“TIME LIKE A BALL AND ELASTIC”

Born in the Mekong Delta, poet Hoa Nguyen moved to Washington, D.C. early in the diaspora of Vietnam. She has authored five books and more than a dozen chapbooks, including As Long as Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008, Tells of the Crackling, Violet Energy Ingots, and most recently, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. For over two decades, she has instructed creative writing workshops, and currently is a faculty member at Ryerson University and Miami University, and Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College’s MFA Program. She is a co-founder of the small press, reading series, and creative hearth Skanky Possum, along with the poet Dale Smith, her longtime partner and co-collaborator, and their celebrated colleagues Renee Gladman, Cliff Gassoway, and Leslie Davis. Established in Austin, Texas in 1998, the press emerged “in apposition to mainstream verse on the one hand, and Language Poetry on the other,” creating “an unruly but open space determined by the adjacent streams of postwar American writing.”1 Central to Skanky Possum’s tremendous success was the creative participation of the intimate, yet expansive community that the press both galvanized and sustained. In Skanky Possum Press: A (Personal) Genealogy, a pamphlet in a series on 1990s small press poetry through the University of Buffalo, Smith writes, “My experience as an editor with Hoa Nguyen has helped me slowly realize how communities of meaning form through the actions and outlooks of individual actors and institutions that coincide with literary affiliations and fealty.”

I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Hoa on a blazing summer morning about her fourteen years living and raising her children in Austin with Dale Smith following their time in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco. Other topics covered include the ancient rock formations and loons of Toronto, her home since 2011; her ongoing, posthumous engagements with the poet Jack Spicer; and her belief in poetry-making as a time-based practice, oriented not towards the clock, but rather a felicity achieved through the alignment of multiple intelligences at once—plant, rock, human, etc. She welcomes synchronicity and chance into her “holiness of attentions” to grace us with her simultaneously humorous and incisive poems that remind us to celebrate and stay present for our everyday. Over two decades later, her work echoes the founding motivations of Skanky Possum: a belief in “the ability of poetry to rephrase and renew ways of seeing.”

CHARLOTTE FOREMAN I was reading through Red Juice and Violet Energy Ingots yesterday and I noticed that rivers, oceans, and waves feature heavily in your work. And they’re sort of vehicles of magic in a way, they have this sort of divine quality. You grew up in Maryland, near the water, right?