Vietnamese Reds
A string of red paper lanterns cast harsh shadows
upon a pagoda of silken Bodhisattvas, snapping
pleats of paper like peacock tails for American GI's.
Their celadon features light opium pipes, pouring
flowery rice wines; while pregnancies out of wedlock
are punished by lying in the street as elephants trod
on stomachs until garments are the color of cay-cay.
Still, born of this night are offenses more colorful
as the essence of jackfruit and pungent curries
stain winds. A river bleeds like a long cut, split open
by the evils of Reds and Capitalists alike. Junks
carry small explosions of orange as black clouds lift
from woks and grenades. Nearby a curious red rain
falls on banana leaves, where a child has followed
a scuttling blue crab over a landmine. Beyond
Saigon, a field of casualties lay splayed in the wake
of "conflict" resembling war. Their vampire smiles
appear to be stained with betel nut, but not.
Burlap bags swollen with shrapnel, bleed rice.
Jasmine and napalm float upon the moist dark:
marriage of dove and vulture. A people governed
by fate question virtues, as Confucius scratches
his head. A staccato beat sounds for the dead
from a drum said to be stretched with human skin.
Cay cay: a fruit similar to a persimmon that produces a dark pink juice that is used as a cosmetic and a paint and sealer for paper fans.
Copyright 2004 by S.K. Duff
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Vietnamese Reds" by S.K. Duff, surrounds us with a world of brutal illusions, where beauty and cruelty intertwine like the blossoms and dragons on a Chinese urn. The finely observed details create an atmosphere that is almost oppressively real, a feat that helps compensate for the lack of narrative development.
This is a poem of disguises and shape-shifting, where grains of rice can be mistaken for shrapnel, and woks and grenades give off identical smoke. The clash between the ancient Vietnamese civilization and modern American warfare adds yet another layer of disharmony between appearance and reality. Duff subtly suggests that the war itself is enabled by deception, as when politicians refuse to call things by their real names: "[A] field of casualties lay splayed in the wake/of 'conflict' resembling war."
The poem demands close attention in order to comprehend what is being described. It's easy to be dazzled by the sensory profusion and fail to spot the deadly reality beneath. It would be nice to deceive ourselves that the bodies' lips are red with betel nut, a sensory indulgence, "but not." Duff is a master of restraint. My favorite example of chilling understatement:
...Nearby a curious red rain
falls on banana leaves, where a child has followed
a scuttling blue crab over a landmine.
Death is everywhere in this poem, but rarely named outright. Even the execution of pregnant girls is masked with the pleasing, impersonal image of decorative dyes.
Poets who aspire to tackle emotionally charged topics could learn subtlety from "Vietnamese Reds". The author refrains from unnecessary editorializing and trusts his readers to have the appropriate response to the scenes laid out before them.
Yet one drawback of the poem's journalistic detachment, in my view, is a certain emotional coolness. The very title suggests an abstract composition, rather than a human drama. While I'm glad Duff refrained from telling us how to feel, as so many poems about atrocities do, I wasn't sure what the details added up to. The poem is structured as a realistic narrative, but it didn't seem to move forward toward a dramatic resolution. The final image of a drum "stretched with human skin" is one more addition to a catalogue of horrors, rather than a clue to making sense of the whole picture. The poem stops, but doesn't really end.
The closest we come to closure is "A people governed/by fate question virtues, as Confucius scratches/his head." This intriguing yet enigmatic statement left me wanting to know more about how it applied to the specific scenes of the poem.
Is the oppressive fate in question the traditional Vietnamese culture, with its harsh punishment of sexual misconduct, or the modern-day "evils of Reds and Capitalists"? Or is the point that modernity has just substituted one inhuman system for another, rather than bringing individual freedom?
Since there are no characters in the poem—the human figures are either inferred from the physical objects they create, or dead and reduced to objects themselves—the notion of a choice between virtuous and amoral action is hard to read back into the preceding stanzas. Perhaps the author is saying that we commit atrocities when we allow ourselves to depersonalize our actions, to act as if "fate" and not human choices ordered those women to be trampled and those soldiers to be shot.
I also found the first two stanzas to lack a strong poetic rhythm, which made them feel overly wordy. The following is a powerful image, but it seems to be struggling to stand out from a jumble of sounds:
...while pregnancies out of wedlock
are punished by lying in the street as elephants trod
on stomachs until garments are the color of cay-cay.
However, by the third stanza, the rhythm tightens up. The line breaks feel more inevitable, matching the flow of the concepts. This image in particular had all the elegant economy of an Asian brushstroke painting:
Jasmine and napalm float upon the moist dark:
marriage of dove and vulture.
The latter line reminded me of the cryptic, metaphorical names given to martial arts poses, or sections of the I Ching.
Where could a poem like "Vietnamese Reds" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Columbia Journal Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 1
A prestigious magazine published by New York's Columbia University.
Foley Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by April 16
Sponsored by America, a Jesuit magazine, yet this contest favors works with a more subtle philosophical/spiritual component, rather than explicitly religious verse.
Pablo Neruda Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Sponsored by Nimrod International Journal, this is one of the most prestigious contests for individual poems. Intense, image-filled work may find a home here.
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Categories: Poetry Critiques
