The Tribute Horse

"That’s right. And it’s not just those two ethnic identities that are at play. There are other themes at play in that book. Som is someone who wants to find a new solution for every poem. He really doesn’t want to repeat himself with his projects. He is like C D Wright – and unlike Hayes, Kasischke and Powell – in that he is really in two minds about making prose sense. He has been intellectually shaped by people who were very resistant to prose sense; people who think that the major modernists are Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, rather than the people who think – as I do – that the most useful modernists now are Williams Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. So, he is someone who asks with each poem ‘how much do I want to say that I have a lyric identity, a speaking voice, that is consistent, and how much do I want to make the poem inscriptional instead, like writing on rock, like a piece of gallery art.’ He’s also someone who is interested in the fact that English is only one among many languages that he could speak but that he doesn’t speak – that people like him speak. He is in dialogue with his Mexican-American ancestry but he’s also in dialogue with Chinese, which he does not speak. Yes, that’s right. His poem called ‘Oulipo’, my last lit crit book has an essay about it. It’s one of these essays where I wrote 5,000 words initially and, of course, nobody wants to read 5,000 words about one poem unless it’s ‘To Autumn’ or Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Poetry’ or something else that lots of people already love. So, I had to cut the heck out of that essay. But there’s so much to say about that poem and it points in so many directions, because it can be read as a meditation on third generation Chinese-American identity, it can be read as a series of experiments in sound, it can be read as a response to a cross-cultural and classical transoceanic lyric tradition, and a pushback against the idea that lyric is this bourgeois idea that’s not that old. And, of course, it can be read as a sort of exercise. The title of that poem – ‘Oulipo’ – is a wonderful trilingual pun because it is a series of poems in English that take their sonic qualities from the sonic qualities of a very famous lyric by the classical Chinese poet who, in English, we call Li Po. The title asks ‘ou Li Po’ – ‘where is Li Po?’ Where does Chinese lyric go, as Chinese speakers and Chinese people come to America and have kids and grandchildren who become American? They become American and urbanized and they move out of Chinatowns and into the American university system. The poem has a certain amount of thinking about Asian-American manhood, which is an interesting line in Asian-American writing more generally. “The title asks ‘ou Li Po’ – ‘where is Li Po?’ Where does Chinese lyric go, as Chinese people come to America and have kids and grandchildren who become American?” “Oulipo” is also the name of a Paris-based and international and polyglot group of writers. (Daniel Levin Becker wrote a good introduction to it.) Italo Calvino is possibly the most well-known. “Oulipo” is an acronym in French whose English translation means: “workshop for potential literature”. Writers in the Oulipo tradition are poets and novelists and essayists and sort of puzzle-makers. They want to make literature that gave pleasure in the way that mathematical games give pleasure; they wanted to make literature that has some of the quality of scientific experiment and mathematical recreation. Som’s poem ‘Oulipo’ succeeds in all these dimensions, as a mathematical game, as well as a very serious, pathos-filled and angry, sustained meditation on Asian immigrant identity. Brandon Som’s work is so internally varied and there are just so many kinds of poems with him – “Oulipo” is only one kind. There are poems that are more narrative – including the title poem – and poems that are more like looking at pieces of gallery art, ones that are very small and hard and Williams-y. I’d love to see a world in which Brandon Som’s book becomes a model for first books by people who share his set of concerns, who are writing in Aberdeen or Melbourne or Singapore. Honestly, my take on this is that effective resistance to Trumpism – which is an acute danger – comes within the United States through running for school board and very practical things like that, and in engaging people who aren’t already reading a lot of literary poetry. In terms of preventing the further undermining of democratic institutions, we need practicality, solidarity, and coalition-building. Contact your elected representative, show up at a direct action if it’s your thing, write an op-ed for a local paper, be visible in your principled opposition, run for local office if you can. And it might still not work. We might end up with 16 years of a kleptocratic police state. But if we’re going to get rid of these people, which we’ve got a good chance of doing – a better chance than England and Wales had earlier this year of getting rid of the Tories – then it involves poets doing things other than writing poetry. That said, and whether it takes two months or ten years to get rid of authoritarian nationalism in the White House, poetry is going to change in unforeseeable ways in response to Trumpism. It’s already changed in that white poets have to think about non-white experience and they cannot take white experience as the default or generic kind of experience. And white gatekeepers and white editors have to think about what we’ve been conditioned to not see or what we see as a special case whereas it might have become general. There’s that sense that it’s time to put poets of colour, and styles that come from poets of colour, at the centre of what US poetry can be. This is fairly new, and it started before 2016, but it’s already quite visible and audible."