AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Nam Le and Lindsay Garbutt on Language as an Ecology of Violence and Corruption, the Pain of Being a Writer, and the Value of Uncertainty

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

Nam Le:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “[11. VIOLENCE: ANGLO-LINGUISTIC]”)

English with its mind closed grids
Demands

Answers

Lindsay Garbutt: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Lindsay Garbutt. This week I have the honor of speaking with Nam Le, who joins us from Melbourne, Australia. We’ll be hearing poems from his much-anticipated forthcoming book, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, intimate and yet politically scathing. It follows Nam’s 2008 collection of short stories, The Boat, which was translated into 14 languages and received over a dozen major awards, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Nam, welcome to the podcast.

Nam Le: Hey, thanks heaps for having me, Lindsay.

Lindsay Garbutt: I’m really excited to talk about your first collection of poems, because up till now, I think you’ve been primarily known as a fiction writer. We had the honor of publishing an excerpt from this book-length series in the March issue of Poetry. Each section has a different voice or point of view or tone. And the series is called 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Can you tell me a little bit about what this series is like?

Nam Le: Ah, I would describe it as a long poem that consists of 37 other poems, each of which is complete and has its own unity, but speaks to and subverts the forms, I guess. All of the other poems in the series. And so, the way that I think about it is, it should be and was for me, rather than a fixed delineation of “Here are some ways of writing a Vietnamese poem,” and of course, that imports all of the different tonalities that you might imagine, some satiric, some earnest and everything in between, some personal, some political, and all of the different sort of formal possibilities and conventions that are associated with, you know, diasporic literature and poetry. But rather than being a list, per se, it should be a process. And so, I wanted to preserve my ambiguities through verse. I guess this is, you know, a deeper and in some senses, more constellatory way of doing that. Because there’s never a foothold, there’s never a point of fixity. Everything changes, depending on where you’re standing, and where you’re looking and how you’re looking and where it’s coming from, and where you think other people or other influences are seeing you had those things from as well. So, in a way, it’s kind of, I guess, it’s a, it’s an Ars Poetica. It’s a sense of, “Here are all of the ways in which I constantly fail to come to any sort of resolution or peace with how to do this thing.”

Lindsay Garbutt: Thank you so much. I, I really love what you were saying about it being a way to preserve your ambiguities through verse, and thinking of it as a constellation, because I do think each poem in the series that we have, they speak to each other, but they also seem like each one is an attempt to try again, right? It’s like well, that, let me try this one more time. (LAUGHS) And I think that’s a great aspect of it. And so maybe, now is a good time to hear you read from the first poem in the series that we published in the magazine.

Nam Le: Sure.

Lindsay Garbutt: The sections are numbered, so I’d love to hear you start with number 11.

Nam Le:

(READS EXCERPT)

[11. VIOLENCE: ANGLO-LINGUISTIC]

Appetitive, omnivorous, expansionary.
Atonal, with smashed-together consonants,
It wants it all.

Empire and industry. Science, technology, narratology.
Transaction. One language to rule them all.
Billions strong.

The standard. The first and first second.
Mitotic, mitogenic, mitochondrial.
Ceaselessly

Dividing, changing, charging.
It incorporates all, exiles all. We become internal
Émigrés. Exophones.

Our tongue blood-glutted 

(FADES OUT)

Lindsay Garbutt: I love this as an entry point into this series. This section, and perhaps the poem as a whole, is about Western colonial violence and English linguistic violence specifically, and that incorporates many things. As you say, it “incorporates all, exiles all.” Could you tell me more about that? How does English exile us all?

Nam Le: Sometimes when I think of what a language is, it’s like an ecology of violence and corruption. That’s primarily what it is. And when you lay that on top of particular languages, like let’s say, English, which is the language that rules them all, in a sense, it’s the language in which so many other languages have become subjugated, in a sense, and I think, to go to your question, we know and use so little of this language. We know and use so little of its development, its etiologies, its etymologies. And in that way, what we think we have of it is just a skimming of that surface. And I think that the language in itself is both welcoming and exilic. You know, I’ve never felt unwelcomed in the English language, which is not to say that I’ve not felt I’m welcomed in the places where it was spoken, or the manners in which it’s been used, but I do think that there is a sense of constant exiling that happens in the language as well. And we see it, you know, on a trade level from generation to generation, just from evolved usages. But there’s also a sense, you know, that we, we lose most of our language, not just through our own sort of decaying, you know, bodies and lifetimes, but we are in the constant process of losing language and all of the experience and knowledge that it encodes. And in that way, we too are always on the outside of it, you know, we are constantly sort of exiled from a, you know, a real apprehension or immersion in it. And I think that’s part of the pain of being a writer is you’re, you’re grabbing onto something which is always slipping away and dispersing.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READING OF POEM FADES IN)

English with its mind of closed grids
Demands

Answers—data, declension, denomination.
But Vietnamese answers: “I am all these things.
Or any.

I am openness, manyness at once, entelechy.
Your grammar is violence. Your way is narrow
Exaction.

The Way that lets itself be said to be the Way
Is not the Way. Nothing (I say) (ha ha!) is more important
Than freedom.”

Lindsay Garbutt: I love the end of the poem too, where you have Vietnamese literally speaking back and saying, you know, talking about its own openness and manyness. And I’m curious how you got to that ending? Did you always think of Vietnamese as being about freedom?

Nam Le: That final quote is from Ho Chi Minh, and it was the political slogan of the Vietcong. You know, “Nothing is more important than liberty and freedom.” And, of course, that comes with such loadedness to me as a disaporic Vietnamese refugee, my parents having fought in the war against the Vietcong. And so, that freedom, which is referenced at the end of that poem, contains within it all of the contradictions and variations of all of the non-freedoms, which ensued upon the Vietcong taking power in ’75. You know, my dad was in a labor camp for three years, which is not exactly an exemplification of the freedom which was being fought for. But then there are deeper and different lenses through which to view this and of course, that war, the American war, was part of a larger, you know, geopolitical ideology, and part of an American imperialist excursion, part of a larger Cold War context, which was in turn part of like a larger colonial set of circumstances as well. And so, what does freedom actually mean in that, in that context, and in those contexts, you know? Was the freedom that was found by certain colonized people, let’s say, was it always vitiated? Was it always sus? Could there have been no real grace or freedom that was theirs to decide or that was volitional in any of those circumstances, which, no matter which side they were on, or which particular, you know, permutation of political circumstance they were laboring under? These are the questions I don’t have an answer to, you know, but I do think that that notion of freedom being such a pure and high ringing word crowding out all of the sort of darker harmonics beneath that chime, you know, we need, we need to open up that spectrum. And we need to sort of like, sound out all of those strands of what freedom actually means, how it’s been used, how it’s been weaponized, whether or not it can be something that is enjoyed individually or communally. And using that as the end of that poem is both deeply lamenting, in a sense, but it’s also speaking, again, to the arbitrariness of how language has evolved in different places, and how, how easy it is to take a reductive view of how one language does things differently to another language, how one language might have less of a vocabulary, or less of a sense of case or gender or tense or denomination than another language, and then to make really sort of simplistic, and often ethnological assumptions about that. I think that’s what the term in that poem is trying to do. It’s saying, “Hey, come with me here. Yeah, there is a different way of doing things than English,” but, but then hopefully to sort of undermine that and subvert that too, and make the reader think, “Hang on, are we imposing an easy judgment on top of something which should not allow us to reliably judge it at all?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READING OF END OF POEM REPLAYS)

Your way is narrow
Exaction.

The Way that lets itself be said to be the Way
Is not the Way. Nothing (I say) (ha ha!) is more important
Than freedom.”

Lindsay Garbutt: The title of your first book, The Boat, evokes the mass exodus by boat of Vietnamese refugees seeking safety after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. You traveled by boat as a baby with your parents from Vietnam? Was this experience something your parents talked to you about?

Nam Le: Yeah, I came across in ’78ish with my parents and by boat, and we landed on a Malaysian Island, which was largely a refugee camp called Pulau Bidong, and then hang out there for I think it was 8 months-ish before getting our papers to come to Australia. I have heard more than a lot of my friends who have been in the same sort of situation, being 1.5- or second-generation Vietnamese immigrants, about the experience, but I think that was largely because I was really pushing for it. And as I was writing the stories in The Boat, ages ago, there was a moment where it seems more possible to get those stories from my parents. And so I did, I did get some. But I think, I mean, I’m sure that I got very little of what the experience actually was, largely because my language is just not up to scratch, my Vietnamese is not up to scratch. But in no small part, because, as you can imagine, there’s just a lot of repression and suppression, and plain forgetting going on with these things. And part of that is acculturated, and part of that is, is deliberate.

Lindsay Garbutt: Do you think they were more willing to talk about it because you were trying to write this book?

Nam Le: That’s a really good question. I think there are heaps of ways of looking at it. But one of the reasons why my parents, and maybe a lot of refugees, don’t talk about it—and maybe this is just myself-serving explanation—is because they are not confident that the language will do it justice. And there’s nothing I don’t, I don’t think that would be quite so specifically, re-traumatizing, if I can use that word, than to feel as though you’re expressing, memorializing, catharting an experience, and yet the language doesn’t even approximate the experience, especially when that experience is one that is so profoundly intense and searing and painful. And so there is a violence between languages that exists there, as well. And there’s a language between generations, between notions of who gets to say what, who has the authority or the authenticity, to say what, in which circumstance. And that violence is, to me, it’s one that, it’s just zinging around in a closed box and picking up steam and, you know, ricocheting every which way for a lot of writers. And so I think part of the process, as always, is to use this incredibly imperfect and corrupted thing, in language, to find an arrangement that can approximate that experience, a little closer. And as with a lot of diasporic literature, I think a lot of it is done through ellipsis and elision and slippage and erasure and indirection. And I think that that’s, you know, if that’s the closest tangent to truth, then that’s the most truthful tack to take.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah, I get the sense that you’ve also tried a lot of tangents to truth in your life in terms of, you know, starting out studying law, I think, before studying poetry, or maybe, you know, studying law in between studying poetry. And then your first book was a collection of short stories. And now this book is a collection of poems. So there’s something about using multiple registers or shifting between different types of storytelling that I’m getting a sense of from you as you’re talking. Is that resonant for you? Can you tell me more about how you think about the different registers of language?

Nam Le: Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that when I was writing the stories in The Boat, which, as you say, they just jump about heaps in terms of style, setting, subjectivity. And then, I mean, you’re right, like, you know, I was a lawyer for a little bit, I started in poetry, moved to fiction, have done some nonfiction, have done some sort of screen stuff. I’m really, I really am, I guess, just predisposed to sort of unpicking what it is about different forms that can do what other forms can’t do. One of the sort of easy ways of pop psyching that really myself would be because, you know, as an immigrant, as someone, between languages, you’re constantly code switching, you’re trying out, you know, different masks and camouflages. Everyone does it, obviously, but if you’re in a particular circumstance, maybe you’re really attuned to that. And maybe my way of dealing with it for myself was to try to keep as broad a bandwidth as possible, so that I could, I could keep things open to access, you know, on some contingency. And so I was the guy in high school who, I couldn’t not have different groups of friends, and sort of switching between them, because it just felt like to be clumped, to be fixed, was death, almost, it was like it was the opposite of growth. And I think part of the vexedness that I have in writing with fixity is that it’s so, it’s so closely hews to this notion of voice, which is so often commercialized, or at least weaponized in some way. And there was a time in the publishing industry where that what anyone ever said they were looking for was, “Oh, we’re just looking for, you know, someone with a voice, with a distinctive voice” or, and that voice would often be tied up with these notions of authenticity as well. And I think the way in which one can get locked into, I don’t want to say performing, but into practicing and reiterating a particular voice, when that voice can often be coopted into a cultural dominance, or into a branding exercise, essentially, again, that just feels like death to me. To use the metaphor that we started off with, you know, that if, if this constellation is myself, my identity, my obsession at the moment, then I just got to keep on remembering that that constellation is made of points of light that are coming from vastly different dimensions and times. And that if I would have switched just a tiny bit, that constellation would disappear. And there is nothing that is fixed, and everything is in flux, and every position, and certainly every positionality, is infinite.

Lindsay Garbutt: This was not a question I prepared, but just thinking about everything you just said, how do you feel about the multiverse? Do you think that that’s like something that really resonates? Or do you hate that idea?

Nam Le: (LAUGHS) I think, I think I, I kind of, it just does my head in, to be honest with you, Lindsay.

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: I think I’ve got a very common plague among the poets, which is, you know, the cosmological sort of hunger, but every time I sort of read anything about string theory or quantum theory, I sort of get really excited metaphorically up to a certain point, basically, you know, point one, one step up the 1,000-step ladder,

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: and then it sort of just swamps me a little bit.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah.

Nam Le: I think, yeah, the metaphorical implications of a lot of physics and cosmology, they’re just, they’re too easy, in a sense, for me to get sucked up into. And so I, I don’t want to say I resist it, but I am aware of my bent.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah, no, I get that. Thank you so much for sharing all that. It resonated with me. I have a memory of when I was a teenager writing in my journal, “I hope I always keep changing.”

Nam Le: Oh, wow.

Lindsay Garbutt: And I think about all the time. I don’t know what possessed me to write that. But I felt it so deeply. And I still feel that way. And you know, I’ve had the same job for 12 years, but I don’t think I could have lasted at any job that wasn’t like this where it is like, every month, it’s a new thing.

Nam Le: Yeah.

Lindsay Garbutt: You know, it’s like just enough change every month.

Nam Le: Yeah. And,

Lindsay Garbutt: Anyway, that’s farther afield.

Nam Le: No, I love that. I love that. And I think, I mean, part of that change is, part of the necessity and maybe the condition that is necessary for change is, is uncertainty, is doubt, is provisionality, you know. And if you just don’t, if you don’t know, and you know that you don’t know, you’re more likely to fumble, venture out, make mistakes, reconsider, recalibrate, and not know in a different, deeper way. And that’s, that’s kind of, you know, that’s the entire ethos, I think, of a certain sincerity that I look for in life and in literature. Like, when you look at the communist slogans that were sort of bandied about as propaganda, the reason why, for me, they’re anti-literature, is because they are all knowing, like, they’re religious in their piousness and in their correctness. And there’s an attitude that’s tied up with that, an attitude of, you know, of self-righteousness and closedness and, and then of smugness, often as well. And so, I guess part of the, you know, part of the beauty of that is just the fear of being a teenager, knowing that you’re, you’re being fed by these, you know, torrents of hormones and the situations are changing, and you’re trying to figure out who you are. And it would be so easy, wouldn’t it? And it is so easy, and often it’s all we can do is to is to cling to certainties, whether it’s, you know, tribal certainties or ideological certainties. But the thing that’s way more exciting to me and the thing that I sort of look for and hew to is that resistance to easy certainties.

Lindsay Garbutt: Mm. That’s a great transition, I think, to one of the other poems we have in this series. Could I hear you read “[12. COMMUNIST]”?

Nam Le: Yeah. Let me just grab it.

(READS POEM)

[12. COMMUNIST]

We are for perpetual revolution!
We are for monkeys and tigers!
We are for permanent re-education!
We believe in necessary rectification.
We are against cows and snakes!
We are against monsters and demons!
Let rocks and pebbles turn into rice!
Let a hundred flowers bloom!
(Tell us: What are the correct
revolutionary traits of the moon?)

Lindsay Garbutt: I think this poem really gets at some of the polyvocal nature of this series that you were talking about. I’m interested in that final question. Who is that question addressed to?

Nam Le: (LAUGHS) Oh, drats, you got to the hard bit straightaway. Now I’m scratching my head.

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: (LAUGHS) I guess it’s addressed inwardly for the most part. Well, the first, the first address is inward. It’s addressed to the persona who is spouting these political slogans, these absolute certainties, and these are life and death certainties. You know, these, these slogans were the platform from which people were suddenly ostracized, you know, set apart, and often executed. And so, it was so important to calibrate and to land on the right side of these slogans. And as you can tell, like the slogans operate metaphorically as well, which I think is really interesting, because metaphor, you know, it obviously has associative elements, but it also has an inbuilt ambiguity to it. So when, when Mao is saying, you know, “I’m part monkey, part tiger,” that is importing an enormous constellation of superstition, myth, history, literature, and, you know, common law into what he wants people to think about what he’s saying. And when you think about, you know, who he’s saying it to, and where it’s sort of oriented, like if you’re saying it in a way that’s meant to be sort of read by the West, for example, that’s a very different, again, positionality to how that truth would be positioned, if you’re saying it to members of, you know, fellow cadres in his party or to the larger public. And so, the moon, in all of literature, I guess, that in this poem, particularly in Eastern literature, is something that has been so saturated with metaphorical coercion that it just sinks under all that metaphor. You know, in Tao, they say, if I’m getting this right, if you’re looking at the finger pointing to the moon, then you’re not seeing the moon, which is the, which is the way, the Tao, but by the same token, if you’re looking at the moon, then, and you think that you see it, that means you’re not seeing it, because you can be sure that what you’re seeing is not what you’re seeing. And I think that notion, it’s almost to me a wistful question, like, “Please, tell us, you know, how is it that we should think correctly about the moon?” I think is a real indictment on this way of thinking. And on this way of asking other people to think or write. It’s trying to narrow things down to a particular semiotics and a particular meaning. And if you’re looking to do that, then you are sort of swerving into the realm of pamphlet and propaganda, I think. So, to me, this question is both an inward, wistful, plaintive question like, “Please tell us, because it’s life and death, this is serious sort of stuff.” But it’s also a serious cosmological question too, you know, not to get too highfalutin about it. But if you are looking at this thing that has sort of, you know, provided so much inspiration to poets and has presided over so much of the poetics in both East and West, then how is it that we can still see it as something that is changing and fresh and not clichéd and tired and romantic?

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m thinking about that aspect of the universal versus the specific that you were talking about, and wondering how that played out in your earlier book, as well, like, in terms of having a book that became so widely distributed. It was translated into multiple languages. It was released in Vietnam, which I think, you know, must have been a—well, I won’t assume. I’m wondering what that experience was like for you to have your book translated from English back into Vietnamese? Did you find that experience predictable in any way? Or was it something you expected?

Nam Le: I didn’t expect it. And I guess it was predictable in only one way, which was, my Vietnamese is so shoddy that I was never going to come to any sort of real assessment of whether the translation was good or not, or any of that stuff. So I very happily sort of washed my hands of that particular anxiety. Although, of course, that didn’t stop my dad from ringing me up and telling me that this or that translation was really, really horrendous.

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: There were interesting political aspects to the translation into Vietnamese as well. I wasn’t as across it, as maybe I should have been. And it’s, it’s, it’s a while back now. But I remember that, I think that there were a few changes that were made. And I expect that they were in relation to the Communist Party and the history that maybe strayed from the official version. But yeah, I mean, again, it’s sort of speaking to what that last poem was speaking to, that impulse to herd, you know, to corral and to make correct, which is obviously a form of censorship. It seems so ironic, because the way in which that was actually executed in relation to my stuff was in, you know, in connection with very specific references, and I can’t remember what they were, but, you know, references that sort of, were at odds with whatever the official story was, but the irony being that if you read the story or the passage or the sequence, and you know, followed it as, as a story, the entire context would have been stricken out. You know, like, there’s a, there’s a way in which, you know, when you, when you are looking for things to strike out, when you’re instrumentalize you’re reading negatively in that way, you almost forestall any real reading at all. And so that worked in my favor, in a sense. I don’t really know how it did in Vietnam, or, I mean, I got some emails. For me, translation into any language is, it’s just such a, it’s such a gift, like, it’s just, it’s pure gravy. And so, I think that the gravyness of that just overrode any other concerns that I might have or should have had.

Lindsay Garbutt: I love that your dad called you about it. That’s such a great dad thing to do. I was gonna ask, do they read a lot of your writing? Do they like that you’re a writer?

Nam Le: I don’t think they read a lot of my writing. I don’t think they read English that—I don’t think they read the stuff, the kind of stuff that I’m writing for the most part. They liked that I was a writer the moment that writing seems like a viable thing to do.

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: Yeah, before that, it was, it was very much, you know, you should be a doctor or a lawyer. And so even, even studying law was in some ways a part capitulation to, you know, I would have, I wouldn’t be here speaking to you now if I decided to just do art at university, I don’t know what I’d be doing, wouldn’t be here.

Lindsay Garbutt: So I’m interested, like, what kind of—what do you talk with them about if you don’t talk about your writing?

Nam Le: I don’t know. Just everyday stuff, I guess. I mean, there was a time that, you know, yeah, it sounds horrible, right, because writing for me is my everyday stuff. And I guess this comes down to, not to put too much of a, like a political or theoretical lens overlay on it, but I mean, it is a real, it is a real sense of loss that informs my relationship with my parents when it comes to this, because I look at friends of mine who are writers, and I hear about, or I read about in their writing the conversations they’re having with their parents, and you know, really sophisticated, linguistically sophisticated, and partaking in a common tradition. And I do feel that loss of common tradition, and that loss of linguistic parity with my parents all the time. Like it would be, it’s almost unthinkable for me to be sitting down and having this kind of conversation with my parents, even though I’m sure it would be a mindblowing conversation to have. And I don’t know what the answer is to that, like, I’ve tried to improve my Vietnamese, but I’m just not in a place to be doing that, at the moment. I try with my kids to keep it alive. But again, my Vietnamese is, is basically, you know, primary school level Vietnamese. And when you chuck on top of that, when you compound that with what we’ve spoken about in terms of, you know, just cultural reticence, I guess, it’s a different thing. And I try, I try as much as I can not to think of it as a loss, and just as the way that things are, and that that communication is made through other means. But being a writer, losing that linguistic communicative connection, it is a loss.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah, no, I didn’t even mean to frame it in terms of loss, although I totally understand that. There’s lots of things that are great that are not writing, so I was just curious if there were other things that they, you know, maybe they love TV, or you love to talk about cereals, or, you know,

Nam Le: (LAUGHS)

Lindsay Garbutt: other things that are not writing.

Nam Le: No, I think it’s normally just, you know, “Did you know that so-and-so’s son or daughter or so-and-so did this and that happened to them,” and there’s a lot of that.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Lindsay Garbutt: Let’s hear another poem, “[13. EASTERN-EPISTEMOLOGICAL].”

Nam Le:

(READS POEM)

[13. EASTERN-EPISTEMOLOGICAL]

(nine white masters sitting in a tree)

So I’m reading Heaney on Yeats on “entire
sincerity”—sincerity in life
correlating to quality in poetry—thinking
how this couldn’t have been unshadowed by
what his father had written him re Blake’s
poetry—“revolting and desiring”—being
his whole true self, how this then shadowed
what I’d been reading in Hass on Oppen
on Zukofsky about sincerity being
the first question of poetry, shading even
into truth, how this even worked, if
truth obtained in verb or noun, image
or action, all this, of course, after Pound,
after Fenollosa saying that nature
hosted no true nouns, wherein he, Pound,
composed an ideogram tree, sang sunrise
through its higher branches and through
its shade lanced sunlight down to just the
spot where word’s made perfect, and the
word’s—the word is, that is—the word
is “sincerity”.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Lindsay Garbutt: This whole series is obviously indebted, if that’s the right word, to so many poets. The title of the series itself invokes Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” who, Stevens isn’t even mentioned in this section.

Nam Le: (LAUGHING) Yeah.

Lindsay Garbutt: But I’m just curious, who do you think of as being most influential to the series? Who do you feel most indebted to?

Nam Le: Yeah, it’s a really loaded investigation for me, and the subtitle, “nine white masters sitting in a tree” sort of gives one very sort of savagely satirical slant to the question of influence, and especially Western canonical influence, and how heavily conditioned by the biases of history they are. So of course, they’re all white, they’re all men, and they’re all coming from a very particular narrow strain of poetics, you know, sort of running through, I guess, high Modernism through to Objectivism. And I wanted to frontload that and say, “Yeah, this is real. And this is me. This is what I was reading and thinking about.” Especially in relation to, I guess, the point in the start of the 20th century, in, you know, let’s say, in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower circle, where these white dudes were getting together and saying, “Hey, you know, let’s, let’s, there’s really good stuff out East, let’s translate it, and let’s sort of like formulate a different vision, a different politics out of this,” most of whom didn’t speak any of the languages. And when they were translating, were translating from mistranslations or mistransliterations, and completely getting really basic things wrong about the way, you know, the linguistic structures and the body of literature from which they were working. But at the same time, it was incredibly germinative. And it was exciting. And the stuff that sort of was happening through Imagism, through Modernism, let’s say, and then sort of like through its offshoots into Objectivism, various other -isms, were really exciting and really did sort of move the Western practice and broaden the Western practice in, to me, incredibly beautiful and interesting, galvanic ways. And so, this poem to me is saying, it’s about owning that influence. But I think it’s also saying that—how do I say this? I guess it’s saying that misprision, mistranslation, misunderstanding can also be incredibly germinative. And it can create new directions and understandings. And that if you sort of go off the given, which I do, that it’s all imperfect, anyway, it’s all an approximation, you can never get there, it’s all futile, like, we’re just sort of trying, trying, trying, then, you know, trying, in different ways, even if it feels dangerous, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, or where you’re going, can, in some ways, become a very creative endeavor as well.

Lindsay Garbutt: I’m curious too, about what it feels like to have the level of success you’ve had so far. I think, you know, poetry is just on a different scale from fiction sometimes. And so I’m curious about whether that experience with your first book, The Boat, which was incredibly successful, it won too many prizes for me to name here, and I’m just curious how writing has been for you in the wake of that success? Whether it felt fun or scary or weird.

Nam Le: (LAUGHS)

Lindsay Garbutt: What adjectives would you?

Nam Le: Oh geez, you know, anything I say now will just be mostly making it up, because I can, honestly, it was so long ago, and I

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS) It was a blur.

Nam Le: It was just, it was all I knew, you know. It was, the whole thing, the whole sequence leading up to that was just nuts, because I’d quit law, and then sort of landed in the States. It was just one steep and exciting learning curve. And so I was, you know, that book, The Boat, largely consisted of me trying out different forms, reading different things and trying out different approaches and different ways, you know, seven ways of writing a short story I guess you can call it.

Lindsay Garbutt: (LAUGHS)

Nam Le: It was absolutely not expected or anticipated that it would even be a book to be honest, let alone find its way in the world the way that it did. I was in Provincetown. And I was meant to be working on my novel. And I kept on returning to these stories, because they weren’t there. They, you know, I knew that they needed they needed more. And I felt like, Okay, if I can just get them all to a point for that, that brief shining second, where I can say, “Okay, I’m happy with these, I can stand behind these,” then I can sort of just tie them off, put them in a drawer, and then do the thing that I’m meant to be doing. So that’s basically what happened, like I was working flat out on these stories. And then I just sent them to my agent, as soon as, the second, literally the second that I put the last full stop on the last story I was revising. And I sent them to him and I said, “Don’t let me touch these again. That’s over there. And now I’m over here, and you know, I’m on it, don’t worry.” And then he wrote back a little while later saying, “Actually, you know, I think this could be a book.” But back then, stories when they were being published at all, the entire vogue was for connected stories or linked stories or novels in stories. And the idea that you’d have this complete Frankenstein hodgepodge of stories wasn’t something that you would sort of, you know, hold up excitedly to publishers, or in a sales meeting and say, “This is, you know, this is, you know, what everyone’s been looking for.” So it was, it was really, it really was such a surprise and such, yeah, it was all the adjectives that you describe as well. Like it was, it was very weird. And I met some of my closest friends through that process. And so that was, you know, that meant the world to me. But there also, there also was a cost to it. And that cost was having to talk about the bloody thing so much for so long. And that sort of speaks to what we’ve been speaking about, which was, when you talk about something, there can’t but be an element of, of somehow reducing or introducing that thing that you’re talking about. And then when you’re talking about something as a writer all the time, you’re corroding the artery that is meant to sort of provide surprise and freshness and newness, and you start sort of thinking of yourself as being phony, because you’re saying the same thing, even though it’s the thing that you mean, and that you meant. So it was, it was difficult for me in that sense, as well. Like I, the time between writing the stories and then publishing the stories and then talking about the stories was a period spanning years. And of course, what I thought about things had changed quite a lot, and was changing and was contradictory often. And the idea of having to sort of say it or sort of be on record saying certain things which I would now asterix and qualify this way or that way, or it’s been, you know, changed or, you know, appended to by this other thing that I’ve been thinking about, you know, that was a bit difficult. And so I think it just comes back to the only way that I’ve found to sort of preserve my sanity, I guess, is to somehow just squash all of that doubt and contradiction and indictment into (LAUGHING) into an art form. And then just like, leave it there almost like toxic waste.

Lindsay Garbutt: Well, you’ve done an amazing job. I would not say the product is toxic waste.

Nam Le: (LAUGHS)

Lindsay Garbutt: And I think you’ve done a great job, I mean, it’s, it’s what we’ve been talking about, right? We’re always changing. And so even if the product is fixed, the way you feel about it has changed. And that’s, that’s a really interesting aspect of your work and of writing in general. So thank you so much for talking about that.

Nam Le: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this.

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Lindsay Garbutt: A big thanks to Nam Le. Le is the author of The Boat, and his new book, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, will be out from Knopf this year. You can read a series of poems from the new book in the March 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. Our upcoming April issue features winners of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, including Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Angela Jackson, Sonia Sanchez, Arthur Sze, and many more. Subscribe today at poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to get your copy of this historic issue in your mailbox in time for National Poetry Month. The show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

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