Photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com

This week’s prompt is about using features of the visual world as a way to write across historical moments, geographic space, and time.  This is a technique I’ve been using a lot in my recent work, and when putting the finishing touches on a fellowship application essay this week, I found myself articulating for the first time why this approach is such a powerful one.

At times, making poetry becomes a kind of transcendent experience.  Tracing certain images through time shows the way in which all experience is radically unified—by screens, wires, flashes of light, images of transubstantiation, to name just a few.

Thus the child sweating at night, afraid for her parents’ safety at the hands of a Communist government, is not as alone as she once thought.  She clenches her sheets, dreams of centipedes whose scaly bodies become an endless braid, and yet the pattern of her nighttime torment finds an uncanny double in the long stretch of wire wound and barbed around her grandparents in a 1945 American internment camp.

Different time and place, same image.  Same condition.  To me, this thinking represents a kind of radical, redemptive vision, one that suggests experience is not so fractured as we believe it to be.  By undoing logics of nation, political geography, and even chronology, it offers us an imaginative vision that is wholly other, wholly whole.

Your poem doesn’t need to trace as emotionally loaded an image as barbed wire or braided centipedes — the example I’ve chosen is an extreme one, used to illustrate the point that the visual qualities of our surroundings can actually echo past moments, other places, different realms of experience.  Tracing these features can reveal unexpected linkages between unexpected circumstances.

In some ways, this isn’t that different from using a person’s name, or a particular scent, as a way to shift the narrative frame of a poem from one setting to another.  It’s just that here, the “catalyst” is visual.

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Prompt: Write a poem that “shifts” in some way — through time, across space, between points of view, to show the unexpected relationship between separate worlds of experience.  Use a visual cue, object, or feature of the speaker’s surroundings to recall them to a different “place,” however you choose to interpret it.  If you like where the poem is going, let that same image lead to multiple shifts.  Pay attention to other visual features in the “worlds” you explore as well, but keep in mind that not all images are as rich with potential as some.

Post your ideas, attempts, or even just a short list of “visual cues” you think other readers/writers could use in tracing their poetry across experience.

A girl runs screaming down the highway, thick clouds of smoke billowing on the horizon. Burned flesh, bare feet, a haze of napalm: though Nick Ut’s (Associated Press, 1972) iconic image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from the smoldering remains of her village was shot almost forty years ago, it remains firmly lodged in the American visual and cultural memory.

The Vietnam War — or, as it is known in Vietnam, the “American War” — began in 1955 and “ended” in 1975 with the fall of Saigon, though its legacy has continued to enact violence of numerous forms on the bodies and minds of individuals and communities into the twenty-first century. War veterans marked by post-traumatic stress, victims of unexploded bombs living on the agrarian hillsides of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, urban communities of Southeast Asian refugees settled in the United States post-1975 — the list goes on. We’ve all seen the photos, but how much do we really know about the United States’ involvement in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia? A Cold War conflict which led to the displacement of millions, over the course of its twenty-year duration, millions of Lao and Vietnamese lives were lost, in addition to those of approximately 60,000 US military personnel.

Quan Barry’s nine-part poem “child of the enemy,” published in Asylum (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001, winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), takes up this period of rupture in history with a series of reflections — some oblique, some direct — on the far-reaching effects of the Vietnam War. She writes:

Later when the black
and white photos came in the rice
sinking in its makeshift grave at the right
of the picture three children wound
about their mother like meat on a spit one eye
rolling loose amazed in the dead

silence of the frame the freshly dead
posed hastily each wound
breaking open like a smile

What Barry points to in this excerpt is the way in which a historical moment, transmitted to us through film and mediated by time and distance, can be equally as real in the “present” as it was forty years ago. The “black / and white photos” are a physical reality whose presence is made just as immediate as that which they portray: “three children wound / about their mother like meat on a spit.” This visceral, gripping description rips the warp of history from normative chronological progression and exposes the way in which the realities of war and violence never quite “pass” into history. They remain with us, preserved in memory, culture, and image — both “real” (ie. photographic) and constructed (ie. through language). As if reversing the work that historic records, photographs, and normative notions of “time” do to mediate the reality of war, Barry’s language makes real and present what would otherwise remain historic and distant.

What are the legacies of war that mark your subjectivity(ies), and how can these legacies function as subject matter for your poetry? In what way do your “freshly dead” remain with you, no matter how much time and space have obscured and distanced their presence? In what ways are they always already “freshly” deceased?

For this week’s prompt, here are a few ways you might consider engaging the legacy of the Vietnam War.

1. Research a community impacted in some way by the after-effects of the Vietnam War (Hmong refugees to the United States, US military veterans, bomb victims injured and/or killed by unexploded ordnances or UXOs left by the US military in Southeast Asia, other Southeast Asian refugee communities) and explore the varying ways in which these individuals and collectives have been marked by what continues to be a present reality.

2. Write a persona poem (a follow-up of Item #1) in which you take up the issues of haunting, memory, war, and/or trauma. Refer to specific “historic” moments, but not as history. Resurrect them into the present through description, image, and detail. Play with the past and the present, warping temporalities and blurring the boundaries between “history” and contemporary life.

3. Respond to a physical artifact of war, something marked by the residue of a different time and place (a photograph, for example, or a war memorial or physical location — like a fort, or bunker), engaging both its physical properties through detail and description, and its metaphorical or symbolic attributes. Make it “real” to the contemporary moment, or graft the contemporary moment onto the larger historical reality of your artifact’s origin.

As always, consider posting your thoughts and/or responses here.

While browsing the library for new voices in Asian American poetry, I came across the book Voices From Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1991).  Though the book is not new, it provides historic context for the experiences that have shaped and seeded much of contemporary Southeast Asian American poetry.  The 247-page volume is comprised of a series of oral histories, each of which features the life experience of a Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese, or Cambodian refugee to the United States.  Though most of the book is written in prose, there are a few narratives in verse form.  The poem below, for example, was written by a Cambodian woman after her relocation to the Bronx.

URBAN LIFE

They take us and put us in boxes to live.

Each family lives in the same kind of box […]

Our boxes are not all in the same building […]

So we talk on the telephone and imagine

what this person does and

how he lives in his box

and I tell him about life in my box.

This poem, probably one of the earliest instances of Southeast Asian American poetry, captures in simple, unsentimental, and uncomplicated terms the experience of resettlement in the United States by a faceless “they,” a “they” responsible not only for “tak[ing] us” from Cambodia, but “put[ting] us in boxes to live.”  In the speaker’s sense of disconnection, her need to construct an imagined community life, and attempts to communicate across fractured lines, one begins to identify the beginnings of Southeast Asian American poetry.

The accounts in the book are, as US Senator Edward Kennedy puts it, “full of the agony of exile, the disruption of the refugee camps, [and] the challenge of starting over.”  Since 1975, over a million Southeast Asians have settled in the United States, established communities across the country, and begun to shape the voice of contemporary Asian American poetry.  The question for Asian American poets writing today, both those of Southeast Asian descent and other ethnicities, is how to engage the concerns of their history and to move forward.

If, in your own writing, you have struggled to engage historical material (family myth, oral narrative, historical text) in verse, please share your experiences here.  What forms and methods have worked for you?  What dilemmas and/or points of resistance have you encountered?  We look forward to hearing your thoughts.