The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) will host poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 13 in the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Auditorium.
The reading will be followed by a conversation with UNLV Creative Writing faculty Wendy Chen. The event is free with RSVP and open to the public.
Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Nguyen discussed blending poetry with the visual arts with Arpita Roy, a Ph.D. candidate in the UNLV Department of English, and BMI’s Joshua Chévere Cohen. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
[Content warning: Nguyen’s poetry and this conversation covers some difficult topics, including suicide.]
Roy: I want to ask you about the photographs in your latest book, Root Fractures. Because they are such an integral medium that you're using throughout, the idea of gaze and seeing and looking end up becoming an important part of the book.
Nguyen: There's two ways I was thinking about it. The first one is what I'm seeing and noticing each time I encounter the photographs. It’s almost like a ritual practice. I revisit them every year on the anniversary of my brother's death. Each time my experience with them is different. And so, what I notice is different; what catches my eye is different. There's a push and pull between the photograph and me. It's not just me gazing. There's a way in which the photograph is also holding me. I think that that's one. And, then the other one is really thinking about who's taking the photograph.
Roy: I noticed that there were lots of fragments and images that echo each other throughout the book, and there's almost a reverberation until a story emerges. Could you share a little bit about your writing process? Did you write in fragments, and then arrange them, or was it more or less written sequentially?
Nguyen: I'm glad there are echoes. I was hoping that there could be. I write in concentrated periods of time. I'll write in the summer, and then I'll write over winter break in December, and that's the time period that my brother killed himself. And so, I write kind of around his death anniversary. Because I'm writing in these concentrated periods, it usually lends itself to less of writing a discreet poem each day, and more of contributing to another segment of a sequence.
When I was trying to figure out how to gather together this book, I had all of these extremely long sequences. All the poems that have the same title are actually just one long poem that I cut up. The way in which they appear in the book is not chronological. Pieces are missing that I've just cut out completely. Once I cut them all up, I wanted to weave and interweave them. I don't want to read a 20 page poem, and then another one. It was actually great for me to revise in this way for the manuscript, because then I was like, "Oh, I don't need that section" or "I like this one" or "This part over here already kind of covers it."
It's almost like sculpting. But, sculpting is a kind of subtraction, and then interweaving, and then just figuring out where I should begin, which comes next. I don't want another one of that sequence yet, because I wanna try something over here. So it was kind of intuitive. It's almost like each of the poems are holding their breath until they reemerge.
Roy: Writing about grief is so hard. Do you have a self-care process as you write?
Nguyen: Oh, yes! When I first did it, I didn't know, and I was crying while writing. And that's not normal for me. I think the floodgates opened. I felt like I was doing something transgressive, something illegal. It's like, "Oh, we don't talk about that," "We don't look at that," "We don't touch that." It was so draining, but also so cathartic, and it unlocked all these feelings. I had to develop a kind of routine to enter into it.
Roy: I love that you talk about how it is so hard to do this because you never talked about these things with family. You write in your poem “a voice like a seam can bridge a rupture. But language fails eventually.” I was thinking about this language as a bridge; because as an object it bridges things closer, but at the same time it makes it apparent that those two things are, in fact, very far apart from each other. Could you talk to us a little bit more about how you think of language as a bridge?
Nguyen: If I say the word “chair,” you might see a different chair than the chair I see depending on the kind of chairs you grew up with. It's very culturally based. My first language and my parent’s first language is Vietnamese, but I quickly moved on to English and was asked to speak primarily English, which is my parent’s second language. So, there's actually this slight language barrier. Sure they understand what I say — sometimes — and sure I understand what they say — sometimes — or I think I understand their Vietnamese. But actually, I'm kind of in this brackish water. I'm not fluent in that way, but I understand the household-speak.
When it comes to difficult subjects, or taboo subjects, or subjects that are extremely uncomfortable in my family, they never had emotional literacy. There was no culture around expressing emotions, let alone talking about how you feel or naming what you feel or making space for how others feel. Even if we spoke the same language, I could never fully express how I'm feeling to them because language is always an approximation.
Roy: As you worked with the visual media, what were the constraints and possibilities that you saw emerge as you were writing the book?
Nguyen: Well, one constraint is just skill. (laughs) I don't have training in the visual realm. I think the possibilities were huge because it's not a field I practice in regularly. I don't think about "what are the rules" because I don't know what the rules are. I have my poetry training, which governs in many ways my artistic decisions.
Cohen: You will be at UNLV on Nov. 13 for a reading at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. Do you have past experiences in Las Vegas?
Nguyen: So many. I went there for my birthday earlier this year, and I was shocked by how expensive everything was, because I didn't remember everything being so expensive. I was like, "What? Why is my smoothie so expensive?"
But, growing up in LA means we went to Vegas a lot. My grandma liked to gamble, and actually we used to go when I was a kid. I remember what it used to smell like before they had the really good ventilation systems from all the cigarette smoke. And then, of course, in college I'd go. We'd party for people's birthdays. Nothing crazy. Vegas was always a place where you could go and stay in a nice hotel, and it wouldn't be a gajillion dollars. I actually love Vegas.
Cohen: Your reading on Nov. 13 is free and open to the public. The following day, you are giving a craft talk to students, faculty, and staff. Could you give us a preview of this craft talk?
Nguyen: I’m doing a craft talk that will also be a conversation with the audience. The talk is called “Image and Text, Text as Image, and Image as Text.” It’s all the different combinations. It’s something that I engage in, and I don't feel like I had examples in my schooling before I started doing it. There will probably be a generative prompt if folks are feeling up for that, or just something for people to take home with them. My hope is maybe to be a catalyst for folks to engage with some visual element that is perhaps exigent to just them and their work.
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