Identity, language, community, possibility: Celebrating Hoa Nguyen’s poetic journey for World Poetry Day
On March 21st, World Poetry Day (external link) honours and celebrates the vast history of poetry and its oral and written forms of expression. Adopted by UNESCO, the day aims to support “linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increase the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.”
Award-winning poet, educator, and daughter of the Vietnamese diaspora Hoa Nguyen (external link) has spent decades reading and writing poetry. Through intimate encounters with self, history, longing, and loss, Nguyen has authored numerous books, including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots, which was nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize. Her most recent collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (external link) , was a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award and has received widespread acclaim.
Front cover of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, featuring a postcard with the poet’s mother, Nguyễn Anh Diệp
Nguyen joined the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in 2023, where she currently teaches poetry and creative writing. For this year, on World Poetry Day, Nguyen offers insights into her creative and pedagogical processes, sharing how her poetic writings have evolved over her career.
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In "Yellow Echoes," the SWHNM collective took part in staged photo performances in which we explored embodiments of harmony, dissonance, resonance, light, shadow, and yellow. Working with mirrors, still and moving bodies of water, and large parking lot puddles that reflected sky, we reference the Vietnamese word “nước”, a word that means both “country” and “water.” Although we don’t foresee returning to our homeland, we may experience “our country”—our former country—in mirrored selves or water/puddles/rain. These reflection sites served as tool, a nước, an expatriatic, transient material, a fabric for exploring themes of exile, diaspora, and marginality.
What is the first poem you remember reading?
In my earliest readings, as someone who spent hours in the public library, I discovered the magic of folk story and poetry, poems attributed to “Anonymous” and those by John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I remember connecting with Millay’s free verse poem “Spring,” (external link) an anti-romantic take on spring that felt grimly wise and cynically punk in its rejection of idealized beauty.
Are poetry and identity inextricable?
The lyric 'I' in poetry is both intimately personal and distanced, both you and not you. Identity, the 'self' in poetry, is a construction and performance that reveals through its very distance. The 'I' in the poem remembers, asserts, and reflects, participating in and responding to the world. The poem's persona exists in a dynamic tension with the world, a response to forces that elicits a participatory reaction from the reader.
As a member of She Who Has No Masters (external link) (SWHNM), a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces, and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora, I take part in collaborative art and writing activities, readings, performances, exhibits, and social practice in an effort to bring into concert the voices of womxn and gender-nonconforming writers of the Vietnamese diaspora.
"For the last several years we have directed our attention toward a multi-vocal, hybrid-poetry project that amplifies the diverse experiences of diasporic Vietnamese women as it reclaims and complicates the colour yellow, re-imaging and reimagining its historically negative associations into a site of connection, renewal, and possibility."
How has your writing in form, habit and inspiration evolved over the years?
What has stayed consistent, even as life and circumstance change, is a practice of attention to language through a considered study of poems that came before me and to those of my contemporaries, and a commitment to living a curious and creative life balanced with beauty. What’s evolved from that investigative curiosity is an expansion on the possibilities of a poem, in all its complexities. Sometimes that means taking risks with new forms and gestures. Sometimes that means adapting old forms and narrative structures.
How have your decades of experience hosting community-based poetry workshops informed your pedagogy as a creative writing instructor at TMU?
I spent decades in a teacherly study of poetics—in conversation with diverse poetry reading and writing audiences—so I may better understand how we can make impactful poems happen. I loved running my own school for poetry, the poets I met, the poems and books the workshops helped birth. Alongside these decades of community-based engagement, I also gained fifteen years of experience teaching as a visiting writer, faculty member, and mentor of creative writing in literary centers, Master of Fine Arts programs, and undergraduate programs across North America.
"At TMU, I love introducing or reintroducing poetry to undergraduates and am excited for how TMU’s new creative writing concentration will cultivate the talents of English majors and creative writers, to give them tools, deepen their skills, and more confidently use humankind’s most incredible invention, language."
Could you speak about your relationship with the Vietnamese language while writing Treasure?
Since I immigrated at an early age and due to pressures to assimilate, I stopped speaking my native language. The Vietnamese language is a ghost for me. A language lost due to relocation, a nerve ghost. I sometimes think that I write poems to speak to or as this lost and ghostly language.
In Treasure, I was inspired to write connected to a desire to language the difficult-to-language. A different kind of linguistic diversity, perhaps. I remain inspired by language itself and am drawn to the ancient origins of poetry and song, to where music and language, ritual and magic meet. I am interested in how language can sing and interact across time and remain an address of and continuance to a tradition that creates possibility and conversations relevant to one’s own time. Sometimes I think of writing and reading poetry as an act of defiance and a way to improvise a way out of the void.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure with the National Book Award Finalist medal.
Nguyen’s writing is a testament to the generative possibilities of poetry: possibilities for encounters, ruptures, and reimaginings. Thinking of and through the conventions of language is vital, not just on World Poetry Day, but in our everyday lives.
