EXPERIMENTAL POETRY AND ITS EFFECTS ON VIETNAMESE

INNOVATIVE POETS

Đinh Minh Hằng

Tiến sĩ, Đại học Sư phạm Hà Nội

Docteur, Université Nationale d’Education de Hanoi 1

Résumé

This paper examines Experimental poetry, Language poetry, and Concrete

poetry, which might not be alien to the West but were a shock to the East.

Experimental poetry emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was

inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism. It was also an underground poetic

exploration. Firstly, this paper indicates that the changes of ideology and

culture in a consumer society contributed to the evolution of Experimental

poetry into an abundant type of interactive art more than conventional poetry

itself. This change widened the gap between creation and reception, and re-

evaluated the position of the poet and his recipient. Whereas poets played the

role of giving ‘specific directions for performance’, readers had their

independent interpretations. Secondly, it provides an overview of picture,

computer and sound poetry as specific Experimental variations. Finally, this

analyzes some interactive poems and poetry experiments from Vietnamese

innovative poets, that might have related to what appeared in Western

experimental poetry.

Keywords: Comparative literature, Experimental Poetry, Vietnamese modern

poetry.

1. Introduction

In my view, the implications of sub-conscious influences from Western experiments

appeared in Vietnamese poetry from the very beginning of the twentieth century.

Performance poetry, music poetry and picture poetry were quite familiar in the lives of

working-class people in the urban society of Vietnam from the 1900s. Some of these

might have come from the habit of writing poetry by considering an object or picture as

1 Email: hangdm@hnue.edu.vn, Tel: (+84) 0907996866

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subject or inspiration, which had already been seen in traditional Chinese poetry. Some

might have come from the traditional ways of reading and publishing poetry in Vietnam,

through oral folk songs and poems. However, a few of them are likely to have come from

the direct reading of modern Western poetry by translator-poets like Dương Tường. Given

this background in terms of Vietnamese social conditions, Experimental poetry could

have been introduced to Vietnamese poets as something which seemed to be familiar; on

the other hand, from my own analysis, it seems it also appeared as something strange but

suggestive.

2. Résultats et discussions

2.1 The Creation of Experimental Poetry

Robert Sheppard stated that:

A social aim (to broaden the appeal of poetry) coincided with an aesthetic

aim: ‘voice’ in poetry was no longer a metaphor for ironic modulation; the

voice was a performance instrument of communal gathering, and (often) the

voice of political protest, which broke abruptly with the quietism of the

Movement. [1, 40]

In my view, poetry persistently seemed to be placed in the realm of abnormality, which

challenged and attacked the thinking habits of readers and the community. With

inspiration from Dadaism and Surrealism, there appeared to be ‘a visit to modernism at

its source’ [1, 38] throughout the 1960s. Thus, Experimental poetry could be marked as

an underground exploration of the British poetry revival which came with Ezra Pound

and James Joyce, whose poems and novels rejected traditional rhyme, syntax and

narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century. Besides Experimental poetry, there

was also alternative typography derived from Italian and German artists like Filipo

Tommasio Marinetti and Kurt Schwitters, who aimed to blur the boundaries between

poetry and other arts. In my view, the complex combination of poetic theories, different

cultures and the desire for poetry that persuaded by disruption turned Experimental poetry

into an abundant type of interactive art rather than poetry itself. I think that at that point,

it might have reached the limit of the genre2 [2, 61].

Nevertheless, once the interactions between poetry and other genres like music or

visual art had been distinguished, it was still possible to recognise some of the genre’s

2 Derrida wrote in The Law of Genre: ‘As soon as the world ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as

soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says ‘genre’, the world ‘genre’, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre’.

3

characteristics. Even if a poem’s identity was intentionally blurred, it still remained a

poem, not a picture or music sheet. This could explain why, despite trying to widen its

limits, poetry finally reverted back to poetry. This writing aims to both systematise the

main trends of Experimental poetry and to point out subversive changes that arose.

As I understand it, there were two trends for making Experimental poetry: through

poetic form and through poetic language. The former included picture, computer and

interactive poetry, sound poetry and prose poetry, whereas concrete poetry and some

kinds of Japanese poetry applications seemed to belong to the latter. However, both trends

tried to escape from the traditional narration in which the writer was placed in the highest

position and had the ability to control what happened in their words, as well as to lead the

understanding and emotions of the reader to what he had intended. Roland Barthes wrote

about this in ‘The Death of the Author’:

Once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to

act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very

exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin,

the author enters his own death, writing begins. [3, 49]

From this, it was clear that readers were considered to be the co-operators of writers

in general and poets in particular. After ‘the death of the author’, the vitality of poems

was proved. However, it could be said that in Experimental poetry, without waiting until

the depersonalisation of the poem, the positions of readers and viewers were admitted.

The interactions between creation and reception were vital and durable. Normally, poetry

was written as a completed process, and could only become art in readers’ interpretations.

In Experimental poetry, however, poets played the role of giving ‘specific directions for

performance’ [4, 5]. Neither fixed meaning nor clear formulae were displayed in such

poems. They might become unreadable or at least ambiguous, with blank gaps in words

as well as ideology, without the participation of readers. Suman Chakroborty wrote about

readers in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry:

For the reader, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writers work as the openers of “the

ways of making meaning”– they are those workers of Language, who force

the readers to take active participation in the production of meaning. [5,18]

Also in the production of meaning, in my view, the attitude of respecting the dignity of

words and syllables played an important role in changing the syntax of poems.

Sometimes, the juxtaposition no longer expressed any relation or communication.

Therefore, syllables in the delicate syntax, and words in the visual structure, could be

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transferred into a note on a music sheet, a tone in a rhythm, a line in a painting, a symbol

on a computer or visual poetry. Thus, Experimental poetry was no longer an exploration

of how poetry could be expressed in different forms, though it was found helpful to revisit

the ‘shape’ poetry from the sixteenth century, mentioned by George Puttenham [6, 49].

The interchange or intersection between these kinds of Experimental poetry, in my

opinion, was sound poetry. As performance poetry, it had close relations to picture poetry

and the beat movement, in which the effects of art were created by the impact of phonetic

and abstract images. Similar to emphasising words and lines by deforming or exchanging

their sizes in space, sound poets made poems louder or softer by tone and voice. This was

also reminiscent of the process of compressing meanings through prose poetry, the aim

being to ‘…compress many tones, by liberating or challenging the resourcefulness of the

voice’ [7, 350].

Moreover, sound poetry also inspired readers by the strength of the sound-image.

Sound poetry did not only focus on how extraordinarily the poem was expressed or how

profoundly it was understood. In my view, intense phonetic alphabets and sudden sounds

at specific moments were themselves protagonists of the performance. It was like reading

a concrete poem and filling nonvisual linking ideas with personal experiences and

memories. Thus, language, sound or image was, as Julia Kristeva claimed, a ‘fundamental

social code’ [5, 18].

In sound poetry, the freedom from any syntax or formula was evident. However, the

further poets moved it away from the basic condition of normal poems, the more it tended

to turn back to its origins through rhythm. Rhythm not only implanted the sound moment

but also assembled the disruptions and separated conditions of words and images. Sound

poetry, therefore, delicately transmitted the complex chord of images by techniques of

voice and reactions to individual moments.

In contrast, being based on the requirements of communication in a technical and

rational society, and stemming from the traditional material of poetry-making with verse

and line order, concrete poetry referred to visual forms organised by semiotics, linguistic

signs and typography. The reason why I have grouped this with the ‘language’ trend of

Experimental poetry is its reflection of the concrete poet’s attitude and view of the world

in terms of physical reality. Content or meaningful usage were not standardised as criteria

of this type of poetry because ‘the fundamental principles of communication become

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important, and more so than meaning itself’’ [4,4]. However, the constraints of many

layers of construction made concrete poems attain the higher level of a picture drawn by

words. Moreover, this approach could also raise the question of compatibility between

language and form in poems, such as how a poet may use restricted semiotics to achieve

minimalistic language. This might lead to a domination of choreographic and perspective

figures and a disadvantaged minority of semiotics or language. On the other hand, as

Eugen Gomringer explained, the language in concrete poetry no longer consisted of long

sentences or statements. These were replaced by letters and single words using

abbreviation and restriction. He also analysed the effects of this kind of poetry in the

commercial and social world, where in ‘the course of daily life this relationship often

passes unnoticed’ [8, 64]:

Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which

could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful

use.

Jean-Francois Lyotard [9] analysed the condition of modern society. In The

Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, he mentioned three steps in

postmodernism which included: 1. Experience of the contrast between realism in art and

the experimentation of pioneer art movements; 2. Experience of the contrast between

beauty and the sublime; and 3. Experience of modern art and aesthetics, which would

further develop into philosophy. The first experience expressed a new conception of

reality. According to Lyotard, in contemporary life, reality had lost stability so that it no

longer ensured material for experience. However, it was enough to explore and

experience because reality itself was only the shadow of realism. It created a virtual reality

to comfort and mislead. Therefore, there should be a modern art which could reflect back

on itself. At the same time, modern art had set its own rules by experimenting with forms,

colours and styles, and opposing the art of consumption based on tastes and purchasing

power. This experience was reflected in the second step, the contrast between beauty and

the sublime. While the sublime could be predicted by thought or conception, it was never

grasped or experimented with, for example as the absolute thing, the whole, the no-

longer-division… It was close to something which was non-aesthetic, non-described.

Meanwhile, beauty was based on what could be captured, described by concepts and

experienced in consensus, harmony and aesthetic preferences. Thus, in my view, modern

art was based on the ‘no-form’ of objects or the avoidance of any simulation. Such

indescribable figures were also shown quite clearly in the crinkly structures of concrete

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poetry. Poems were written, drawn, collaged or installed in expressive forms. This

reminded of The Arte of English Poesie published in 1589 by George Puttenham, in which

poetry was displayed in geometrical figures [6, Chapter XII].

It seemed that the aspirations of renewing poetry did not only belong to the modern or

postmodern condition; poetry from the sixteenth century had depicted itself in a highly

interactive and visual form. However, the reason why this geometric poetry had not

become established, in my view, was the retention of traditional verses and rhythm. Even

though poets tried to space the words and letters to suit the intended shape, the

seamlessness of the poem was still maintained by line and content. For example:

Power

Of death

Nor of life

Hath Selamour

With Gods it is rife

To giue and bereue breath.

I may for pitie perchaunce

Thy lost libertie re store,

Vpon thine othe with this penaunce,

That while thou liuest thou neuer loue no more [6, 49]

By complying with the rules of the English sonnet, this poem could easily spread and

restore the original form of poetry. Thus, the pyramid shape, if it had any effect on the

poem beside the visual impression, might contain the attitude of reverence and the feeling

of minority when overwhelmed by the power of God. The word ‘power’ was placed on

the top of the pyramid as the confirmation of its august position.

2.2 Meaning or Nonsense

However, what could be suggested from the geometric shape of that kind of poem seems

to have been based on its meaning. The boundary between content and form emerged as

7

evidence of that binding force. In addition, readers had almost no role here. Feeling

images as they existed in real life, reading poems in the flat space, the vertical of time,

according to Eugen Gomringer, was the simple ‘line way’ of making poetry. Thus,

Gomringer introduced the process ‘from line to constellation’:

The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry

which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were

drawing stars together to form a cluster.

The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed

dimensions. [8, 67]

It could be said that the constellation model, of which Eugen Gomringer was

considered one of the pioneers, was totally different from visual the sixteenth century

poems. By observing poetry from a mixture of directions and dimensions, bending the

line vision into a 3D vision, merging the boundary between shape and content, grouping

all of them into a cluster so that no star was in the centre, the poet presented a maze or

matrix that was both mysterious and attractive to readers. It was no longer a case of

playing with signs, words and semiotics. It gave readers the opportunity, and invited them,

to explore concrete poetry. As Lyotard pointed out about the virtual reality of realism, in

the constellation there was no need to cite any real objects as prototypes of poetic images

or ideas. The poem itself created reality and, whether it was accepted and understood or

not, it still existed as a possibility among unlimited possibilities that could be assigned to

it. The opinion of rule and law for making poetry, according to this, was further

overstepped. The law was no longer a super-personality factor which was formulated,

generalised from reality and universally imposed upon all. The laws and rules themselves

were the creative, present personalities of the artist, with ambitions to become unique.

Moreover, the laws and rules did not aim to create a simulation of a model that had existed

before; they aimed to structure a model that had never existed. After that, games in

modern/postmodern poetry started by setting up new conventions, laws and unspoken

agreements among poet, text and reader. This explained why contemporary poetry could

take profoundly different forms to traditional approaches. Poetry could become

meaningless sequences like the compositions of the Dada poets. Poetry could deny the

existence of text as in the experience of sound poetry and performance poetry. Poetry

could reject all words, syntax and rhetoric as in concrete poetry... The personalisation

genre not only made specific categories blur but the boundaries between poetry and other

art forms also became ambiguous. In conclusion, it could be said that it was only through

playing that poetry could maintain its existence. The function of poetry was to stir up

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central discourse, to open up potential meaning and potential expression; in other words,

it was the function of play.

However, in my view, considering the creation of concrete poetry and other

Experimental poetry as taking part in play did not mean that poets chose a purposeless or

rebellious attitude. The purpose of concrete poetry was not the minimising of words ‘but

the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of communication’ [8, 68]. I think this

communication should be divided into two trends. The first, under the pressure of

language, hid itself in using the monologue form. In the second, discontent with the

fragmentation of reality and the disintegration of social relationships in modern life was

exposed through the proliferation of signs, semiotics and letters that made readers

impossibly find the original words and collage them into meaningful language. This could

be considered as a way for poets to search for dialogue in this solid community.

In the first trend, for example, Bob Cobbing expressed extreme loneliness in a

monologue with an imaginary interlocutor, ‘Sockless in Sandals’:

Sockless in sandals,

gibbering his wares

in unintelligible shrieks and hisses,

a 'poet' merely disrupts

the solid, sensible business

of the night.

the people hear gibberish;

Poets: how can nothing be said

with all that noise? [10, 8]

The poet places himself in opposition to the night, places his quiet situation in contrast

with the noise of the night: ‘gibberish’ and ‘unintelligible shrieks and hisses’. Sound is

used to highlight the no-word condition. The final question is left opening for the

participation of readers.

Similar to the attitude of Bob Cobbing, Alan Riddell, in his poem named ‘Help’ [11,

22], communicated with others through the feeling of loss and despair:

someofmybestfriendsare

someofmybestfriendsar

someofmybestfriendsa

someofmybestfriends

9

someofmybestfriend

(…)

some

som

so

s

All the lines of ‘Help’ open a question the poetic character seems to ask himself: ‘Could

I name some of my best friends?’ but there is no answer. The same structure is repeated

over 22 lines. After each non-response, a letter is dropped. Finally, he receives nothing

and the poem loses itself in a single silence: ‘s’ – ‘shhhhhhhhhh’. The poem is structured

in quite a simple shape: a triangle with the top beneath (with the maximum restriction in

terms of making new words); thus, it is strictly a concrete poem that shows the forgotten

position of the human being in modern life.

Still on the first trend, in other concrete poems of the mentioned volume, Bob Cobbing

used many phonetic aspects. This was reminiscent of his ABC sound poem, which was

performed in ensemble at ‘The Other Room’. The attraction was that, in both sound

performance and silent reading, his phonetic poems proved their total difference from any

dictionary expression or anything found in the introductions of guidance books. Since one

of the aims was that concrete poems would be as easy to understand ‘as signs in airports

and traffic signs’ [8, 68] it would have been easy for this kind of poetry to fall into

naturalism and then lose the poetic figures. However, Bob Cobbing, by taking on this

challenge, kept his poems far from the temptation of depiction of normal life. For

example, he created a poem from a list of Californian fishes [10, 33] analysed as ‘A – nan

an’ nan in a dictionary format [10, 24], he described mushrooms with various names,

kinds, shapes and materials [10, 32] or used the letters in the word ‘rainbow’ as initial

consonants for creating new compounds [10, 39] and many other cases. However, they

did not become phonetics lessons or crossword puzzles. The poet showed that this was an

exploration rather than unconscious play. In each poem, the concern of the artist to find

the right letter and organise the correct word structure was evident, as was the aspiration

to create new words and unpredictable transplants that would never be found in a

dictionary or in real experiences. The poem ‘Rainbow’ was an integration of innumerable

images which seemed to have no relation to the meaning of a rainbow but were born from

the actual word R-a-i-n-b-o-w. The poem included the beauty, the ugliness, the logic, the

illogic, the unexplainable combination and the curiousness of exploring more about the

unlimited associations arising from the specific word Rainbow in a limited form. As such,

the poem bloomed like a kaleidoscope of the rainbow itself.

10

The other trend expressed the desire for two-way-communication by inviting readers

to contribute to poems which were incomplete and which lacked the basic components to

be simple to read. The poet, in this case, explored the possibilities of poetry by cutting

words into pieces, mixing the orders of letters, blurring language into a shape or even

using non-linguistic components.

For instance, with the poem ‘Spectrum Shift’ and its content made from repetition of

the seven words red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet with an alternate

arrangement of typography, Alan Riddell created the visual effect of a spectrum in the

shape of a crossed line throughout the poem. In my view, this kind of visual feature

influenced Dương Tường, one of the first Vietnamese poets to experiment with concrete

poetry, especially picture poetry, when he published his second volume named Musical

Instrument. This was a ‘non-word’ volume which used images to indicate an

autobiographical chart of human life in communication with the universe. Before Musical

Instrument, following the influence of concrete poetry, he disrupted the structure of

language, giving verbal expression in a form which was constantly moving, changing and

forcing readers to integrate into the poetry, perceived by every possible sense. Like Bob

Cobbing, he was concerned about:

The extent to which syllable-structure plays a crucial role in determining the

choice between 'ae' and 'e' is dramatically revealed by considering post-

vocalic consonants other than 'n' or 'm'. [11,11]

2.3 Some followings from Vietnamese poets

In my view, Western experimental poems came to Vietnam before Vietnamese poets

really understood about Experimental poetry and its theories and experiences. Most

knowledge about Experimental poetry had come from translation, and thus it was not

strange that many modern Vietnamese poets had been translators. I think it was only by

this means of transforming Western poetry collections into Vietnamese that Vietnamese

poets had some typical examples to follow. The Vietnamese poet that I mentioned as an

apt example of modern poetry in Vietnam, Dương Tường, is a translator. He has

translated many poetry collections and novels in French, 3 which had been the main

3 Dương Tường translated L'Etranger by Albert Camus, La Route des Flandres by Claude Simon, and À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust.

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language in Vietnamese schools before 1945, and in Russian,4 which used to be very

popular language in Vietnam from 1975. However, English was the language that helped

Dương Tường become a poet. He translated Bronte’s novels and for the first time

introduced Shakespeare’s plays to Vietnamese critics and readers. Being familiar with

reading and listening to modern American artists (e.g. Bob Dylan), Dương Tường became

the first of a generation of Vietnamese experimental poets. He created poetry in music

and painting. He tended to ‘perform’ his art rather than printing it in normal paper form.

The first volume, Thirty-six Love Poems [12] was published in 1989, contained many

modern poems that Dương Tuong had written in the 1960s. After another collection,

which only had a limited understanding, he wrote Mea Culpa and experimented with

defamiliarisation in Vietnamese poetry.

It [defamiliarisation] is the creative distortion of a familiar word or concept to make it

seem strange, unfamiliar, or in some way odd. The purpose of defamiliarisation is to

strip away ‘the film of familiarity’ that blurs everyday perception in order to awaken

the reader or hearer from the lethargy of the habitual which hobbles thought.5 [13, 27]

In my view, defamiliarisation was used to make described objects unfamiliar, to arouse

new feelings in readers, and to prevent them from being governed by existing habits and

unconscious prejudices about cognitive objects. This process was suited to the purpose of

art, which is:

…to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to

increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an

aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. [14, 216]

In his own way, Dương Tường changed the fixed consonant in Vietnamese words to

refresh its sound, and transformed some other meanings in combination with the context

of poems. Similar to the way Cobbing did with his alphabet, Dương Tường chose

consonant pairs to change using criteria such as competition between the lightness and

strength of similar sounds like: ‘s’, ‘z’, ‘d’, or the matching phonetics of letters like ‘c’

and ‘k’, which are dorsal unvoiced stop consonants, both being at the same utterance

4 Dương Tường translated Lev Tolstoi’s novels (e.g. Anna Karenina). 5 Ostranenie in Russian, which means ‘making strange’. ‘Defamiliarisation is a term that was popularized by the Russian Formalist, Victor Shklovsky, in the early part of the last century’, James L. Resseguie.

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position. Therefore, verses were expressed as forms of notation and the poem was like a

song. Concrete poetry forced readers to forget their old verbal experiences, and this factor

challenged the inertia of poetry. For instance, from a visual direction, it turned to hearing,

and from words, it turned to sound full of musical characteristics.

Moreover, Dương Tường also disrupted the structure of language, giving verbal

expression a form, which was moving, changing, forcing readers to integrate into the

poetry and perceive it by every possible sense. Language, words and phonemes were

accompanied with the rhythm of contemporary life. He established a principle of

changing orthography through consonant changes, such as the sounds ‘p’ and ‘b’. In

phonetics, the former is an unvoiced stop consonant, the latter a voiced stop consonant.

In addition, there were some specific changes such as double consonants: ll (e.g. ‘luênh’,

‘lli’, ‘lluâng’ ...) [15, 17]. The rhymes became inactive: (e.g. tr' and kh^) to evoke the

feeling of having no rhyme: ‘kh^’ [15, 50].

Making sound impressions was also a target of Dương Tường in his approach to sound

poetry. In actual use, sounds are spoken continuously in time. Language signals,

therefore, are linear. They appear in turn, each following the other to form a chain. This

one-dimensional characteristic of language also applies in music. However, a melody

cannot be considered merely as single sounds in a sequence one after the other. To create

fluttering over several dimensions in poetry, Dương Tường separated letters from words.

The letters (which were separated) often expressed feelings and evoked images. Their

meanings appeared not only through imagination but also in the spacing of words.

Language was perceived as both linear and multi-linear in polymorphic routes and

multidimensional space, regardless of the order of time and space. Dương Tường tended

to spread letters on the surface of the paper in a certain order depending on the content of

the word or verse in order to create a sense of intuitiveness for readers.

z

Chìm ọ đời

c

a

sink l ife :

on

g

13

Mùi v-

ắ-

n-

g trắng

smell of e-

m-

p-

t-

y white [15,131]

On the first line, the words ‘along’ and ‘sink life’ seem to be configured to represent

loneliness. This feeling is spread, broken into many stages, which helps to create an empty

space. Something is likely to fall off or become lost. Separating letters from their words

made the words slide from their original meanings and carry the concept of space as they

created shapes, lines and sound effects.

Among the consonants, the position of ‘z’ was changed most in Dương Tường’s

poetry. In Vietnamese, ‘z’ is similar to the sound of ‘d’. The change expressed the idea

that both words and verses could be read from the page without the external effects of

sound. Language, therefore, emerged on the surface, and came alive above all. In my

view, this was consistent with Dương Tường’s concept of poetry form; he wished his

poems to be read as songs with quiet and bass notes in extraordinarily spaced lines.

In addition to affecting the form of poetry, the changes in orthography suggested

meanings in a musical sense. In Mea Culpa, the poem ‘Moment’ uses the dominant ‘k’ at

the end of a word instead of ‘c’. ‘K’ is a stop, which relates to the steady beat of a clock

counting drops of time. This feeling of time is matched with space where the poet uses

‘b’ repeatedly as the final consonant instead of ‘p’ as usual. It blocks the sounds from

coming out. This method is used consistently until the end of ‘Moment’:

Tinh (Semen)

Chẳng thể nào xuất

Can not be produced

Thần (Mental) [14, 49]

This is no longer a choice about finding a single acceptable way. There are three

dimensions to the diagram by the end of the verse. In my view, the overall achievement

expresses a sense of extreme impasse in everything: love, life and art. It is the social or

living space which cannot not accommodate all three aspects. The whole poem is a

‘shocking’ awakening of a ‘civilized box’ in human life.

14

In my view, the combination of different phonemes also featured meanings. A

phoneme itself did not contain meaning, however when it was placed in clusters of

phonemes, it might evoke something. A paradigmatic relationship was created among

elements that could be substituted for each other in the same location of the speech string.

The selection of appropriate phonemes usually took place in thought. When a phoneme

already existed in a cluster, its stability contributed to create the meaning of the word.

Thus, in Mea Culpa, such a paradigm was a choice for renewing language. Numerous

options for choosing phonemes were being realised on the surface of the paper, but the

poet himself seemed not to participate in the final selection. Therefore, letters and words

were expressed for their own inherent ability to create tone and meaning:

e

Kể cả không miền (Despite no area)

i

a

[15, 87]

This poem is written just below the line: ‘I did not choose’. On one hand, this is an

image of choice: ‘e, o, i, a’, while on the other, it is disregarded by ‘Despite no area’.

Thus ‘o’, by different tones of reading, is renewed.

In response to concrete poetry, Dương Tường tended towards visual images, including

visual emotions. For example, through ‘exponentiation’ in polygons, he talked about

feelings:

Tôi

Lũy thừa yêu

Lũy thừa nhớ

Lũy thừa đau

(I

exponentiation love

exponentiation miss

exponentiation pain) [15, 64]

The repetition of ‘exponentiation’ multiplies those emotional states, swirls and links

them to each other. Each is the consequence of the others. Three exponentiations

contribute to a whole ‘I’ – the ego. In contrast, ‘I’ was written about as a non-ego in

another poem (‘I am still non-I’) when he described himself as a ‘silent bass polygon’.

Thus, Dương Tường, rather than shaping poems in blocks or cubes or triangles as Western

15

poets did to bring new sense to the form of poetry, shaped them around himself as the ‘I’

inside. I consider this process a somewhat destructive way for him to renew Vietnamese

poetry – by renewing the ego.

Dương Tường also perceived space horizontally and time vertically. For example,

‘Stratigraphic Memories’ in Romance 3 enabled readers to feel and touch mysterious

memories. In another poem, ‘America’, he brought in another dimension, the ‘diagonal’:

I look at America

through

your perversely di tenderness

your vulnerably a gynecology

your frustratingly g sensuality

your waywardly o friendliness

your hopelessly n dynamism

your puzzlingly al pussy

*

I met you, diagonal girl

in diagonal Broadway

and I realize

you’re America6 [15, 64]

Thus, I think that while other Vietnamese poets were struggling to find honest words

to express something, Dương Tường, as a poet exploring Experimental poetry, could

express an idea through a shape, or simply an assembly.

Dương Tường, in my view, refused meaningfulness but saved something which

belonged to human existence. In a very loose relationship to modern life, he tried to catch

images going through his mind by using defamiliarised metaphors such as ‘Ngực thời

gian’ (chest of time); [15, 14] ‘Mười hai lớp thịt tháng năm’ (twelve layers of meat in

time) [15, 15]; ‘mủ đêm’ (latex of night) [15, 19]; ‘mùi mồ hôi ba năm chờ’ (the smell of

three-year-waiting sweat) [15, 41]; ‘Những bản thảo jà chin tháng mười ngày’ (the nine-

month aborted manuscripts) [15, 94]; and ‘thời gian như một cái nhìn vàng’ (time as a

golden look) [15, 15]. Such images were arranged in a conscious and evocative way. For

example: ‘chest of time’ could be time measured by the flaming of youth. ‘The nine-

month aborted manuscripts’ could be the birth of art inside the birth of man, the pain of

art in the pain of life. These could be understood by the idea of time in Dương Tường’s

poetry: time of in the measurement of art. I also focused on the way he talked about rain

- ‘Những ngón tay mưa’ (rainy fingers); ‘mưa giọng sắt’ (iron voice rain); ‘mưa bémol’

6 Dương Tường, ‘America’. This poem was written in English by Dương Tường.

16

(bémol rain); ‘mưa tôi’ (rain me); and ‘dương cầm mưa’ (piano rain) - with an invisible

connection to music, serenade and romance, which were far from the school of nature.

Sometimes Dương Tường was close to Surrealism in creating a fancy realm of concrete

objects: ‘búp hôn đầu’ (first kiss bud), ‘đám ma lá chết chiều nay’ (dead leave funeral this

afternoon) and ’24 mùi hoa violét’ (24 smells of violet). These objects were associated

with nature but immersed in nostalgic memories of lovers regardless of time or space.

In his poems, Dương Tường experimented with defamiliarising musical features

within poetry structure. He used words as leading sounds. There was usually a basic chord

first, then the resonance was produced in a certain sequence. It was ‘24’ in ‘Tình khúc

24’ (Love song 24) [15, 42] , ‘những ngón tay mưa’ (rain fingers) in ‘Serenade 1’ [15,11]

and ‘khe khẽ’ (softly softly) in ‘Chợt thu 2’ (Sudden Autumn 2) [15, 39]. The sequence

was often timeless and non-space, formed by the logic of mood and memories. Because

there was a dominant sound, the poem might follow an illogical, non-conventional

sequence. Poetry using music structure was inextricable from a form of contemporary

social consciousness. It might be jazz, a richly toned kind of music which allowed full

impromptu performance. I consider the collections of ‘Serenade 1, 2, 3’ to be more like

real music than poems. The mainstream sound here not only creates the poetry’s structure

but is also positioned as a chorus:

Những ngón tay mưa

Dương cầm trên mái

Những ngón tay mưa

Kéo dài tai quái

(Rainy fingers

Piano on roof

Rainy fingers

prolonged mischievousness)

(‘Serenade 1’)

Each time the chorus is repeated, a new space is opened and absorbed in the sound of

floating rain. Sometimes, it is like continuous legends as in a Scheherazade night:

Ngã tư

Cột đèn

Ô kính

Những ngón tay mưa

Xập xòe kỉ niệm

(Crossroad

lamp

glass window

17

Rainy fingers

ambiguous memories)

Moreover, the end of this poem is also an open-ending of a song, which gradually

blurs. The music becomes smaller and lighter but has not gone. It turns to be an echo in

the mind:

Những ngón tay mưa

Những ngón tay mưa

(Rainy fingers

Rainy fingers) [15, 13]

An example of harmony in the changes of orthography is displayed in the poem ‘Noel

1’:

Em về phố lặng (you come, street’s quiet)

lòng đổ chuông (heart strikes)

lluềnh luềnh nước (pouring pouring water)

lli

lluâng

lloang llưng

lliêng llinh lluông buông boong

adlllibitum 7

There is a transformation from the visual to auditory sense. The double ‘l’ sound in

every line makes both letters and words cohere together. The ringing tones radiate in

harmony with water like continuous overlapping waves. The Noel bell is deployed in a

whirlpool and thus, the space belonging to the bell, water and you/the girl becomes even

more echoed and faded.

It could be said that the Vietnamese poetry written from 1963 that possibly bore

influences from Experimental poetry and American New Formalism was not published

until 2003. Dương Tường missed the period for creating a revolution in poetry in

Vietnam. However, his efforts to introduce Experimental poetry to the young generation

of poets are worth recording among Vietnamese poetry.

In addition, creativity did not stop at concrete poetry. The more poetry was

experienced, the more possible it was to push it into other extreme kinds of poetry. One

of them was L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry. It was not only Tristan Tzara who showed how

7 Dương Tường, p. 17 – In Vietnamese language, those verses did not contain specific meanings. They are just the sound of water when it spreads and mixes with the sound of the heart.

18

to create a Dadaist poem; the ways of writing Language poetry diversified and separated

into many trends. Jerome McGann wrote:

Oppositional politics are a paramount concern, and the work stands in the

sharpest relief, stylistically, to the poetry of accommodation.

In addition, Bruce Andrews pointed out that the role of meaning in Language poetry

was a way of opposing the traditional harmonic ideology of making poetry:

The distinguishing quality of writing is the incessant (& potential) production

of meaning and value. […] Meaning isn’t just a surplus value to be eliminated

– it comes out of a productive practice [16, 135].

Furthermore, if Cobbing had a poem in the shape of dictionary or a discount

advertisement [10, 13]. Bernadette Mayer in ‘Experiments’ offered the possibility of

composing a poem as a writing index. In these cases, Language poets blocked the gates

for the reader to penetrate into the realm of poetic works. Typography, semiotics, letters

and signs developed from materials within concrete poetry to become the poems

themselves. The life of each letter or semiotic was so sturdy that even if a poem contained

only uncompleted words, it was still a completed art product in interaction with readers.

The poem by Clark Coolidge could be mentioned here, in which each person, through his

own experiences and feelings in a certain moment, could fill the blanks:

Ber

esting

ciple

ture

ent

tive

a ture

the ing

Although born from Experimental poetry and influenced partly by Concrete poetry,

Language poetry seemed to explore a new line that was initially recognised as radical

efforts at a watershed. Its records needed to be proved by time and further experience.

Thus, taking into account the complex literary context of Vietnam after wars, Language

poetry itself could not have had a true and absolute follower in Vietnam who could

contribute to its unofficial manifesto and be accepted as a true modern poet. However,

similar to the case of Dương Tường with concrete poetry, Trần Dần was considered to be

the rare Vietnamese poet following the trend of Language poetry.

19

Trần Dần was a Western intellectual and Dương Tường, who had translated many

classic novels, was a well-known poet. They wrote poetry in three languages: English,

French and Vietnamese. Trần Dần’s poems dated from the Vietnamese wars against the

colonial French (1945-1954) and the Americans (1955-1975). In 2008, his achievements,

created over half a century previously, were recognised by Vietnamese poets. There were

two major innovations in Trần Dần’s poetry. The first was the trend for ‘dòng chữ’ (line

of words). He focused on exploiting emotional forms of language such as sound and

image, while he disregarded or even destroyed the semantic relationships that were

similar to the Language trend in contemporary American poetry. The second innovation

was that he advocated that poetry should involve synthesis and an interdisciplinary

approach, which included poems, art and music, at several levels and dimensions using

both visual and auditory senses. This was expanded and realised into visual poetry and

‘harmonique’ by Dương Tường. In this type of versification, the major poetic material

was sound rather than words. He worked on the side of significance rather than

denotation, using ‘tilted’ words instead of ‘straight’ ones.

Trần Dần’s poetry colletion was a shock to readers and caused much debate from

critics. Most of them were confused whether these kinds of poetry should be considered

as poems, and if so, which group or school they could be categorised in. Some critics

even asked for Trần Dần’s poetry to be removed from Vietnamese literature forever

because of its madness, darkness and unexplainable figures. In my view, his poems could

be analysed in the light of Guillaume Apollinaire during the 1910s, the Dada poets in late

1910s and early 1920s, and Jacques Prevert in the years after the 2nd World War.

However, the mini and visual poetry could not be reasonably explained. That might have

been because of the common standing position between many different theories at the

time he wrote (or drew) in 1982.

Until I explored Concrete and Language poetry, it seemed that I had found parallels

between Trần Dần and some poems in the later volumes of Bob Cobbing, the

consciousness which was familiar in Eugen Gomringer’s work and especially, the way of

making poetry in the spirit of Ron Silliman and some other Language poets.

For example, Trần Dần created a saga in the poem ‘Jo Joacx’ [18, 226], which

described the life of a person named ‘Naked man’ who had unusual and abnormal

20

activities in a day of his life. The poem had 17 chapters. Here it is introduced in summary,

placed in comparison with ‘The Jack poem’ by Cobbing [10, 17]:

I then recognised some similarities between the journey of Jack and the life of ‘Naked

man’, such as the same consonant ‘J’ used in the titles ‘Jack’ and ‘Jo Joacx’. Both could

be a story or single activities; both could contain meaning, or might not. However, both

Jack and Jo Joacx show the poets playing with words. Jack could be any person or could

be no one, and so could Jo Joacx. The poets tell readers, through long poems, a story

without a beginning or end. They are flexible enough to add any verbs that we think the

character could do, as well as any places that he could go. There is no boundary for

reviewing whether anything is good or bad, clean or dirty, pure or having been stained.

The play with Jack or Jo Joacx could last forever depending on the patience of readers.

However, they show a hidden meaning, especially in the case of Jo Joacx. Traditional

narrative, when telling a story, must have a certain character with specific characteristics.

It would be regarded as useless to tell an empty story like this. Most importantly, the

language related to sex would not be accepted in Vietnamese traditional culture. The same

conclusion would happen to a Vietnamese poem written about the negative aspects of

life, the side that was not smooth but rough, full of scars and being hurt. That might the

reason why Trần Dần wrote some poems that seemed to relate to Concrete poetry to

The Jack poem Jo Joacx

I. Naked man wandering in naked room

Naked man met 17th scar woman 10pm

date II. Naked man sheltered the rain

scared wine scared rain scared

constellation III. Memory is fresh scar

IV. Naked man broke the umbrella virgin

summer naked wall V. Jo Joacx

corridor 10 pm date VI. JA JACC

SSS JU JICSSS JU JUSSS JA SSS

SSS SSS Death in the station From

the rainy scars JA JOC XXX (…) XVI.

Universe need furniture Cock napes

XVIII. Chirping rain morning newspaper

scar news Ja Jươc xxxxxxxx

21

express another person, ‘Jo Joacx’, the person who did not belong to any certain place.

He was the universal citizen.

This also evoked the attitude of the poet in society. In another poem named ‘Légende’,

Trần Dần drew only one letter: ‘i’, in different sizes, with the comment ‘Tôi không phải

thổ zân quả đất’ (I am not the citizen of the earth).

In my view, ‘i’ in that shape, could express the moon and stars, two favourite images of

Trần Dần in his writing, it could be the dream of living in the universe, or could be seen

as tears when the letter ‘i’ is separated into two parts: the round and the comma. Above

all, however, ‘i’ seems to be the cry of a person losing the self and defining as having a

marginal position in this imagined society. This was a familiar reaction to the world by

Language poets. It could also be said that when Ron Silliman named his memoir ‘Under

Albany’, he also identified with and accepted the attitude of a Language poet.

The above kinds of Experimental poetry supplied readers with a portrait of innovative

poetry that was almost a distortion of traditional poetic forms and functions. Most of their

effects were considered in terms of the effort to renew and remove the boundaries

between poetry and other art types. The artist, on one hand, tried to have his poem

performed interactively and visually, while on the other, he implicitly kept the lyrical

characteristics that made their performance remain poetry. This contradiction was most

marked in prose poetry, a poetic genre that seems to have arisen in the nineteenth century

in France and quickly became one of the mainstreams in Experimental poetry, with the

‘conflict in which presumably every literary text participates, but which was here

intensified and foregrounded’ [2, 3]. This conflict, then, was no longer an obstacle or

cause of segregation for prose poetry, which was on its way to becoming an accepted

genre.

22

3. Conclusion

Experimental poetry has been developed in various kinds in the West for more than a

hundred years8. However, from the time Vietnamese poets first knew about it (from the

1960s with the popularising of the English language) until now, Experimental poetry has

not been considered as ‘poetry’ in Vietnam. Vietnamese poetry required poems to be

understandable, but Experimental poetry challenged normal understanding. Vietnamese

poets wrote according to themes (e.g. nostalgia or patriotism), but Experimental poetry

refused such arrangements. Vietnamese poets considered poems to contain responsibility

towards an aesthetic and educational orientation, but Experimental poetry set poems free:

‘anything could be art’. Thus, having researched Experimental poetry, I suggest some of

models to help Vietnamese poets see new methods of writing from the position of an

inventor rather than a moral propagandist.

Along with writing about Experimental poetry, I aimed to point out the obstructions

in Vietnamese poetry, which included the underestimating of the ‘ego’, the ‘self’ and the

rejection of ‘nakedness’ and ‘sexuality’. Thus, I raised the question of how, without those

two identities, a Vietnamese poet could write about subjects as they existed and objects

as they naturally appeared. Without them, there could be nothing related to or similar to

Western Surrealism.

DOCUMENTS DE REFERENCE

[1] Sheppard, Robert, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950-2000

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005)

[2] Murphy, Margueritte S, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from

Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)

[3] Barthes, Roland, The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989)

[4] King, Doreen, Short Essays on Experimental Poetry: Experimental Poetry in the 20th

Century and Beyond (Shrewsbury: Feather, 2003)

[5] Chakroborty, Suman, ‘Meaning, Unmeaning & the Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’,

IRWLE, Vol. 4 No. I January (2008), 16-27

[6] Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (Cirencester The Echo Library, 2007)

[7] McFarlane, James Walter, and Malcolm Bradbury, Modernism 1890-1930, 1st edn,

reprinted with a new preface ed. by Harmondsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1991)

[8] Gomringer, Eugen, ‘From Line to Constellation’, trans. by Mike Weaver in Marjorie

Perloff, Unoriginal Genius Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 2010)

8 ‘While the mainly English background of the poetry does not reflect a fully “British” context, the question of what constitutes the “experimental” in poetry is robustly argued in a convincing argument for the validity of the avant-garde legacy’, in a book review of David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale, Contemporary Women's Writing, 9 (2015), pp. 159-160.

23

[9] Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

[10] Cobbing, Bob, Sockless in Sandals: Collected Poems, Volume Six (Cardiff: Second

Aeon, 1985)

[11] Riddell, Alan, Eclipse (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972)

[12] Lê, Đạt and Dương Tường, Ba Mươi Sáu Bài Tình (Thirty Six Love Poems) (Hanoi:

Nhà xuất bản trẻ, 1989)

[13] Resseguie, James L., The Strange Gospel: Narrative Design and Point of View in

John (Leiden: Brill, 2001) [14] Morson, Gary Saul, ‘The Russian debate on narrative’ in Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory

and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), [15] Dương, Tường, Mea Culpa (Hải Phòng: Nhà xuất bản Hải Phòng, 2005)

[16] Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G (Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1984)

[17] Coolidge, Clark, Space (New York: Harper and Row, 1970)

[18] Trần, Dần, Thơ Trần Dần (Tran Dan’s Poetry) (Da Nang: Nhà xuất bản Đà Nẵng,

2008)

* Vietnamese poems cited in this paper were translated by Dr. Dinh Minh Hang.