Hi, I'm Susan Briante.
It's so nice to be here.
It's so nice to see so many of you here.
It's been a long time.
And it's a hot, beautiful, humid night
to be gathered together in the presence of such amazing poets
and their work.
I teach here in the MFA program.
I feel so fortunate that we have the Poetry Center here with us,
and I'm grateful to have your company tonight.
Let me take a sip before I start because it's humid.
So reading the work of Mai Der Vang's two
brilliant collections over the past couple weeks brought
to mind a quote from a poet, artist, and curator who
I very much admire--
Anaïs Duplan.
He writes, quote, "we often turn to history for lessons
that we hope will guide us through the present moment.
That's a worthy cause.
And I'd like to think that the process of remembering history
together as a culture saves us from repeating
the mistakes of the past.
As we've seen in this nation's history,
however, there are limits to this process,
especially when defining the success of seeing together.
Seeing together can be tricky, to say the least.
Can you remember a time when all Americans saw together?"
End quote.
In my own documentary work, I've thought about that quote a lot,
its essential truth and essential difficulties.
Reading the work of Mai Der Vang brings further complication
to Duplan's thesis.
Whose culture or history?
Where do we find the border of American history?
How can we be accountable within the legacies of US imperialism?
Who do I refer to when I say "we"?
In her first book, Afterland, winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman
Award, longlisted for a National Book Award,
Vang established herself as an essential contemporary voice,
writing poems that attempt that kind of accountability
to the past as they chronicle and contemplate
the violence against and displacement
of the Hmong people as a result of the Cold War
geopolitical contests and the Secret War in Laos.
In the midst of ongoing conflicts,
it's a book that provides an essential reminder
of how long the legacy of a war lasts as it explores
the afterlife for victims of such conflicts in the after
land of diasporic survivors.
In her most recent collection, Yellow Rain,
and the book to which I'll focus my attention in this
introduction, a finalist-- a book that was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry,
Vang focuses on one particularly harrowing aspect of that
legacy--
the yellow rain which fell over Hmong villages, a reference
to a never officially acknowledged use
of a brutal chemical warfare agent and the elaborate methods
concocted to deny it.
The poems in the book take as their sources documents
from the National Security Archive and the Armed Forces
Medical Intelligence Center.
They include declassified cables, dissertation,
congressional reports, memorandums, and telegrams.
They tell a story of gruesome deaths,
mishandled, lost, and corrupted evidence, red herrings,
and scapegoated bees.
But the documents not only feed the poems,
they help define the forms of the poems.
The cover-ups and conspiracies that mire this history
can be seen in the overlapping and manipulated
images of quotes that float under poems
or sometimes over each other, such as in a series of works
called "Composition."
Another poem takes the form of a questionnaire
given to Hmong refugees.
But while the language of imperial bureaucracy
is left to reveal itself in all of its brutal banality,
Vang acts like a translator, reminding us
of poetry's ability to return language to its humanity
and reveal the costs of military experiments and exercises.
And here, I'll just quote briefly from the poem,
"Self-Portrait Together as a CBW Questionnaire" as an example.
In the poem, you'll find this stunning line.
Quote, "we rescue a hundred whisperers,
force the utterances of our feet to survive," end quote.
But that line is sprawled across in bold texts
and with the blank lines that you'd see in any standard form.
The result of this kind of work is work that, to quote Vang,
"pulls up furtive roots of a covert history,"
but it's also work that seeds.
Vang writes of a desire to, quote,
"let the ancient ones utter the narrative uncloaked,"
end quote.
And elsewhere, she speaks of wanting to,
quote, "let things come clean in a scandalous tornado
of simmering truth," end quote.
But in that desire, Vang never shies away
from allowing the blanks in the history or the black boxes that
cover the text in a redacted document
to remain as absences, gaping like wounds.
For many years-- I'm thinking back to at least Muriel
Rukeyser, but we could probably go way before--
poets have gone to the archive and the document
to recount if not recover history.
And those of us who engage in this kind of documentary work
are sometimes faced with or even haunted
by questions related to the impact of that work.
When documents, journalistic reports, documentaries,
and book-length histories already exist,
why do we turn to poetry to tell these truths?
A book such as Yellow Rain reminds us of the imperative
to remember, to re-member--
to gather, to bring together our history, our memories,
our humanity, in a way that only poetry
can do with its attention to language and culture,
to the material and the imagined.
It reminds us that we need to remember
even when we can't remember together,
because it is the only way to approach our present.
Again, I'll quote from Vang, who writes,
"I gather sharpness of my burn beyond agony for an answer.
It is not to know the shape of what happened,
but to know it happened.
It happened."
The poems in Yellow Rain are not just documentary.
They're monuments, memorials, and temples to ancestors.
They're tributes to a past and offerings to the present,
and they read to me like candles lit in prayer to a possibility
of a future wholeness.
It is such a joy to be introducing Mai Der Vang.
[APPLAUSE]