A native of California, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Key West Literary Seminar. She's also received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Diana's poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Phantom Limb, Memorious, Lana Turner, Poetry, and elsewhere. www.dianakhoinguyen.com
Her poems, "Self-Portrait as Justin Boening" and "Flaw in the Nursery," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about self portraits, the left margin, and the mishearing of "bray" as "pray."
I looked up Justin Boening, and he just had a chapbook come out called Self-Portrait as Missing Person and we published his “Self-Portrait in Which I Resemble the Man Next to Me” in Issue Forty. Could you tell us about the connection and about writing your poem, “Self-Portrait as Justin Boening”?
In graduate school, I couldn't for the life of me write a self-portrait when assigned. I think I submitted some picayune thing in which a speaker described her body in terms of paper products and insects that live under a rock. Basically, I thought I was ugly. That thinking likely hasn't changed, but I no longer feel it has a place in my poems. It was also in grad school that I met the illustrious Justin Boening--there's a term for this now, meet-cute--anyway, we've been partners since then and are currently residing in Amish country, where he's the Stadler Fellow in Poetry at Bucknell University for the next two years.
I was living with Justin when he wrote the poems that would later comprise Self-Portrait as Missing Person; it's wonderful to share a home with a significant other, but it's especially enlightening to share it with a partner who is also a poet. As when one lives with another (be it family member, roommate, lover) for a long period of time, one picks up on all the intimate details and preferences of that person. I knew Justin's poems well--I had seen them go through their various transformations, just as I knew the man himself well.
In April of this year, we both signed on to write a poem a day for Tupelo Press's 30/30 fundraising challenge. When you have to summon a brand new poem each day for thirty days, it really opens you up to trying anything. So of course I thought I'd renew my attempt at a self-portrait; I mean, why not? One of my favorite self-portraits comes from my mentor, Lucie Brock-Broido, "Self-Portrait as Kaspar Hauser." The poem is revealed in a Q & A format, a form with which I am currently obsessed. So I thought I'd try my hand at writing a Q & A self-portrait--and instead of choosing a historical figure, I thought it would be funny to choose my best friend. It was a revelatory experience to learn about my self (or perception of self) through the guise of detailing someone I love.
At the time of composition, I had no idea if the project would yield a poem (especially in the constraint of twenty-four hours), but I took it, one call and response at a time. When I finished the draft, I stepped back from the poem (rather, I rolled my office chair away from my monitor) and read the poem through. I remember asking myself, "Is this a poem?" and then thinking, "Okay what just happened?" This is what I love about creating--starting from a block or blank, working on all the minute details, and feeling that sense of wonder when your body feels the task is done (for the time being). I think it must be similar to how endorphins work or how oxytocin is released after a mother gives birth so that she can connect with her child.
I love how “Flaw in the Nursery” pushes the lines away from the left margin, making the lines, which already feel distinct from each other, feel as if they are floating on the page. Could you talk about your use of line in this poem?
I can certainly try. As a person who bores easily, I'm often loathe to render all my poems left-justified--but I'm also loathe to randomly disperse language just because I don't like the left margin. So I can never figure out what I want.
For this particular poem, I felt the poem had much to gain from pauses between each stanza. And in this poem, each stanza also happens to be a contained thought, so the placement of lines were a kind of ruling. A ruler is apt in this case since rulers are associated with early schooling and with measurement (as in lines marking sibling growth on a doorframe). Then, by extension, the lines are a form of measurement in the poem. Or so I hope.
“Self-Portrait as Justin Boening” asks a lot of questions that aren’t exactly answered. I’m most interested in answers to the question “What did it feel like?” which gives a series of forward slashes as an answer, and the last question “And?” which is answered with “And bray” (when, my ears at least, expected to hear “pray.”) Where did the answers come from? Did the questions come first, or the answers? A little of both?
To me, I feel that inquiry should lead to further inquiry. Which is another way of saying that receipt of information should lead one to pursue even more information--which is really a process that doesn't ever end as far as curiosity is concerned.
So where do the poem's answers come from? Me, of course. Which is to say, The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, or the pitch-black phantom floor at which the elevator sometimes stops in Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance.
For as chaotic as I can be, I'm also fairly linear. The questions came first, because query is such an instrumental key to accessing mystery. I'm not sure if I could have written this poem had I started with the answers first. It would have been a different poem altogether.
To address the answer to the poem's question, "What did it feel like," it felt natural to try something other than words for once--I mean, this was part of the poem-a-day, so if non-words in a poem didn't work, it didn't matter since I'd have to shell out a new poem the next morning anyway. I must admit I nearly always have trouble articulating feelings into words, which is why I try to direct my focus to concrete images (created by words). Since this particular question asks the addressee to relay a feeling, it made sense to try to replicate the source instead of rendering that feeling into likeness or image. The act of tapping on the forward slash key irregularly to create the poem's response produced this tense momentum in my body to which my mind was resistant. I hoped something similar to this effect would be achieved by the reader since one's eye has to follow forward slashes and spaces between the slashes.
It's a reasonable expectation to want to hear "pray" in the last line since the previous question's answer involves brothers kneeling down on the floor. But "bray" made sense not only because it is animal in nature and directly deals with the sound emitted from one's mouth (as in the act of prayer or song), but that it had to also call to mind what creature makes a braying sound.
Could you tell us about some of the things that you’ve been reading?
I read as much fiction and non-fiction as I do poetry, and in some ways, prose tends to have a more direct influence on the composition and inspiration for poems. Don't get me wrong: I love poetry--but after reading so many great poets and poems, all I want to do is mimic--which is a form of instruction, certainly. But after reading phenomenal prose, I feel there's no way I could imitate it since my medium is poetry; so this frees me up to focus directly on the sublime feeling derived from each prose experience. I suppose the same process could be applied to reading poetry--except I haven't figure out how to do that yet.
To answer your question, I'm currently reading (and rereading) some of my favorites: Willa Cather, Carson McCullers (no one does that in-between ennui quite like she does), Yoko Tawada, Marilynne Robinson. I'm also reading this incredible book called Tinkers by Paul Harding and the new Eliot Weinberger I picked up from AWP earlier this year.
As for poetry reads, I'm currently inhabited and inhabiting Berryman's "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," and anything by Mark Levine. I just started reading David Baker's Midwest Eclogue and Bridget Lowe's At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky, two incredible poets and humans I met at Bread Loaf (albeit on two different occasions).
Could you tell us about what else you’ve been writing recently?
Poems, or at least, I hope they are poems.
But I think this question wants me perhaps to discuss the details of my current project(s)--in which case, I can say that I'm working on assembling my first manuscript. The recent poems I've been writing have either been other kinds of direct or indirect self-portraits (surprise!) or poems which examine abuse and empathy in human and animal behavior. Which is to say I'm writing about family.