In a boat flooded w/ moonlight

The psalms are of course poems written out of deep and often passionate faith. What I am proposing is that the poetic medium made it possible to articulate the emotional freight, the moral consequences, the altered perception of the world that flowed from this monotheistic belief, in compact verbal structures that could in some instances seem simplicity itself. Psalms, at least in the guise of cultic hymns, were a common poetic genre throughout the ancient Near East, but as the form was adopted by Hebrew poets, it often became an instrument for expressing in a collective voice (whether first person plural or singular) a distinctive, sometimes radically new, sense of time, space, history, creation, and the character of individual destiny. - Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

It is fitting, I think, that my very first post in the Year of the Fire Pig (or Golden Hog) should be about poetry. Like Pen over at Pen and M's, it is easy to forget that only a short while ago, I was a vital part of a thriving writers community, working hard to develop my writing -- and with great albeit naive hopes of developing my sense of self -- all the while grappling with ways of becoming more conscious, focused, on the world and its larger contexts w/o drowning from a depressing sense of anonymity and insignificance.

What does this have to do with Psalms and the Hebrew poets? It's in the form: they used poetry (and art & music & everything in Creation) as a way of engaging the world, as a way of understanding their participation in the complex societies of their time. Poetry was a conduit, a vehicle, through which they crafted and understood their contextualized histories -- and then made those known to everyone else that dared to listen. Had I known, had I thought of it, I might have used the craft with a stronger determination and maybe might have perceived the particularities of my graduate school experiences differently.

Perhaps with a bit of ingenuity and imagination, I might have been able to do more than what I did (what was it that I did?). Perhaps even articulate "the emotional freight" of being hyphenated then unhyphenated, abridged then expanded, translated then re-defined. Perhaps even articulate an "altered perception of the world" or maybe alternate perceptions of the world, coming from the perspective of she who dwelled in a city of minorities.

While I think fondly but critically of my three years in graduate school -- studying poetry of all things -- I am reminded that there were multiple instances of feeling acutely solitary -- isolated? -- within a much more formidable collective. It wasn't just that I was the only Vietnamese American poet in the city of Wilmington (please allow me this one exaggeration -- it impresses on one's mind that I was feeling bereft, if only in my imagination, but bereft nonetheless). But I hail from a family of Asian descent firmly entrenched in a Christian faith built upon foundations heavily influenced by colonial-imperialist histories. That's a mouthful, but it isn't so far from the relative truth.

Poetry was the "instrument for expressing in a collective voice... the character of individual destiny." I don't think I understood that, or perhaps I understood but did not know how to use such instruments of power. It was a game, me being teased continuously, with the potential of thơ but unable to extricate its power. The collective voice I channeled was not familiar with my "individual destiny", and I disregarded some of that complexity. Forgot the language for that kind of discourse, even. The poetic enticed me with the appearance of simplicity, and I neglected what was buried underneath, all the compacted layers -- culture, religion, politics, economics, etc. -- all that hidden inside something seemingly simple.

I write about all this, nói mãi cũng không nói đủ, just to say that I had forgotten the collective voice of where I came from, and allowed some to drown out the others. The most unmoving -- không thay đổi -- image I can conjure up for the beginning of this year, một năm đầy hy vọng, is this poem:

Midnight. No waves.
No wind. The empty boat
is flooded with moonlight.

In this haiku rests the image of the solitary, the individual, but there is also a sense of the expansive, the connectedness created by the absence of movement that might part the air and move the boat. There is a seeming seamlessness, which is punctuated by the moon -- referenced obliquely by the "moonlight" -- and the empty boat. Yet the boat's individuality is zeroed, nulled, by its emptiness. Back and forth, the haiku struggles -- uplifts?-- for our appreciation the complex states of being, the awareness of self and no self. Individual destiny within a collective voice.

Photo copyright F. Monteiro