Some Kind of Cheese Orgy by Linh Dinh
30.01.10
Some Kind of Cheese Orgy
Linh Dinh
Chax Press
128 p.
Like the Swiss cheese version of the foodstuff from the book’s title, Linh Dinh’s poems are obsessed with holes. Images of gaping mouths, puckering assholes, and other orifices appear throughout the book. The narrative voice is candid about its obsessions with bodies and worldly detritus. In “Jive and Solids”, he writes that “I’m the… aggregate… of all/that I’ve ever glimpsed, including all/ the holes, the blanks, the tax returns.”
Much of this book is told from the perspective of narrators who work close to the ground. As one speaker reflects in “Clean, Clean, Clean”, many generations have watched this country not from a position of equality, but from a subservient viewpoint based on the circumstances of their birth. Dinh shows that there’s a lot to be seen and learned from a position on your hands and knees.
Belonging to the lower class, you’re expected
To cater to the upper classes’ bodily functions,
Not to engage their minds but to wipe their asses,
Kiss their cunts on demand, suck cocks for tips,
Unless, of course, you’re an artist, in which case
You’re an aristocrat of the servant class, to quote
That grand maestro among slaves, Jasper Johns.
The speaker goes on to reveal tidbits about the elite women whose homes he has cleaned. One of the women comments: “I have the most respect/ for new immigrants. You work so hard!”
Dinh’s autobiography colors my reading here. Dinh left Vietnam as a young teenager in 1975, at the tail end of that protracted, bloody war, and came to the U.S. He went to college in Philadelphia and afterwards began writing while supporting himself as a house painter, house cleaner and window washer.
Dinh’s is not a poetry of privilege, but, while he’s understandably flippant about the finances of people he’s worked for, he isn’t out to take down the system either. There’s a watching-the-late-Roman-empire, bitterly exhausted sentiment to many of the poems here, the voice of a man sitting back on his haunches and observing the squalor of 21st century life. Given Dinh’s sentiments, the book’s title can be read as a riff on western privilege and decadence, the ‘cheese orgy’ serving as a funny kind of counterpoint to Asia’s reputation for lactose intolerance.
In a recent interview with Fact-Simile, Dinh comments, “I haven’t been reading a whole lot of poetry lately just because the quickly developing story of our society’s unraveling is so compelling that it’s hard for me to focus on anything else.” On his blog Dinh has been documenting this perceived societal collapse through his prolific photographs of the bleak lives of homeless Philadelphians. His interest in photography, which has almost seemed to eclipse his writing, recurs throughout these poems. In “Caption” he writes:
Before photography, people didn’t exist.
…I’m in
Each photo, in the cool blur, in the
Brown cloud, my tiny head redrawn,
My splayed limbs cropped.
True, I’m lying
Face down, here, in the mud, my pants
Stained with too much clarity.
While the “poem about a photograph” has become something of a cliché, Dinh’s depiction of the hard reality of seeing yourself in photographs is unsettling. He’s not necessarily interested in the photograph itself; he’s interested in how it represents the shame we often feel when we look at ourselves.
In “Poem Before Mirror”, Dinh admits that any human face is, in the long run, only a cover for what’s underneath. Midway through the poem, he writes:
So sloppily made, will this face
Last a day or a week? Already
Discolored, musty and sagging
From mere seconds ago.
And then in the final stanza, as it often does, the truth comes out:
A breathtakingly radiant face
Still can’t complete with more
Salient and silent parts of
Its ensouled package.
The sour tone of the poem suddenly shifts to a kind of reverence for the crappy miracle that is humanity, deploying alliterative sounds (salient, silent, ensouled) along the way. That’s the surprise here and in much else of Dinh’s work. He might come across as a cranky, profane misanthrope, but the undercurrent is a deep, compassionate understanding of what it means to be human, to live life trapped in a human body. Our faces (and all of our holes) are simply one part of the story. What Dinh is really interested in, underneath the disgust, is our humanity.
Very much a contemporary poet, Dinh writes about the hostility of the internet (“normally, one hesitates before calling someone an idiot or/ an asswipe face to face”), the flotsam and jetsam of media culture (“Tila Tequila isn’t/ all that”) and this era, in which the archaic assurances that poetry could matter have been stripped away. Dinh is unconvinced that poetry exists in order to redeem or save us. Arguably, this is a good thing: it means writers like Dinh are free to do whatever they want, however they want. In “What a Wand”, he expands on the sense of futility that accompanies the modern notion of poetry, writing that poetry is really
A chance porthole into the real
A glancing clarification, more
Than just horizontal euphony,
Poetry still feels false within
The context of this slammer
Of mushy minds and bodies,
Yours also. Truly.
This is cynicism and transcendence, old and new. If poetry feels phony it is only because its truth so startlingly contrasts the cruddiness of our human circumstances. The way it rings false to our muddled human senses is an indicator of its greater truth.
Dinh ends the book with a series of increasingly abstract poems exploring the intersections between food and language and juxtaposing the rich varieties of Vietnamese verbs and their limited English translations. It’s a logical place for a book so obsessed with orifices to finish. Language, after all, is a way of naming things we take into ourselves and things we push out.
Linh Dinh is not a badass because he writes poems that deploy f-bombs with an enviable insouciance, or because he writes from a place of race and class rarely visited in the often elite world of contemporary poetry; he’s a badass because he’s capable of writing startlingly beautiful poems about shitting, fucking, and human frailty and ugliness. Throughout the collection, there are moments of real revelatory transcendence, like looking through a microscope at a slide of feces only to discover that a turd has transformed into a gemstone.
Some Kind of Cheese Orgy is available from Chax Press and Small Press Distribution. ____________________________________________________________________________________________
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