36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

"Nam Le’s latest work represents a radical restatement of modern poetry. The poet, evoking Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, becomes the “aperture” that sharply captures multitudinous poetic traditions. In this endeavor, Le critiques the way mainstream poets flatten the representation of the other through well-intentioned if facile assumptions. “Ekphrastic,” which refers to an overexposed photo of Le’s grandmother, seems to be a retort to “What Were They Like,” Denise Levertov’s 1967 anti-war poem. In it, Levertov laments the obliteration of the Vietnamese people due to American bombs, yet her very description of Vietnamese culture resorts to clichés verging on erasure – thus failing to illustrate its complex, heterogeneous heritage."