Mong-Lan does personal as political like whoa

Whoa! Mong-Lan! Whoa! Personal as political! Whoa!

I’m blown out by this poet, by her insane diction and impeccable timing on and across the page. I looked her up right away to see what new book she has out & found that she hasn’t published since 2008 because she’s been busy with Fulbright scholarships in Vietnam and silly things like that. Psh, get back to work!

On her website, Mong-Lan is quoted as saying “Behind the image, the imagination.” I think this is a really acute & open-faced summary of the ways in which her poems are stacked thick with layers and tightly wound. I’m looking specifically at “Field” on page 102 of AAP. The poem itself doesn’t physically take up very much room, a half page at best. But the psychic space the poem inhabits unfolds indefinitely off the page and into my lap, my bed, the floor. I read her poetry and I think YES. THIS is what good poetry is supposed to be capable of doing.

“Crows land like horses’ neighs” and I’m on the floor. What just happened? She blew in and touched down like some tornado off the radar. The juxtapositioning of this first gusty line and the quiet flatness of the title allows this to happen, allows us to be surprised and engaged and yet not at all misled. This is where the layering begins, where we find the imagination behind the images. “Crows land like horses’ neighs / rush of rocks,” and we can hear it before we see it. This poem is so tightly crafted!

The poem continues with a question that, without these particular line breaks, would otherwise slow the poem significantly. “how many buffaloes / does it take to plow a disaster?” she writes, sliding more layers on quickly. We are shown the buffaloes right after the aural rush of power in the first stanza, allowing us to hear the buffaloes here too, a herd of them. But then Mong-Lan enacts the plow and we are watching buffaloes tear up land into a disaster and watching buffaloes working fields for an unyielding crop, all at once. When she calls upon women in the last two lines of this stanza, we are allowed to recognize the possible gendering of the buffaloes in the previous lines.

The next stanza complicates nouns into verbs, layering imagination upon images that we think we understand. “shoots of incense / hotly in her hands” represent both shoots or stalks of incense and also the shooting pains of aging hands, ones that have cleaned up many messes. “she bows toward the tombstones / face of her son” and suddenly she is not only looking at the tombstone, but at it’s face and that it’s face is that of her son. Her hands hold the pain of grief and of many years where the “revolutions [are not] realize[d].”

The final full stanza leaves the poem ringing before the last couplet. The last line, “to dye what she’s earned” infuses the poem with the death & disaster that’s obviously prevalent in this life, on this field, but takes it a step further to layer her own age and inevitable death as well. Mong-Lan shows us that there is no reason for the speaker to dye the grey hair she has earned in her lifetime, but the poet also deposits another coating by implying “to die for what she’s earned.”

The whole poem sits on that last line. On her back. The field, the animals, the disaster, the death, the hesitations, the refusals, the weather, the age. Everything sits on her back.

Mong-Lan brings the political into the personal in ways that invite the reader to investigate both more fully. I’m really excited to see how the groups elaborate on the personal as political, especially in terms of poetry’s responsibility to both.