The assault on poetic conventions is the core of Open Mouth’s seemingly colloquial and improvisational manifesto, through Lý Đợi’s article, “Poetry: we do not make poetry” (2004). Seen in a larger context, this statement points to a dialogue between the present and the past, a battle between the novelty of the avant-garde and the decay of the conservative, a proposal of poetry as anti-poetry that is certainly not an outlier in the history of poetry, an attempt to resist perceptions that have turned fixed and fossilized, an urge to speak that arises within a suppressed presence.
Author note: This paper was originally written in Vietnamese by Nhã Thuyên and translated into English by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên. This is an abridged version of an essay that appears in the book un\ \martyerd: [self-] vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetryby Nhã Thuyên (New York: Roof Books, 2019).
“‘How can the poet reach and touch you physically as say the sculptor does by caressing you with objects you caress?’ [bp Nichols] asks, and then answers: ‘only if he drops the barriers.’” Image: Adaptation of photo of bp Nichol’s ‘Journeying and Returns,’ with permission from Coach House Books and the Poetry Foundation.
The haptic poem occurs at an extremity of communication. It arrives in the fleeting moment of contact between language, body, and object as they route their way along the skin and through the nervous system. Unlike the related expanded practices of visual poetry and sound poetry, which engage the ocular and cochlear realms of experience, the haptic poem is a more holistic engagement of body and bodily processes.
Poet Mohammad Ali Maleki’s notebook, which was destroyed by immigration authorities on Manus Island.
Hello. im a refugee in the manus. but im not good speak english. im like poetry. I was writing 2 poetry. Are you help me writing poetry? My poetry farsi send australia edit change english come bake in the manus. are you help me to written poetry me?
Hello. im a refugee in the manus. but im not good speak english. im like poetry. I was writing 2 poetry. Are you help me writing poetry? My poetry farsi send australia edit change english come bake in the manus. are you help me to written poetry me?
“[B]alancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.” Above: detail from page 90 of ‘Uxudo.’
Surprises are adrenalizing. Likewise obsession, movement, risk. I suppose, running the parahermeneutic gamut of the poem, one dilates or, basically, one is asleep.
Uxudo, written by Anne Tardos in English, French, Hungarian, and German in 1999, plainly disincentivizes napping. To the contrary, balancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.
“Pritchard seems to have been profoundly and earnestly committed to a poetics of revelation as much as he was to a nonreferential self-cancelling poetics — and perhaps those two versions of nonsignification are not at odds with one another.” Above: pages from “Hoom, a short story.”
Norman Pritchard may have been the most formally innovative visual poet in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and yet he largely vanished from the literary scene after publishing two exceptional books, and did not publish at all for the last two decades of his life.
