and never did question that, because it was seen to be, you know, you don't, you don't fuck with that. So, in this case, I thought I was stacking on, you know, Agent Orange, yellow, yellow rain, grief. (HELENA LAUGHS) I thought OK, I'm making it very obvious. And then I'd talk to my friends and they would say . . . "Oh, no, I read that straight." And I thought that that was really interesting. None of which is to say that the poem is not straight, either. Like, the poem is extremely raw and does go there. You know, like I'm putting myself in my history and my story and my family in this poem. But to me it feels more, to use an outdated word, more honorable, just for me, that is, to do so with the carapace and a sense of the knowingness around it. You know, the stone-carved lingas and the mangoliciousness.

[BREAK]

Helena de Groot: Your work, you know, both your poetry collection and your short stories, it's clearly very well-researched. Like, a lot of work has gone into facts and knowledge. Whether you write a short story about an activist in contemporary Tehran, or an orphan right after the bomb on Hiroshima, or a hitman in Colombia, like, you get the lingo and you get the sort of the images, and a lot goes into that. And so I'm wondering, like . . . Well, I have so many questions about this, especially because it's so fraught, right? Like wow, you're just setting trap after trap for yourself. Like, you can so easily stumble, like you can do all the research in the world, but someone who's from there will probably see things that you don't see, or will see mistakes that you didn't see, despite all the research. So, let me ask you, how did you go about this? Since you know better than most people how fraught it is to say anything, you know, and have different people with more knowledge than you have read it too. How do you come to a standard that you feel OK with, without spending the rest of your life trying to verify these facts?

Nam Le: Yeah, I mean, it's a vexed question. Both, you know, internally and externally. Nothing—nothing— can survive a hostile or suspicious raid. Especially when the grounds of that raid are, you know, "this is not real" or "this wouldn't happen," or "this is something that is coming from the outside." And I think that when I think about what I'm interested in and where my sort of mind goes—and when I also think about what reality is, what representation is, what authenticity is—I find all of those terms so problematic. You know, the reason why I've written 36, 37 poems, talking about what a Vietnamese poem is, is because to me, there is no unity, there is no coagulation that is then able to be promulgated as the truth. You know, what is the voice of Vietnam? What is the voice of anything? You wouldn't say that America has one voice. You wouldn't say that confessional poetry has one voice. You wouldn't say that avant-garde poetry has one voice. So, for me, it's so important to try to preserve as much of the reminder that we are multiple and all capable, and that to read something through a suspicious or a gotcha kind of mindset is to A). completely eschew any chance of reading it as art, and B). it's always going to be a fruitless exercise, because it always reverts back to type. You know, when someone says, "Ah, well, an x person wouldn't say or do this or that wouldn't happen," aside from, you know, really obvious factual errors, what that does is it sort of just reverts to a median kind of representation or a sense of essentialization. And the secondary thing that I would say, is that when you write something, the great translation, the great transposition that happens is from whatever that thing is, into language. And language is so idiosyncratic, and it has its weird slants, and its weird rules, and it's steeped in, you know, violence, to be frank, and prejudice and bias. And it is so imperfect. It is so difficult to say anything that really approximates anything at all that is true, in my experience. That it doesn't matter, I mean, that's the big chasm that we're never successfully crossing, not the chasm of "Oh, well, W. 33rd doesn't actually have a 33rd because it skips from 32 to 34," or you know what I mean? Like, because they seem to be just completely different registers of understanding and reading.

None of this is to say that there isn't a responsibility, and an ethical responsibility, and a moral responsibility. But I think that responsibility is not only to a sense of veracity and a sense of, you know, researching things to make sure that is evinced in the work. But I think that that responsibility also has to redound to the writer thinking about the conditions of their writing, thinking about the conditions of the infrastructure around their writing practice and their writing industry. How they imagine things will be received, what clout or coin they might receive, or cultural capital by saying things in certain ways. What they're expected to say or assume to say. I think if a writer is not honest about that, then it's very, very difficult for them to not import some of that false consciousness into crossing that chasm of language.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm, yeah, and I mean, you know, you hint at this thing—like, of course it's hard to say something accurate about someplace that maybe we've never been, or we didn't grow up at least, or something. But, you know, then it's hard, as you said, you know, to say anything that's true at all, even about things that we supposedly are the experts on, like ourselves, you know.

Nam Le: And even if you were to just, say, a place, for example, let's say, you know, the local bagel shop down the corner, your experience of that bagel shop is guaranteed to be different to the next person's or the next person's or the next person's. What they notice would be different. What they remember would be different, and in many cases, probably inaccurate. So, to me, it's ludicrous to sort of think about, like, well, this is the essence of that bagel shop. And anyone who's not like a habitual, you know, customer of that bagel shop has no right to write about this. And if you're reading someone else, who you think you know has not been to that bagel shop writing about it from that lens, then you will never have a generosity of reading that would admit that there might be anything worth saying from that person's account at all.

Helena de Groot: But it's so attractive, right? Like, we so love doing that and feeling superior like that, right?

Nam Le: Yeah, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: I'm thinking of, there's this Belgian, you know, foreign reporter who lives in New York. So, he works for the Belgian broadcaster or like the Flemish broadcaster, but he lives here. And at some point, you know, he moved and he made this little audio story about the new neighborhood where he moved to, and he mispronounced the name of the neighborhood. And like it took everything I had—like, my mom sent me this, you know, she was like, "Look how nice." Like, you know, "you should listen to this, this is so interesting," you know? And I listened to it and I was like, I don't believe anything he says because he can't even pronounce Bed-Stuy correctly, you know? (LAUGHS) I mean, all I'm trying to say is, like, don't we just love that, you know, pointing out that someone else is wrong . . .

Nam Le: Because it's, I mean . . .

Helena de Groot: It's a deeper pleasure.

Nam Le: I'm not saying that you're doing this, but, I mean, I think there is a . . . How do I say this? I mean, you know, obviously, there is a notion of authority. And we like to pull it in for ourselves. We like to credentialize through our knowledge and through our experience. And, of course, that's part of who we are. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But then there's also an idea of, you know, tribalism, of using certain things to exclude, and also like this vexed notion of authenticity. And maybe that's at the heart of this, so . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Nam Le: You know, when I think about authenticity, I think authentic Thai cuisine or authentic merch from a particular company, etc. And, like, relatedly, the second context would be in the context of something being fake or forged, right? And so from the very, very start, you're dealing in a language of commerce and suspicion. And it's the perfect condition for dominance behavior and for exploitation. And that's, you know, without being honest about that or without sort of at least trying to . . . I mean, ideally, you would sort of move out of that register altogether, and sort of take the thing as it is. But if you can't do that—and who of us can—then at least be honest about, you know, who you are and where you're standing as you're coming to something.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, we’ve firmly landed in the stoner portion of this conversation. (NAM LAUGHS) So, I'm just going to go there. But, you know, what you're saying also about the slipperiness of self-knowledge. Like, are we even experts on ourselves? And do we ever feel solidly in command, you know, of any body of knowledge, even if that body of knowledge is us, you know? And one of the things that made me think of is, what happens to our sense of self when we change really radically? Like, for instance, in your case, you used to be a lawyer, and now you're not, and "lawyer," like it has a certain type of dress and it has a certain type of thinking about time, in a way, because you have to bill by the, whatever, 15 minutes or I don't know however long, you know what I'm saying?

Nam Le: Six minutes.

Helena de Groot: Like, there's all of this sort of culture around what it means to be a lawyer and to think of yourself as one, however at odds you are with that identity. And then, when you change, you know, and you're like, "I guess now everyone sees or thinks of me as a writer," where is the continuity? Am I still me? You know, like what? You know, was I not me then? Just looking back on sort of the radical changes that you've gone through—to say another thing, fatherhood. What is a period in your life when you most realized that you did not know yourself?

Nam Le: Jeez, Helena. There's no period, it's just all of it, all of the time. You know, I never really reposed too much of myself in lawyerdom, so it was not difficult to tear away from that. I guess just temperamentally, I've never really been too much of a joiner. I have liked to sort of preserve my ability to move, and in many cases my marginality. Again, it's really hard to think or talk about self without moving into the terrain of identity. And then identity is so closely linked now to a sense of brand as well. Not to be derogatory about identity, per se, but the sense of, like, always being aware that one has a public-facing self that is there to exploit and be exploited, to trade, to transact, and that the more unified and coherent that self is, the easier it is for that commerce to be transacted. And it's also more comfortable, because for yourself and for the people who engage with that, with that self or that brand or persona or a character or whatever it is, for the most part, people don't have an enormous capacity to dwell in the chaos and capriciousness and changeability of other people's souls. You know, that's just not something that we tend to spend a lot of time doing. We're not really practiced at it. So, I find it difficult to talk about strong senses of self for me. What I can relate to you is that it's terrifying to me how quickly I'm losing my memories. Not in a neurological way, touch wood. But just, you get to a certain point and you realize that there's probably less, you know, in front of you than before you. And you start reinterrogating, often through no volition, the stuff that you've already been through. And I am, you know, I've lost so many of the memories of things and people and experiences that have meant things to me when I try to recall them, they're, you know, invariably patchy, incomplete, and usually inaccurate if I care to verify them. And the reason why this is so hard for me is because, you know, I think we are all so assailable, you know, we think of ourselves as being sort of coherent, consistent and sovereign, you know, self-willed. But jeez, you know, a cloud floats across the sun, and that changes our mood, which changes, you know, the trajectory or the velocity of our trains of thought.

We're so assailable to—I mean, advertising, the most, in many ways, the most primary colored of influences, is all-powerful. You know, none of us are immune to it. Music, light, temperature. And so when I think about myself, I guess I am thinking of sense memories. I'm thinking of moments when I'm drifting off and I remember a certain angle of light or a certain, you know, feel of a certain velocity of wind against my skin, as wanky as that sounds, or a smell, a feeling, a presence, a memory of something that might be a memory of something else. And it just feels to me like, you know, when I actually question what that self is, I think about yesterday, last week, last year, or whatever. I'm just living in a hall of shadows, you know, and it's so murky and you're just blown around. So, you do cling to certain formulae of identity and they're important. But that by no means, the true core or skeleton of self to me, you know, like fatherhood would be one example that you brought up. I do cling to that when I think about who I am and how I am. But I know for a fact that my sense of fatherhood, as similar as it may be on many, many sorts of grounds to other people's experiences, does consist of those moments and sense memories and interstitial realities, I guess, that no one else knows about, and that I'm going to forget, and have already forgotten.

[BREAK]

Helena de Groot: Given that it's so hard to say anything true, what is your relationship to, you know, writing and self-knowledge? Do you feel like it gives you more self-knowledge?

Nam Le: Well, I think as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, that's in some ways—and maybe this is the most self-indicting, instrumentalized way of all—but in some ways, for me, writing is the ultimate crucible. It's the ultimate proving ground of what feels true to oneself, you know? If writing is—and I think it is—an articulation of consciousness, and if consciousness is, as we say, this very, very difficult thing to pin down, then, writing is the only test that I can think of where I can reliably—usually through the via negativa, to be honest, like what doesn't feel true, what rings false, what is quite a little bit alloyed or off . . . But, you know, when I'm trying to figure out, like, what it is like to be me and not just, you know, the slice of me that is expected or assumed, or there's still an ability of writing to ring true to oneself. And that can change, and sometimes it needs, you know, a whole larger constellation to hold it kind of in place, which is kind of what I've done in this book. But that's the only thing that works, in terms of that interrogation, in terms of that testing. And for me, that's why it just seems like a no-brainer that if you're in it seriously, then, of course, you're only doing it to say something true to you, and to be really honest about what that means, and when it's not happening. And that something, invariably, has a greater hope of speaking beyond the moment. And it can be something that you can stand behind, even as you know how provisional that you is.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm, I mean, one of the things that I love so much about poems, is that poems can be so weird. Like it's allowed, you know? And being a person is also very weird. So it seems like the correct tool for the occasion. You know what I mean? Of saying something true about what it's like to be me, to be a person.

Nam Le: I think that's right.

Helena de Groot: And especially, you know, I was sort of reminded that when I was reading the last poem in this collection, number 37, which is funny . . .

Nam Le: Spoiler alert.

Helena de Groot: Because it's—yeah. Oh, sorry.

Nam Le: Close enough, as they say.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, I sort of don't want to say anything about this poem. I want you to say something about it. Or if you don't want to say something about it, just read it. But, like, I would be happy to first hear about it, because it is such a profoundly weird, and, you know, it takes that idea, I feel, of—oh now, I'm saying something, I'm not saying anything, I'm shutting up now.

Nam Le: What can I say about that poem? I will say that when I had finished it, I felt as though it was the best thing that I'd written. And I used to be a huge fanboy of Tennyson, and still am in many ways, and there was a poem that he wrote called "Crossing the Bar" that he said he wanted to be the last poem of every collection of his work. And it's about, you know, crossing the bar, crossing into death or into afterlife. And in some ways, when I wrote this poem, I had the same sort of feeling about it. It's a poem that takes certain logics to their extreme. And it takes perspective by zooming way, way out. And the extremity of the logic and the perspective shows you something that is both completely barren and stark, and at the same time full of beauty and hope and capacity. And that also happens to be the place where life can start, can restart. And so to me, the idea of an outwash plain, I guess, to use the term, was one that both as a metaphor but also as a concrete thing—because I went up to the Arctic, to Svalbard, and saw some, and it really just . . . Yeah, it struck some sort of deep harmonics in me that I'm still trying to work out.

Helena de Groot: When did you go to the Arctic?

Nam Le: Jeez, I'm not quite sure, but some time—this is what I'm talking about—sometime in the last ten years, I'd say.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, and were you with a group or were you alone or how?

Nam Le: Yeah, it was this weird thing. It was an expeditionary residency, so it was sort of half scientists and half artists, and it was on a three-masted brigantine tall ship. And so a replica of, you know, tall ships from ages past. And so we were actually on this thing circumnavigating Svalbard from the north of Norway. Yeah, it was nuts.

Helena de Groot: And if you're in a place where everything is so different. Like English was not made for that place, let's just say.

Nam Le: Yeah, I think I mean, the cliche obviously is, you know, the further north you go, the more words for snow there are and . . .

Helena de Groot: Right, yeah, I don't know if that is true or not. Anyway, we don't have to talk about that. But, you know, like, I wonder what, you know, when you're there on that boat and you're looking and you're trying to take it in, did you come up to the limits of your own capacity for, not just description, but as a result seeing? Did you feel limited?

Nam Le: Yeah, I mean, all I felt was limited up there, to be honest. Like I—it was really interesting. And I love what you're saying about how culture shapes the capacity of language and the shape of language. You know, one example that I can think of in terms of just whiteness, I guess, is when there's commerce involved, when you need to sell paint, for example, then suddenly there's a proliferation of different words for white, because there's, you know, there's an impetus behind that. And some of the words are gorgeous . . .

Helena de Groot: Eggshell and ivory.

Nam Le: Right, but there are literally hundreds, you know, depending on which company and which paint swatch you're looking at. And so I was very much struck by, I think when I was up there—as you say, like you're looking out at this thing that gives either very little back or that fiercely reflects, you know, in every sense possible. What you're looking at, and all you end up doing or I end up doing, is thinking about representations, images, emotional conveyances of the Arctic, you know, while looking at the thing and thinking, should I be somehow trying to evacuate myself of this thing? Like there was one, there were moments when we would land, and every single artist on the residency would sort of dot themselves at a distance from each other. As long as you were in range of the guide with the rifles for polar bears, if that were to happen, and then everyone would, like, face out with their 45-degree slant of point of view. And then imagine that they were the only ones there. So, you know, you're there and you're in this weird, artificial sort of situation and moment. and you sort of somehow intuit or, you know, it's determined, deeply, culturally, the expectation that you need to have a solitary experience with the Arctic. And so everyone has positioned themselves to have that. And I remember looking out in my own little sort of slice of solitude. And I kept on thinking, I'm in a Coke ad, like, this is—I don't know what I'm meant to be thinking. I'm obviously meant to be having an experience of the sublime or some sort of transcendental something, but my mind was just like moving around, and as you say, like, I didn't have the language either. Like, I love the language of geology and topography, but I didn't have the language then. And partly what this poem was doing was me looking for that language, and what becomes true, I found with everything, became true in the writing of that poem, and also informed my experience in the Arctic, which was the more you look at something, the more you see. And it wasn't just a case of being able to name things and processes, but it was that sense of, you know, seeing a forest in a leaf. You know, you were there and then suddenly you would see this is a repository of time and light. And these are things that don't really do things by our human timetables. And it was in that sense looking sort of back through secondary lenses, it was boring for me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, do you want to read the poem?

Nam Le: Yeah, sure.

"[37. Post-racial / -glacial]"

If I must be something

let me be outwash plain

lowland

past glacier’s margin, glacier’s edge

thaw and drift convene

breathtaking arguments of light

over me

where what matter was argued

has long evaporated

Let what’s left be

left on me

spill spoil residue

sweat & naked chill

once passion has dragged

over —

Let me have been loomed

over, overwhelmed

and left and still

Here where the perfect thing’s

been and gone away

let me stay

I will accept anything

You

know that I know

my place, silt, sand, gravel, clastics,

clay — I am an open mouth

for Your waste

Glad I am O Lord Glacier

of Your leavings

fast-hold sediments scoria

sequences of laminae

all that long-held deep-time till

moved by Your own weight

You lay Your burden down instead

in slow flow / throe on rhythmite beds

I can be where You forget

Your reason unlearn Your compaction

of snow (which is breath) to firn

ice (which is rock) —

there is order beneath Your face

of frozen rock —

I can be entropy mine the cross-

reasons counter-actions the erring

(dis)orders of erosion

Well come all

and by any transport

out of irresistible

increase to slack stark

space

out of symmetry to splayed mess

take the air take the light see

the outer spread-out stars

and by any process

Melt and calve basal lodge

phasal sublimation

how could You who accumulate

but to ablate

apprehend all my forms of loss?

Stands of verglassed breccia

glisten like viscera

Dead-ice in disintegration

moraines maimed kames eskers

All the forms of collapse

present fluvial surficial

pock and pit

snowmelt sprawls the sediment flats

like dazzling lines of errata

See: if You let me

I will be a field of deposition

with things in it

for You for (un)sorting for strata

No that silver thaw

is sclera

and the glacier (come to think)

one glaucomatose blue eye

rebuffing every wave of light

its blue shy inlit paling —

like an error of sky exposure —

ghosting the iris as if

arrested by murder

Let what’s pure be

perturbed in me blue

gone keen in nervy brightness

imprismed by black brown

coils my ice-keeps ice-hoards

salted loess yellow

my distal drainages scored

tea green by rock flour ground

steeped at the wastage zone

Not what turns away light to see

but takes it in too washes its feet

changes

(its sheets) for it if You are eye

let me be aperture the clear

all-accommodating blink

that takes in flow retreat thaw

refreezing all of it all here

and — too — what all of it’s for

Nothing escapes me

I am the escape

the vast secular sweep where nothing

need mean more than itself

(let) light form land form liquid

life itself labile microbial

seethe grouse & auk I am (let me be)

because You left (now leave) and what’s left’s

work and more than enough

Helena de Groot: Nam Lee is the author of the poetry collection, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem, as well as the collection of short stories titled The Boat, for which he won the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for literature, a Pushcart Prize, a US National Book Foundation “5 under 35” fiction selection, and it has been translated into 14 languages. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena De Groot and this was Poetry off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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