Hi there. I meant to post something sooner, and maybe not something so deep in the poetry weeds, but here we are. The chunk of reading and writing described below has helped me unlock some things about poetry and utopia that I’ve been reaching at for a while. Always reaching.
One of the highs among the mess of mixed feelings about this year’s AWP conference (right here in Kansas City!) was attending a panel called “The Page Blinks Back :: Image, Text & Screen,” where I was particularly excited to hear Diana Khoi Nguyen. Her debut collection Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) is easily one of my favorites I’ve read in the past few years.
When Nguyen was being introduced, the panel host read from Lucie Brock-Broido’s blurb about the collection. Here’s the full text of the blurb, where I’ve bolded some of moments that set off my utopia brain spider sense:
"Dina Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. These poems are uncanny renderings of an invisibility made visible by the sheer will of candor, bemused forms, agility of lexicon, and a voice, almost noiselessly extravagant. What she gives us, she takes away; nearly impossible transformations transform. 'Something keeps not happening' she writes. And then she causes it to happen in a language of grief—bold and often colder than most daring, exquisite acts. Nothing here is ever entirely complete—ghost of mourning, ghost of yearning, ghost of the kiln unfilled with the probable impossibility of an afterlife. It is as if a medieval scholar were transcribing an ancient Latin manuscript, pieces of script are missing, illegible, annulled by time. The scholar writes in the margins Desunt Non Nulla—signifying—Not No Things Are Missing, Nguyen's voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I've read."
—Lucie Brock-Broido
Part of the reason I knew I had to pursue the project of my first book is the way obsession works for me, this feeling of synchronicity—the way an idea that has just started to form in the mind begins appearing everywhere. In the above moments, I kept hearing parallels to and echoes of José Esteban Muñoz’s seminal Cruising Utopia, a book I’ll probably write about later that was the exact thing I needed to read when I finally got around to reading it (after many, many people told me I needed to read it).
Muñoz writes:
Utopia is always about the not-quite-here or the notion that something is missing.
Cruising Utopia approaches utopia as search for what is missing from the present to help reveal possibility beyond the horizon. Muñoz describes his approach as “a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” We can’t see the future, we can’t see beyond the horizon. As a result, the utopian—both the things we most desire and the things we most need—is always just beyond our grasp. Because we can’t quite see it or understand it, we certainly can’t quite communicate what it is. So Muñoz approaches utopia by looking back to the past in search for what is missing in the present. Identifying what is missing offers glimpses at possibility in the future.
I want to stop and recognize that it does feel a bit wrong to be thinking of utopia when reading a collection of poems with content so rooted in grief and loss. But in Ghost Of’’s formal maneuvers, I can’t help but see a poetry that enacts a utopian gesture in the mode Muñoz describes.
Throughout the collection, Nguyen includes visual poems all titled “Triptych” or “Gyotaku.” The Triptychs each begin with a family photograph that the poet’s brother cut himself out of. What’s missing is literal and extremely pronounced in these photographs. On the next page, text is written in the shape of the missing part of the photograph, the silhouette of the missing person—the entire page is white apart from text written into the form that had been white space in the previous page’s image. Finally, the last part of the triptych is written in a square block of text with white space cutting through the text in the same shape missing from the original photo.
It’s a stunning maneuver that to me makes manifest the kind of utopian looking that Muñoz suggests. The poem first looks at the past in the form of the photograph to see what is missing from the present. Then the poem constructs something new from the shape of what is missing. This new thing doesn’t (and can’t) replace what is missing but offers a possibility for something new in its shape. Finally, the last moment of the triptych again constructs something new, but this time around the shape of what is missing. And while the combination of these three maneuvers doesn’t make up for what is missing, they offer readers a multiplicity of possibility in the recognition of what’s absent and the constructing of something from that recognition.
The poems titled “Gyotaku” offer a similar maneuver but move a bit more dramatically and symbolically towards building something new. On the first page of these pieces, text written in the shape of the photograph’s cut out negative space is included on top of the photograph. On the next page, that text is repeated to form new shapes, as if the text was stamped (like the titular method of Gyotaku) into a pattern.
The text in the pattern is exactly repeated from the previous page, but the shapes often overlap in a way that blurs or darkens the text beyond legibility, so I don’t think it’s meant to be read again. The text has instead transformed into something new, something the language may be reaching towards, but that Nguyen is offering as visual. The poem seems to use what it’s constructed out of the absence to reach for a new way of communicating what can’t be said.
Much of the text throughout both the Triptychs and the Gyotaku pieces is generally difficult to read. Difficult as in it takes a bit of concentration. Words are divided in the middle, spill over into the next line, or are cut off by blank space. And I think even these moments offer a reminder of utopian thinking and possibility. Line breaks in any poem are jumping off points for the imagination—the brief flicker as your eyes physically move down a line where you get to anticipate and imagine what could possibly come next. And in these pieces, I kept having moments where I could feel my mind searching to construct a word that it might know but can’t quite get to. To me, these are all moments, despite the grief of the content, that feel filled with hope and possibility.
And I can’t end there—as I’m sure the visual and formal aspects of Ghost Of often got so much critical attention. But the more traditional poems here also wow me, offering utopian gestures, glimpses, and invitations. One of my favorites is, not surprisingly, obsessed with time: