Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . At a dinner party that I moved from Singapore to New York for—with guests by turns intensely and merrily passionate about books and the arts—my hostess, an art historian and curator, spoke about a Black immigrant artist who was receiving a great deal of attention right then and the difficulty of getting in touch with her because of the phalanx of gallerists and publicists monitoring everything that she said and did. It's a danger of being an immigrant artist, I replied in a non sequitur, the temptation to produce work that would please, even flatter, your host country.  Oh, my hostess said, I don't hold it against the artist. It's so hard out there, you do everything you can to survive and thrive.  Her words came back to me yesterday while I was viewing the show  "Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands"  at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. The show is bil...

On Wednesday the William Carlos Williams Cooperative held their monthly reading at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey. Ocean Vuong and I were there as the features. John J. Trause had kindly invited us to present our work after hearing us read together at David Lawson's reading at Jujumokti Tea Lounge in the East Village. One things leads to another, as they say. I really liked the format of the reading. It always begins with someone reading from or speaking about Williams, this time John talking briefly about the new biography of that very American poet. The feature then comes on, followed by an open reading. And the evening ends with a last poem from the feature. If I ever organize a reading series, I will follow a similar format. It pays respect to an important past poet, it ensures that everyone hears the feature before reading for the open-mic, it makes time for the open reading, and it returns attention to the feature at the end of the event. It was lovely to h...

Ocean Vuong's poems are quieter on the page than his dramatic reading style may suggest, and the poems benefit from their quiet inwardness. Burnings is the first collection of this Brooklyn College undergraduate, and already it showcases a significant lyrical talent.  The book is divided into two sections. The first consists of poems about Vietnam, and Vuong's flight, with his family, to the United States. The second section takes for its subject gay love. The two sections have the same number of poems (12) but they are not equal in quality. The first section is superior. It shows a remarkable sensitivity to the plight of women, and finds the images and structures to express that empathy.  The poem "The Touch" is emblematic of the section. The child sleeps with the mother on a hardwood floor, "bones cushioned/ with cardboard," and feels the mother shaking with crying. He wraps his arms around her waist, "the way a man does," but knows that the a...

Read on Sunday night with Ocean Vuong at JujoMukti Tea Lounge in the East Village, at a reading series curated by David Lawton. We read a poem each in turns, and the poems played off each other wonderfully. An electrifying moment happened when Ocean read his self-portrait as Jeffrey Dahmer, and then I read my self-portrait after Frida Kahlo. The body broken and eaten becomes the body put back together and giving nourishment. A number of friends came for the reading, Linda Lerner, Miriam Stanley, Jackie Sheeler, and Brant Lyon. GH was there too. Rachael Briggs also came, and read two witty poems written during NaPoWriMo. She, GH and I had dinner afterwards at the Polish diner, Odessa. I sold two books at the reading and traded with Ocean.