“The Page as a Kind of Sheet Music: A Conversation with Diana Khoi Nguyen” — curated by Lisa Olstein


Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?

Diana Khoi Nguyen: After Ghost Of, I wasn’t sure quite sure what I wanted from a poem—something to surprise, me perhaps, and for six months, it felt like I was sputtering, which I think it really natural—the mind-body clearing itself, resetting, -calibrating, -orienting. At first I felt the usual existential despair that accompanies poem-making, but knew my neural pathways were working, and let them work, and tried to be gentle with the process. It helps to remind myself that young children don’t assess or judge their play/creations as they are engaged in playing/making, and so, I, too, should just give myself to activity.

Then I picked up Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (taken from a freebie shelf inside the Denver Quarterly’s office where passed-on review copies are placed, no less). Her prose electrified me—I would reread paragraphs, chapters, savoring the sentences, hoping to experience them as if for the first time. Reading Erpenbeck challenged me to consider my own relationship to the sentence, to see what I could do with a sentence—for instance, how long could I make a sentence, and could I embed lyric into the unit of a sentence without any formally visual formatting, as I’d done in the first book? This ignited early prose poems that comprise “Đổi Mới,” and once I started, I couldn’t stop—the sequence got longer, and then also became a lyric essay offshoot of itself.

Leaning into the limits and possibilities of a prose-inspired sentenced unearthed family material I briefly touched upon in the first book: now, I considered my parents’ childhoods in Vietnam during the war, and their late teens as refugees who fled with their respective families to California where they met, married, had children, and enacted violence and survived new traumas. In many ways, Root Fractures looks at the legacy of violence at both transnational and intergenerational levels.

LO: Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?

DKN: Root Fractures consists of prose forms and also extends the prose form, merging it with my visual manipulation and concrete poetry that engages with family photographs, the same ones which appeared in Ghost Of. Because I’m not the same in the years after Ghost Of, the family archive, too, has shifted and aged alongside me, and so my image-text formal play here felt different. One big difference is that I was no longer terrified of these images, and now they felt like familiars—my engaging with them and form was more experimental, and less an effort to unhaunt myself.

But let me be more specific: I was interested in radical empathy, chiefly, retracing some steps my brother had taken in cutting himself out of the family photographs two years prior to taking his own life. So I digitally traced the whole family, curious what would happen if I removed the whole family. An attempt to visualize all of our deaths, which are inevitable. When I hit “delete” in Photoshop, the program intuitively filled in the family cutout with the photo’s background—where we had once stood was now bamboo, or continuation of our home’s exterior white stucco, leaving ghostly glimmers and shadows of where our younger bodies had been. It was activating, exciting, and really spooky—all in the best ways. Of course the house and the garden continue without us. This nonverbal play and composition then ignited my intervention / engagement via language; I began to write over the bamboo and stucco, and into the cutouts of the family (as a whole, and via individual bodies).

LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?

DKN: In a very non-poetry sense, I was thinking of English speakers who have an in-between relationship the Vietnamese language. I only found out that Vietnamese was my first language several years ago while watching old home videos—how shocking to see my four year old self running around bossing everyone in my father’s Southern Vietnamese dialect!

LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?

DKN: Definitely ways in which I document cruelties within my mother’s family—cruelties which shaped her, and cruelties she enacted on others. But the book isn’t an indictment of anyone; it’s indifferent, I think; I was hoping to acknowledge that there are more legacies than just a long history of wars, that there are so many fissures and fractures related and unrelated to war. It’ll always feel risky to directly name harm that one person enacts on another. To render visible what is usually unspoken and suppressed—and worse—condoned, enabled within extended family systems.

LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?

DKN: Oh it’s polyvocal in the way that Douglas Kearney’s overlapping texts are polygonal, but also is inspired by the ways in which M. Nourbese Philip and Susan Howe read from Zong! And That This. Aurality drives the visual poems as much as the visual elements do—I was thinking about the page as a kind of sheet music. I knew that I didn’t want to read the grey text in the same volume as the black text—so at some readings, I play a pre-recording and read along with the recording for darker text. It’s an evolving process; I’m still trying to figure out how to perform this sheet music. The poems are less in revision, but the performance is fluid, changing. I’ve heard that Philip doesn’t read from Zong! solo anymore, that it’s done as a group activity, which makes tremendous emotional sense to me.

LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture? 

DKN: Honestly, it was a bit of a puzzle. I carried the unordered manuscript for about two years—in my backpack and luggage while I traveling, thinking that I’d have time to dedicate to it. I did have time, but I couldn’t figure out the structure—I had multiple long poem sequences, and didn’t want to stack them back to back, but didn’t know what to do, or what to leave out.

Funny enough, during the years of carrying the pages around, I was surprised to discover I was pregnant, gave birth, and temporarily moved back to where I was born, like a salmon returning home to spawn. And something mysterious happened: when the baby was about 2 months old, I left her with my parents, drove up to my childhood library where I spent countless hours reading and wandering—laid out my manuscript on a conference table and cut up the long sequences, shaved them down, threw out poems, and braided a leaner version of the book. And I didn’t really have doubts while doing this. I think the book just needed a longer gestation period—it had its own pregnancy! And is very much tied to my own surprise pregnancy and new parenthood. It made sense—since the book does dive into my relationship with my parents, and their relationship with their parents.

LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm? 

DKN: Aside from Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, I also sat with photos my mother brought home after her mother passed from pancreatic cancer during the writing of this work. These are photographs of my mother as a child, of her siblings and parents during the Vietnam War—much earlier in the Vietnam War. I’m struck by how the War is both present and not present in the photographs, and what a gift to see your parent as a little girl—it really helped me to think about my parents and relatives as the kids they used to be, and maybe still are.

Tina Campt’s Listening to Images was a critical framework that influence my engagement with these familial photographs. In it, she talks about paying attention to the vibrational hum that diasporic photographs emit—a hum that we cannot hear, but feel, since sound waves at hertz undetectable to human ears are still absorbed by our bodies. I love that—how to listen to the unheard parts of a photo. What is it transmitting? What is under the surface or just out of frame?

LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?

DKN: I like to joke that writing the prose poems and lyric sequence in Root Fractures was like a gateway to writing prose prose. Since completing the manuscript, I immediately dove headlong into an autobiographical prose project (I can’t bring myself to call it a novel and it’s definitely not auto-fiction) based on something I read in an interview with filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. In the interview, he talks about writing the screenplay for Minari: first he wrote out 100 memories, then sifted through them to lift several which formed a thread—I love that he didn’t set out to write a particular story. He just traced a line from a larger pool of memories. So I started writing out memories in prose. And then new ideas emerged—fictive events that merge with the autobiographical—and here I am, writing what feels like a tv show I’m binge-watching, except I have no idea what will happen in the next episode.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and two books of nonfiction: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006); Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009); Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press 2013), Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press 2017), Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press 2020), and Climate, a book of epistolary essays co-written with Jule Carr (Essay Press 2022). Dream Apartment, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2023. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and Writers League of Texas book award. A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.