On poetryfoundation.org, I found a ‘micro essay’ by Linh Dinh on teaching poetry, in which he states, “Poetry should astound and frighten.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/01/what-i-usually-say-to-my-students/

I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.

“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”

One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.

Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.

In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”

And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?

The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.

So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.