Linh Dinh

Of the three poems below, guess which one was composed by a student:

Tears

When the male prostitute started to cry,
I knew right away something
unusual was happening. Something I could
not have foretold that morning, when I passed
my toothbrush under water,
before applying the paste, or zippered
up my bluejeans or took the first crisp
bite out of a hot toasted bagel, spread
with cream cheese. I had been
sucking him off, as
usual, and his cock was
wonderful, very hard. He was
barely moving, as I had asked, kneeling and I,
too, on my knees, bent. First I heard the muffled
catch, loud gurrump in the throat I took
for coming. A loud, clucked swallow—I
stopped. No, he said,
keep going—then
gulped, slung low in
the windpipe. My palms touched
floor before I felt the cold
droplet and looked up and he was
crying. He cried,
and cried and would not tell me. What,
I asked him, what? He had said,
before, his name was Todd. What,
Todd, what?—I kept asking,
but he only cried. I told him no matter
what the dreadful thing was,
nothing could be
that bad and not to worry. Then looked
around for my purse, which had
Mace in it—I’ve read
about these guys, who one day
just snap, like a fist punched through
the universe, and suddenly the world
unstarred and awry and who knows
whose neck they’ll wring next. Quietly,
still crying. Gurgling
din. Coursed
polluted streams across the torso. Drone
ribbon of the ages, what, Todd,
what?—I stopped asking.
And a cool shade
of dullness set in, identical
to the dullness before, the clean grey
walls, bristled nonsmell of
carpet, the dullness of even-tuft, sheerness
of sheets, identical as before but for
the low, persistent white caw of his tears.

Poorly Matched

Poorly matched the world and she
or so her best self would say (knowing her well
and making rare appearances.) But kingside she sits to post her fee
to lumber locks and fucks the jocks. And the malodorous cell

kept her solid for a while. The day came when she planted her feet
elsewhere. With the suggestion of limitation–she drunk it all down
and pushed and pushed her way to the source of the dinner bell–in her seat
she asked: Who are you and what is this we are eating? What gown

has draped this crapshoot? But it was winter and then summer
before she got an answer. Now it was too late for her hanky to drop
onto the centennial and nobody took her seriously. The drummer
drums a march to the wicked world’s beating and we stop

the poem from the real dream that stood underneath her–what she drank
with what she ate. Awfulness only lasts a while, light to green, everything
melts to the deep sea. After dinner she thanked her host–lank
and benevolent for the kind creepiness and social visiting.

Tomorrow the directory says to take up more rooms, more loves,

no matter how unorganic–for Saturn’s last fires have kept her from the infirmary

and her bad seed has turned good. Saluting now the uncool doves

of St. Francis–of her childhood of the sanctimony of another family.

She holds all meetings in secrecy–this for the greatness of
chronoscopal times.
Decadent and unyielding, never impairing the strength of a victim’s cry,
she smirched the walls of her house with patterns–gross animal outlines,
tulips, or the quick stumped fox who smiled and bleakly froze to blind her sky.

Sea by Dusk

Comes to gather you from clocks and says be moon,
be progress. Gathers the bitter fact of chance and says
change in every way. Depending on the harvest,

a sadness glassed in autumn, depending on the sea.
Shatters the lullaby, lush and drugged, that would settle
in the downcast reaches. You who bear the light in you

bear the deep compass, unending corrosion,
an irreparable white meadow. Gather what voyage you can,
a sound far into water, susurrous in the array of salt

and drifting sunlight, what is left for us to live. Below water
or close above, rhythms emptied in the flutter of Pacific,
without limit, a human sound breaking hard against this air,

endure, says become what you can in the summer fluency of waves.
Sleep, saline, gathers the currents of blue driftwood,
says a hymnal loose with eiderdown and light—

and comes to prize you in the hour of your late undertaking,
your new and precise fear. Listen, lean, that you might feel,
in the warm blurring of waves, the opening and closing of flowers,

a circadian call that pulls all desolation toward clearing,
be ready, be shirred, task of light, a cadence of star
and constancy, change, dropping far in pressured water,

sails of shadow change in every way. As in the halls of night
the swallows gather up whole acres of past error,
vision into vision, printed in the last coral light spilled out

across the tides, your arms, gathered and withstood
in such arcades of stars and sleeping fish, within, without,
pulling near—do I know you—issued in calligraphies of brine

on darkness, turn, return. We are drifting out of phase,
lost, calendar-sprung, and feel the wings slanting through air
above these fleeting museums of the sea, held

within a single note that moves in pain, pattern, scarcity
and abundance, abide, turn and return, some small, far happiness—
and the nocturne grows within each drowsy marine creature,

rope, tack, slowing muscle of the heart, depending on the tides,
depending on the air, a perfect mammal stillness
beneath all flights of caution, the net cast far into

space, who, clock, stopclock, falling lace, beautiful and slow
across the warming skin, in the slipping borders, your body,
shall be safe, unscheduled beyond the seatorn cemetery,

gracious fields, the gardens, as in a true response
to daylight, here, unearthed in cooling water,
full of suffering, mirrors, moving countries

of fish and floating grass, your hopes, receding
terror, recognize you, it says, no loneliness, no more
loneliness, open, it says, your arms.

Before I give you the answer, let’s eavesdrop on a Ted Berrigan lecture, "Incredible Masterpieces":

It seems to me that anybody that writes a few hundred poems ought to be able to write a very good one. Probably should be able to write twenty very good ones. Because the first, if you start writing, the first couple of years you write quite a number of pretty good poems; it's just after that it gets a little hard. And then one wants to see what you do in the next three or four years, and if you're still around after that six or seven years, you're probably going to be around. You're probably going to be a poet. And everybody is rooting for you to do that, but if you don't, it's all right. What the hell. We get ours, you get yours. I mean, it's not quite that brutal, but in a way, it has to be. It's a full-time thing, and particularly the business of becoming a poet.

That’s an interesting phrase, “the business of becoming a poet.” I’ve encountered a surprising number of excellent poems written by students or occasional poets. What they lack in experience and polish, they more than make up for with a giddy excitement that comes from discovering a method, feeling or insight for the first time. Animated by an emotional urgency, their poems are not merely willed into being, an inevitable practice among those committed to the exasperating business of poetry. We know what Michaux means when he declares, "To will a poem into being is to kill it,” but that statement is also misleading and a little harmful, especially to younger poets, since many worthwhile poems would go unwritten had inspiration been an absolute prerequisite.

If even amateurs can pen a few decent poems, why are there so many lame ones? Because, frankly, too many poems are willed into being by poets who are emotionally numb or beaten down by the ugly business of living. One has to be oddly fierce and a little naive to write inspired poetry into middle and old age. Octavio Paz dismissed Arthur Rimbaud as "heat, not light," but I prefer Rimbaud's "immature" genius over Paz's seasoned stuff. In "A Season in Hell," Rimbaud examines his loss of innocence, as translated here by Louise Varese:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

The genius of that first line is the qualifying "if I remember well." Here, a 19-year-old is speaking about his innocence as something he could barely remember, since it already seems so distant and unreal to him. With maturity, with the awareness of one's mortality and ongoing decay, one's appetite is compromised if not snuffed out altogether. It's one reason why aspiring poets give up, why there aren't many more poets out there. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke points out:

And I sit, and have a poet. What a destiny. There are perhaps three hundred people in the room now, reading; but it is impossible that each single one of them should have a poet. (Heaven knows what they have.) There aren't three hundred poets.

[translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

We begin this post with a poem by Youna Kwak, a just-graduated student from the University of Montana, where I taught this past semester. The other pieces are by two of Youna's professors, Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink, respectively. At her best, Youna's work is already exciting. If she can add the depths of maturity to her youthful intensity and volatility, she'll be a special poet indeed. Remember her name. Here's another by Youna Kwak:

Personal

DWM 6’1” NS 43 entrepreneur turned consultant loves scuba
diving, Mexican food, travel, romance, foreign films, keeping fit, Jesus
Christ adventures, fun, walks by the beach, camping, real estate,
money, laughing, Marx Brothers, Coen brothers, hiking, swimming, boating,
fishing, hunting, stoning, jazz, picnics,
whorehouses, Jews, blacks, fine wine,
microbrews, exploring new places, Easter, Christmas, fireworks, Paris,
Rome, Barcelona, Rio, Afghanistan, Gothic Revival, Arts
and Crafts, Bauhaus, drug-free zones, bomb shelters, world music,
reggae, philanthropy, monkey blood, NPR, NYT, NYRB, MOMA,
MOCA, COCA, POKA, SPIC, shivs, blunts, Macanudos, Jameson’s, Grey
Goose, fair-trade, osso bucco, fireplaces, winter days, spring days,
autumn days, summer days, Mondays, Saturdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays,
January, August, September, February, March
Madness, The Final Four, Proust, Frost, Hemingway, The Wasteland,
theater, red, blue, violet, beige, oatmeal, jokes, funny games, silly
games, serious games, horseback riding, drag racing, tennis, jogging,
mischief, the outdoors, British Airways, finger
fucking, Rockies, Alps, Smokeys, the Renaissance, Victorians,
Modernists, photography, blood-soaked gauze, helicopters, yachts,
BMWs, painting, sculpture, sailing, unwinding, pad
thai, Riesling, Saint Bernards, Jasper Johns, oil.

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