Mong-Lan

behind the vision, another reality ---Mong-Lan

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REVIEWS

"Mông-Lan is a remarkably accomplished poet. Always her poems are deft, extremely graceful in the way words move, and in the cadence that carries them. One is moved by the articulate character of ‘things seen,’ the subtle shifting of images, and the quiet intensity of their information. Clearly she is a master of the art."--Robert Creeley

Mong-Lan at LSUMong-Lan

Song of the Cicadas

winner of the Juniper Prize
& the Great Lakes Colleges Associations' Award for New Writers.


On Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos)

"A mesmerizing accomplishment - four voices at their climax: the dance,
if we can call it that, the physics of being, the history and manual
of dark beauty and the voleos of line, ink, stanza and voice,
layers of loss, desire and the body in ecstatic explosions.
Three drops of Lorca, one tincture of María Luisa Bombal
and a full vasija of Mong-Lan, a masterpiece,
señores y señoras. A mathematics of fire."
-- Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate

" . . . . That Mong-Lan succeeds at such an ambitious project in writing
that is visually striking, musically complex, unabashedly erotic and deeply
intelligent, is testimony to her very great poetic talents. This is a marvelous
book, one I’ll return to again and again."
--Kevin Prufer, poet, professor.

 

Why is the Edge Always Windy?

 

One Thousand Minds Brimming:  Poems & Art

“Mong-Lan’s poems are fresh and real as a street, full of the seriousness of pleasure. She has the same sense of joy that Kenneth Koch loved in the courage to sing, happiness of St.-John Perse. The courage of Frank O’Hara who said that the smallest idea in one's own head was better than an old idea in some other brain. The wars and horrors of wars are here, but even disasters and disappearance doesn't stop the poet from celebrating lemons and vegetables I do not know. The Chinese speak of the three perfections: poetry, painting and calligraphy. But Mong-Lan speaks of the great imperfections that are better for being so. Her poems are full of the bright primaries of her brushstrokes. . . . I praise these poems of praise which collapse distance and makes us feel, as O’Hara seemed to say, poetry is just a telephone call away.”—David Shapiro, poet, translator, professor.

 

Tango, Tangoing: Poetry & Art

Tango, Tangoing offers an astute and refreshing look at real tango.  So much is written and said about Argentine tango; here is a new and complete way to get to grips with more than just the steps and the music of this dance; the greatest of Argentine institutions.--the argentimes

Mong-Lan's Why Is The Edge Always Windy? is a stunning book that turns our "era of exile" into one of lyric possession, the impulses to lament and to praise whirling together into a bittersweet music. I'm amazed at how these poems hold the complexity and contradiction of a global world view that spans from Hanoi to New York, from Chiapas to San Francisco, while still striking notes of intimacy and making formally beautiful sense. --Alison Hawthorne Deming, writer, professor.

 

“ . . . . One should not be mislead by the title into thinking Mong-Lan’s work will be airy.
The lyricism of her writing sings not of the ethereal but of a hard land; her work
speaks not of arrested moments but of the tectonic force of history, which, moving
at the pace of geological time, presses cultures against each other, folds moments over
each other, edges everywhere and always exposed. Indeed, Mong-Lan’s are poems
of exposure. Reading them is revelatory.--Lyn Hejinian

 

Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems

" . . . . We sense that she . . . values what she brings from her adoptive culture–a new language, a new aesthetic, and the conviction that a woman artist has special insights to offer on the subject of armed conflict and its aftermath. From visual beauty, human suffering, and verbal inventiveness, Mông-Lan stakes out a poetic territory that is completely her own."--Alfred Corn

"Welcome to a poetic voice that represents no less than a manifestation of soul. In Mông-Lan’s debut book, she has taken on the daunting responsibility of representing the Vietnamese nation and culture, via imagery, consciousness, and memory. Hers is a stunning experiment and a historical imperative."
--Jane Miller


 

Reviews, Events


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Winner of the 2000 Juniper Prize -Song of the Cicadas

ISBN: 1558493077.  

Song of the Cicadas by Mong-Lan

UMASS Press, 2001, 82p

 

Order it now at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com

or UMASS Press

Book Jacket: "Song of the Cicadas" by Mong-Lan

 

In this striking first collection of poems, the grainy strangeness of the modern world is transformed into a place at once knowable and enduring. Mông-Lan conveys the certainty that even when the world stops making sense, decency and beauty somehow survive. From Saigon to San Francisco, she combines the earthly and the ecstatic, the animal and the sublime, to create lyrics that tempt and haunt.

Jane Miller "Welcome to a poetic voice that represents no less than a manifestation of soul. In Mông-Lan’s debut book, she has taken on the daunting responsibility of representing the Vietnamese nation and culture, via imagery, consciousness, and memory. Hers is a stunning experiment and a historical imperative."

Alfred Corn "In Asian tradition, poetry and visual art go hand in hand, with the collaboration of work, image, and calligraphy. Mông-Lan’s first book renews this tradition for American poetry, and with a startling subject matter. Her poems and drawings dealing with Viet Nam reflect the awe, the anger, and the mourning of the expatriate who returns to the country of her birth. Brilliantly exact observation of people and places here is paradoxical evidence that this land is no longer entirely her own. We sense that she also values what she brings from her adoptive culture–a new language, a new aesthetic, and the conviction that a woman artist has special insights to offer on the subject of armed conflict and its aftermath. From visual beauty, human suffering, and verbal inventiveness, Mông-Lan stakes out a poetic territory that is completely her own."

Robert Creeley "Mông-Lan is a remarkably accomplished poet. Always her poems are deft, extremely graceful in the way words move, and in the cadence that carries them. One is moved by the articulate character of ‘things seen,’ the subtle shifting of images, and the quiet intensity of their information. Clearly she is a master of the art."

 

 

 


From Publishers Weekly  

Song of the Cicadas by Mong-Lan, Massachusetts, 2001, 82p, $13.95 paper

"Tide pools wait/ for the stone-eating sea," "children play mindlessly in satellite/ shores," a Vietnamese "dialect is a giddy/ fish" and "monkeys howl the illogical twilight" in Mong-Lan's intriguing sequences about places in Southeast Asia and North America. Mong-Lan takes her geographic imagination far beyond the space of a single ethnic heritage: scenes and sketches of Southeast Asia complement similarly structured poems about Mexico, whose tropics provide vivid, organic-seeming symbols. The Asian sequences concentrate instead on people "villagers commuting from the countryside," Saigon citizens, kids, a new mother and the whole strange (to American eyes) constellation of "A New Viet Nam." Mong-Lan, whose family came to America from Vietnam in the '70s and who is now a Stegner fellow at Stanford University, explores all the above subjects and, crucially, her speaker's reactions to them in juxtaposed fragments, speculations and phrases arrayed on the field of each page in a manner that suggests the influence of Charles Olson and Adrienne Rich. Though the poems can have the too-even keel of reportage, they also ascend to heights of electric oddity: one poem finds new things to say about "The Golden Gate Bridge," where "the wind's mood and resolutions/ erase tendrils/ that grow/ from the sea (to engrave around it/ have that as a dish/ you could eat)." Readers who seek elaborate structures or an unerring musical ear may be may be disappointed in these impressionistic, accretive works. Those who seek ethnography, good travel writing, vivid phrases or durable images, on the other hand, will find much of this debut a worthwhile trip.

 


 

From North American Review, by Vince Gotera.  January-February 2002

Song of the Cicadas by Mong-Lan, Massachusetts, 2001, 82p, $13.95 paper

 

An artist/poet, Mong-Lan's pen-and-inks of Viet Nam appear throughout, and the cover features a lovely photograph she took of boys framed in magenta light by an iron-latticed window against the green of Viet Nam.  These exquisite poems remind me of Japanese floating-world prints, with lines and images sprinkled across pages, bridging Viet Nam and the US in startling beauty.


 

From ForeWord Magazine, www.forewordmagazine.com,

by Johanna Masse, October 2001.

Song of the Cicadas

Mong-Lan

University of Massachusetts Press

82 Pages Illustrated

Softcover $13.95

1-55849-307-7

 

Vietnam is not a pretty place to be, according to this talented writer, who emigrated to America at a young age after the fall of Saigon.  She finds that the United States has its own share of problems as well.

 

     From the banks of the Red River in Vietnam to the heights of the Golden Gate Bridge, Mong-Lan's poetry evokes the vision of an international soul.  Images like women doing their washing in the river, a San Francisco professor, and a suicidal mandolin player show how Mong-Lan's life experience lends her poetic voice a multi-textured reading of her many worlds.

 

     In the "The Long Bien Bridge," Mong-Lan graphically describes the hard life of much of the Vietnamese population around the Red River:  "Her older sister / who refuses to marry him / sits near the bridge amassing / vegetables for sale / mounds of mint / hills of water spinach / guavas bananas ' the poor man's fruit' / swords of sugarcane / flopping scales like huge tonges / ready to weigh."  The poem's images--buffalo in the water while children play and women wash clothes, bicycle commuters crossing the bridge--convey a sense of rich life, where resolution carries the day.

 

     This poem contrasts with "The Golden Gate Bridge," which describes the bridge's suspension cables and the water underneath with cold precision:  "above the bridge / the universe of red rust / thicker than wrists metal cords / pass us lax or hasty as the years / yearly repainted."  The poem also addresses an unnamed suicide, who chose to end life at the bridge.

    

     Other poems, including "Grotto" and "Lake," suggest that Mong-Lan mourns the passing of pre-industrial (pre-war) Vietnam, and retains some ambivalence about leaving her country.  Her Vietnam is fraught with hardship, particularly for women, but is also beautiful in its co-existence with natuare and the dignity of the hands-on laborer.  The title poem sequence, "Song of the Cicadas," about the end of a romance, reads:  "then I wake up cold / you are nowhere near / but in my lungs ripped out rushing for air / must I stop this voice / is this voice the land's?"

 

     Song of the Cicadas won the Juniper Prize for a first collection of poetry.  Given the breadth of her work and her highly descriptive voice, Mong-Lan will surely make more waves in the world of American letters.

 


 

International Examiner, Asian American Journal, Volume 28, Number 20, October 17-November 6, 2001.

"tracing the landscape with words," by nhien nguyen.  (click on thumbnail below, then click on bottom right)

 

 


 

Review for Best American Poetry of 2002

 


Review for watermark, vietnamese american poetry & prose
edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T.D. Truong, & Luu Truong Khoi

http://www.hardboiled.org/2-2/reviews.html

 


 

 

Tuoi Tre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 30-3-2003.  Vietnamese Language.  Click on thumbnail.

 

 


 

 

Dallas Morning News, "Double the fun with genre-bridging poets," February 22, 2005.

 


 

 

Why is the Edge Always Windy?

Mong-Lan

Tupelo Press, 2005
ISBN:  1932195289

Purchase the book now at your bookseller,

Amazon.com, or Tupelo Press.

 

 

“what you’ve lived through    you are,” says Mong-Lan in “Coast,” one of the early poems in this beautiful, spellbinding book, Why is the Edge Always Windy?  One should not be mislead by the title into thinking Mong-Lan’s work will be airy.  The lyricism of her writing sings not of the ethereal but of a hard land; her work speaks not of arrested moments but of the tectonic force of history, which, moving at the pace of geological time, presses cultures against each other, folds moments over each other, edges everywhere and always exposed.  Indeed, Mong-Lan’s are poems of exposure.  Reading them is revelatory.

 

--Lyn Hejinian

Mong-Lan's Why Is The Edge Always Windy? is a stunning book that turns our "era of exile" into one of lyric possession, the impulses to lament and to praise whirling together into a bittersweet music. I'm amazed at how these poems hold the complexity and contradiction of a global world view that spans from Hanoi to New York, from Chiapas to San Francisco, while still striking notes of intimacy and making formally beautiful sense.
 
--Alison Hawthorne Deming

 


International Examiner, April/May 2006
Why is the Edge Always Windy? (poems)
By Mong-Lan
Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2005
86 pages, pb
ISBN: 9781932195286

Review by Tarisa A.M. Matsumoto

To call the poems in Mong-Lan's Why is the Edge Always Windy? impressionist or surreal would be to reduce them to the stereotypical categories in which all writing so condense, so image-based and so seemingly disconnected is placed. And it would be easy to say that her poems create emotionally-charged moods and subtle colors, because they do. But again, that would be too easy, too disregarding of the depth of Mong-Lan's work.

The sparse structure of the poems may jar readers. Rarely do Mong-Lan's lines begin on the same margin. Instead, her lines move across the page, creating gaps and new margins, spaces and time. These purposeful lines add weight to the poems. Her poems are not poems of blocked stanzas and dense words, but are expansive, flexible:

    sea in the sky
                                    knives
                        striking obliquely army of light
                                                      beating walls
                        the aquamarine houses are ghosts
                                                                                between crystal trees
        water steals over skewed floors

only this life

The result of these constantly moving lines is two-fold. First, the spacing allows Mong-Lan to control how we read her poems—we know where to breathe, where to change gears, how much time to wait until we move to the next line, which images go together. Second, the gaps she creates allows us time to answer the question she poses in the title: Why is the Edge Always Windy?

Is the edge the country of Mong-Lan's birth, Vietnam? She writes, "Saigon's foot is bound/the city a person with amputated limb/has feet that strain for movement."  Perhaps the edge is New York: "ghosts of America roam/land of fast food/joints defined by movement/herds of taxi cabs apartments too expensive to rent."  Or San Francisco: "The Golden Gate Bridge from my window/is a red of smothered crabs/cooked in dreamfog/savage-haired/drummers in the park beat on."  It is as if, with her careful lines and pauses, Mong-Lan is probing for the answer. And maybe, with the breadth of her images, she is giving us room to ponder the question as well.


From another generation, by David Burleigh, The Japan Times

WHY IS THE EDGE ALWAYS WINDY? Poems by Mong-Lan. Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo Press, 86 pps., 2005, $ 16.95 (paper).

Despite the long engagement between Vietnam and the West, in the throes and in the aftermath of war, there have not yet been many literary consequences, at least in English. Monique Trong's imaginative novel, "The Book of Salt" (2003), was an interesting contribution, though it was set in France. The work of the Vietnamese-American poet Mong-Lan may be viewed as a useful exploration of this uneasy territory.

In "Rush Hour," set in Hanoi, she notes: "my parents walked these streets / some forty years ago." Later she provides a sketch of swirling traffic, one of several drawings that decorate this attractive volume. It is left to the reader to connect the broken utterances of the poems: "hidden motion between knife and shadow." But we are in no doubt that the poet carries the past within her, as she says in "Trail": "I can correctly say this an era of exile . . . I speak of nothing no ideas just Vietnam motherland inside us."


North American Review's Vince Gotera writes about Why is The Edge Always Windy:

 

"Mong-Lan's poetry reminds me of Whitman, especially in 'O New York' which addresses 9/11 and its immediate anti-Romantic after-effect, as well as her treatment of war's aftermath in Viet Nam. She also reminds me of e. e. cummings; lines peppered across a wide page in eloquent visual prosody. Both M-L and e. e. are visual artists who treat their words as a palette of intimate hues painted on a paper canvas. In these poems, the styles of Walt, the good gray poet and e. e. are reused, recreated with a femmin(ist/ine) (land/mind)scape of emotion and sensibility that is all Mong-Lan's own—bringing together Paris, San Francisco, Ha Noi, Switzerland, and New York in a much-needed global synthesis and symbiosis."

 


"34th Buenos Aires International Book Fair: Tango, Tangoing: poems & art by Mong-Lan"

Review by Sam Walker, for the argentimes, 8 May 2008, edition #37.

 

In Tango, Tangoing, Mong-Lan --Juniper Prize-winning poet, writer, painter, photographer and professional Tango teacher -- fully combines her paintings and her poetry for the first time.

Having left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, Mong-Lan moved to the US where she grew up.  She is the author of Song of the Cicadas, which won her the prestigious Juniper Prize, Why is the Edge Always Windy? And Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems.  Her work has been widely accredited and has been published in Best American Poetry, Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies.  Her credentials as a tanguera are stunning, having taught tango for many years, from San Francisco to Thailand.

Tango, Tangoing is a sensual combination of tango, poetry and artwork.  Her art comes from a deep, organic love of Latin dance, and she has an acute sense of what tango is really about.  She was here in Argentina during the economic crash, when as she said, “even while the world was crashing down, the milonga carried on.”

The poetry, like the artwork that accompanies it, is free-hand, fluid and dynamic.  She adopts a free form, or ‘open field,’ which compliments the natural pauses and flow of the lines.  “I use words as paint.” She says, and likes to experiment with the form; “it’s very important to be playful in poetry.”  As a result, the poetry moves swiftly, changing directions and cutting back across the surface, much like the dance that it describes.

Her poetry is enhanced by a montage of prose and Spanish text.  “I think people understand more when poetry is written in prose.” She explains, rather enigmatically.  And, it’s true; the prose adds a great deal to the poetry, and clarifies some of its more complicated gestures.  The Spanish phrases are excerpts from tango songs; they effectively set the moody, tango atmosphere.  The fluidity and dynamism of the abstract paintings that accompany the text add to the sensation.

According to the poet, the book is ‘a seismology.’  This seismology (the study of earthquakes) insinuates the passion and emotion of a tango dance, using poetry instead of graphs and measurements.  It is a study on the earth-shaking effects of tango.

Tango, Tangoing offers an astute and refreshing look at real tango.  So much is written and said about Argentine tango; here is a new and complete way to get to grips with more than just the steps and the music of this dance; the greatest of Argentine institutions.

Mong-Lan will be reading at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair on 10th May 8pm – 8:30 pm at the US Embassy Stand.

She has an exhibition of her paintings and photography at Porteño y Bailarín, Riobamba 345.  It opens with a milonga, on 10th May at 10.30 pm.

 


From El Tangauta, Buenos Aires' tango magazine, ¨La dimensión poética del baile.¨ Review by Carlos Bevilacqua, on Mong-Lan´s new book, Tango, Tangoing: Poetry & Art.  June 2008. Link to Article in El Tangauta with English Translation.

Review from El Tangauta


 

"Mong-Lan: Una artista de Vietnam enamorada del 2 x 4 (An artist from Vietnam who fell in love with tango)." Article about Mong-Lan's One-Woman Art exhibition of Paintings & Photographs, at Porteño y Bailarín, Riobamba 345, Buenos Aires, Argentina, which runs from June until December 2008. The location of the exhibition is in a milonga, which opens at 10:30pm until 3:30 am Tuesdays and Sundays. It opens most days from 9:00 pm for dance classes. The bilingual article below was published in the magazine, La Milonga Argentina, June 2008.

One-Woman Art Exhibition, Review in La Milonga Argentina


Tango texts

From TimeOut Buenos Aires, 2008

If it's murder at the milonga, why not curl up with a good tango book instead? Ruth-Ellen Davis picks out two of the best.

There are many ways to experience tango, from the dazzling razzmatazz of a show, to the intimate airs of a neighbourhood milonga, to tentative limb-waving in a dance class. Or you can simply pick up a book.

The latest publication from celebrated US poet and artist Mong-Lan, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (www.monglan.com), is a beautifully crafted collection of poetry and artwork, capturing the flavours of Argentinian tango through three sections of free verse interwoven with fluid pen and ink drawings. 'Poetry is the highest form of verbal and written expression, and dance is the highest form of movement,' explains the Juniper Prize-winning author. 'One could say dance is the poetry of motion, and poetry the dance of words on the page.'

BA is a familiar place for Mong-Lan who visits for months at a time purely for her beloved tango scene - the references to BA's tensions and history in her haunting poetry and drawings testify to her insider knowledge. Marina Palmer became addicted to it, a compulsion she chronicles in her bestseller Kiss and Tango. If you've swallowed the myth that tango is just an extremely complex form of dry humping, all codes and no consummation, this racy memoir may well make you cough it back up again. Sample quote: 'As for [Frank's] body, it was to die for . . . The guy smelled of sex. My nose could not get enough of his armpits, nor of the other places where it went to seek its olfactory treasures. And while we're on the subject of these other places, they were as smooth as his dancing. That's because he shaves down there. Talk about being a pro!"

You'll never listen to Carlos Gardel in quite the same way again . . .

 



Background drawing of Ha Tien, Vietnam, by Mong-Lan, 1996.

Copyright © 2001-2006  by Mong-Lan. All rights reserved.  Website created by Mong-Lan.
Please respect the fact that all artwork and writing (except where indicated) and poetry on this website are copyrighted by Mong-Lan. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, without her written permission.