On Linh Dinh’s Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax Press, 2009)
For months now I’ve been thinking of Linh Dinh the photographer and not the poet. That’s because he’s been busy posting almost daily updates on State of the Union, his photoblog devoted to documenting the lower half of our body politic. Mostly taken in and around Philadelphia, Linh’s documentary photos are dispatches from the frontiers of American decline. Seen at street level, shot on his nerve, & uploaded onto the computer screen, Linh’s photos capture: our contemporary hieroglyphs of graffiti, signs, billboards, and ads; our public spaces of sidewalks and alleyways, bus stops and subways, parks and tent parks; and most importantly, they capture the people who create and inhabit them, especially the dispossessed and transient, going about their daily life along the margins of Center City. So when I drove down from Madison to Chicago the other week for Linh’s reading at Myopic Books I was happily reminded of Linh Dinh the poet.
And what a poet he is. Author of Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), Linh writes something fierce, funky, and funny in his newest collection, the mysteriously titled and suspicious smelling, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Just out from Chax Press, this fifth book of poems by Linh is further evidence that he is a poet to be reckoned with. His poetry, in its intensity of awareness, unsparing portrayal of modern life, and use of the grotesque image of the body to limn his most favored subjects–violence and the human psyche, social collapse and decline, language and translation, damaged lives and difficulty loves–is like no other in contemporary American verse. Always surprising, alarmed and disarming, Linh is a poetic outlaw making border raids on official verse culture, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy is his latest incursion.
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Linh’s yawp is barbaric. Sometimes I think he’s possessed by the ghost of Walt Whitman: “Broke, I’d like to borrow your lower half, / Wear it for a day, make some coins. I’d // Love to enter you, snug, but not through / The usual channel. You can invade me, / Feel my convexity, as I’m ventilated / By your absence, there, in the crotch,” he writes in “Not Quite Symmetry.” That is, a pissed-off Whitman ghost:
People, can we go a day without massacring a shit load?
How many collaterals have you stabbed this morning?
How many did you strangle last night? Looking at you,
I just want to strip you naked, eat every scrap
Of your lovely nonsense, gargle your thin soul
With my stink hole, then spit you into paradise.
(“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”)
How about “thin soul”/”stink hole” for “lovely nonsense”? With brutal and unblinking clarity, what Linh sees and makes us see ain’t pretty–it’s downright ugly. Adorno has this to say about the ugly: “Art must take up the cause of what is prescribed as ugly [...] in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation” (Aesthetic Theory, 48-49). Adorno endows the ugly with an aesthetic and political edge. This critical potential of the ugly is also the thrust of Susan Schultz’s perceptive reading of what she calls Linh’s “poetics of disgust.” Focusing mainly on Linh’s first collection, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish, 2003), Schultz understands the manifestations of disgust in Linh’s poetry as “paradoxical expressions of suffering: violence, poverty, degradation, and (in the reader) an odd empathy for those caught up in it.” Linh continues to head straight for zones of disgust and discomfort in Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Other ugly feelings seem to have crept into these new poems as well, and with a force and frequency unfelt in previous collections. There is an undeniable sense of doubt, irritation, futility, and anxiety, for instance, in some of the early poems in the collection, much of it self-consciously poetry-related. “99.99 percent of poetry is a sham, / Likely this poemette, for example,” Linh writes in “What a Wand.” One speaker is “dead already” and another “must compose from a freshly-dug grave.” Fortunately, Linh digs his speakers and himself out of this early grave and writes on.
Linh’s is a poetry of revolt, even revolt against poetry’s own death, sounding a dissent against what’s truly revolting about the State of the Union. Or as he writes in the poem “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”: “His eyes refuse / To close on such an outrage of a universe.” Cheese Orgy is the name Linh gives to what’s revolting. Not for nothing does he mention “orgy” only once in the collection (by my count anyways) in these lines from “Pissed Off Zombies”: “our appetite for death porn is / Being whipped into a frenzy by an endless orgy of destruction, / All with the aim of selling us more Mars bars. Asian tsunami, / San Diego fires, Iowa floods or Katrina disgrace are all cool / To watch, dude. Chill, everybody else is into the same shit.” As for cheese, Anne Boyers says it best in her post on Linh’s book so I’ll steal this chunk of American cheese from her: “cheese is not just the fluid that comes from the tits of cows, sheep, and goats which is then recombined with substances from these animals intestines in order to coagulate, but it is also that stuff that comes from the crevices in our human flesh. Asses are widely known to smell cheesey, as are feet. Belly buttons can appear to create cheese. Fat people are cheesier than thin people. Poor people, with all their trucking in the baser sentiments and brutally obvious struggles, are cheesier than the rich. Cheesey is an aesthetic: smelling like ass, gooey or spongey, a signifier of profound effort, like when someone tells you to say “cheese” to simulate a smile (see Abu Ghraib). To be cheesey is to be artless and sentimental, a brute and ineffective emotional force. To have a cheese orgy–that’s all the smelly obscenity without any of the sexy [...] Welcome to the U.S.A.”
That’s another thing about Linh’s poetry. He writes like he’s perpetually coming to America, always arriving, but also always about to leave, addressing it from without, and unsettling it from within. Born in Vietnam in 1963, he came to the United States in 1975 and has lived much of his life, at least his life as an artist (he was a painter before he became a poet), in Philadelphia. As Ron Silliman writes, “[Linh] is not writing ‘about’ or even ‘toward’ nor ‘from’ any one of these contexts so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters, that condition his perspective on everyday life.” I would just add that it is through the body first and foremost that Linh thinks, feels, and writes. Take the title poem of the collection:
As soon as I got off the boat, I stepped on a slice of cheese.
The cheese is cheesier here, the non-cheese also cheesier.
I ate cheese with both hands, wishing I had one more hand.
“Don’t bother chewing your cheese, dude, it’ll chew itself.”
My cheesy thrill was enhanced by the sight of everybody else
Also drowning in milk, whey, milkfat, milk protein concentrate,
Salt, calcium phospate, sodium citrate, whey protein concentrate,
Sodium phosphate, sorbic acid as a preservative, acpocarotenal
(Color), Annatto (color), enzymes, vitamin D3 and cheese culture.
I couldn’t entice them into eating cheese with their mouths wide open.
Here, of course, is America. The speaker of the poem could be a distant relative of Karl Rossmann, Kafka’s young hero making his way into the clogged heart of the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma; or he could be Lý Ký Kiệt, the fake identity Linh Dinh was given when he left Vietnam on April 27, 1975 for the U.S. by way of Guam, as American Forces Radio issued the evacuation signal, “The Temperature in Saigon is 112 degrees and rising,” and played Bing Crosby’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” Either way, what’s important to note is how the poem connects its bodily images of eating/ingestion with the process of cultural absorption/immersion experienced by the newly arrived speaker. Thematically, assimilation is associated with incorporation or “drowning” in a larger social body, an orgy of indistinguishable parts. Formally, the poem itself incorporates language material (ingredients) otherwise rejected by conventional lyric modes but does so through the familiar poetic device of a list and formal unit of five couplets. It’s not the speaker’s (or for that matter, Linh’s) experience of displacement into American “cheese culture” that I would emphasize here, but rather the apparent failure of a new practice of eating with “mouths wide open.” Unafraid to offend, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy plops a fleshy messy body into the picture, a grotesque body full of gaping holes, folds, orifices, convexities, protuberances, cracks, and crevices where word and world meet and mix.
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Linh is an American Grotesque for the Age of Late Late Capitalism. Following his nose, he digs up the “shit knowledge” found in the grotesque image of the body private and public. Here’s the poem, “Let’s Talk,” a super-condensed pellet of Linh’s poetics of the grotesque:
The shit knowledge gets stuck
In between the eloquent teeth,
Anchors those haloed thoughts.
My chain of minty abstractions trip
Over the titty bumps, gets hoovered
Into the scalloped ever pink. Your
Jazzy jibes sidestep that rude rod.
Each utters in euphemisms, the hate
And fuck fuck creases ironed away,
All inchoate truths diluted into light.
As I read it, the poem is a 30 sec. mini-treatise on how “talk” (language, communication, discourse, etc.) is habitually, automatically, and unconsciously cleansed of what Linh calls “shit knowledge,” or the scatological hints of a world known otherwise. I love the linguistic quirks and sonic verve of the lines, especially how the poem is so damn adjective happy. Try subtracting the adjectives from the lines and you’ll see how they do more than just modify: they amplify the poem’s sound quality and semantic substance. Linh uses adjectives here as his primary device of defamiliarizing a disembodied model of rational discourse; as verbal excrescences, the adjectives roughen the poem’s texture and slow down the reader’s perception of the communicative act unfolding between the “I,” “you,” and “each” of everyone. As Linh states more directly in a poem from his second collection, American Tatts: “You (almost) never see it in public so / You have to conjure it up all day long, / Drag it into every conversation, / To flesh out the corporate picture.” When trying to describe Linh’s poetry for myself and others, I inevitably reach for negative forms of adjectives. The kind of poetry Linh is writing is the kind that is unsentimental, discomforting, ambivalent, undigestable and unassimilable. This shouldn’t be mistaken for nihilism, however. Rather, driving all this restless negativity is the poet’s dogged attempt at “Looking past the spins and jives, seeing behind what’s behind.”
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Yes, Linh’s collections can be frustratingly uneven at times, this most recent book perhaps more so than the previous two. Still, I think it’s important to keep in mind the deliberate roughness and unfinished character of each of Linh’s books of poetry, without giving a free pass where his poetic vision and formal execution fail to fully ignite. The “unpublishable” poems other poets and editors would usually leave on the cutting room floor are often necessary in Linh’s books because they damage the structural integrity of the polished and finished literary product; waste products, they fuel the conflagrations to come. Though Some Kind of Cheese Orgy may not be Linh’s “best” collection (I’d choose 2007′s Jam Alerts, if forced to pick one; and nominate 2004′s Blood and Soap, if only those “stories” were considered “prose poems”), I think it contains some of his most compelling work to date. I’ve already quoted a number of them. But there’s much more here. The poem, “Clean, Clean, Clean,” is a moving portrait of the poet as a house cleaner and a refracted picture of class relations: “I cleaned toilets and fridges, folded panties,/ Got on all fours, dipped into the suspicious.” There’s also an inventive clutch of poems near the end of the book that continue Linh’s exploration of language and translation. Two of them are in the form of Vietnamese-to-English dictionary entries for the Vietnamese words, khóc ( “to cry”), with thirty-four entries, and cười (“to laugh”), with something like seventy-five entries. Coming near the very end of the collection, they suggest the presence of a blues impulse in Linh’s poetry. One of my favorite poems in the entire collection is “Zoology,” which is actually part of a pair of “zoo” poems. Longer and looser, a kind of hybrid poem-essay that offers a reflection on damaged life and love, something in “Zoology” points to a new or different direction in Linh’s writing. I’ll leave you with the opening stanza:
My wife and I are at the zoo on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.
There are not many parks in our crowded city. Our zoo, once world
famous, is now very run down. The big cats and elephants are gone,
the giraffes gone, the hippopotamuses gone. We stroll past cage
after cage with nothing in it but a damp, earthy smell. Gone in body
but held in smell. How can a foul smell linger for so long without a
fleshy agent?
“Gone in body but held in smell,” Linh’s poems linger long after they’re gone.
