13 Ways of Looking at a Jew Hater (i)

From the janitor at the Viet Nam Literature Project

You see things that twist your guts. Những điều trông thấy mà đau đớn lòng, if you want the Vietnamese. Fourth line of the famous verse novel about 3 friends.

The ups and downs of Kim, Van, and Kieu provide an aphorism for every occasion, including the sight of a good man suffering from anti-Semitism. I reach also from another national epic.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, if you want the Latin. Aeneas the pious has washed up on the beach where his fleet counts those ships gone missing in the storm after the sack of Carthage. It begins to rain.

Perhaps, one day, remembering even this will give us joy. Between them, Nguyen Du and Publius Vergilius Maro have it covered. Life is going to burden your heart and remembering those times will one day be fun.

Because, you know, it is only going to get worse. That is, better. See what poetry can do for you?

Gorgeous nonsense lets you face facts. Let us follow a poem which the poet Linh Dinh and I have both read with attention while learning English, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Wallace Stevens published it in his first collection, Harmonium. Well, Alfred and Blanche Knopf published it with the author. I bring that up because they were Jews.

Wallace was anything but. Yet their collaboration changed the world for the better. His poem taught how to read both his own work and anything at all and ever since poets, Linh among them, have learned from it how to write

and in turn have taught others reading and writing. Linh has translated the Stevens poem, I think, when he was writing to colleagues in Vietnamese about the ideas and procedures of the art world of contemporary poetry in English he had mastered.

It was an Ezra Pound thing to do, as I love him for, teaching transatlantic modernism with common sense. Now of course it burdens my heart and will be something else to remember joyfully one day with Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina about her mad friend Ezra,

the talkative man that lies in the house of Bedlam. The poet Linh Dinh is running his mouth about the Jews like a crazy person. Let me tell you about it 13 times. Here is number

I

You go read him for yourself. I am not going to repeat his crazy talk. You may feast your eyes upon the Jew hater Linh Dinh at substack where he carries on his work of this century as Postcards from the End.

The last 5 posts as of today come from Pakse, in Laos. The most recent 3 address bullshit in their title. The method of the poet’s Postcards has been to visit some place that does not enjoy the gloss of the rich world.

He finds a cheap place to stay then hunts up a cheap place to eat, drink, and write. He talks with anybody who wants to talk to him. He began in the United States, with his Postcards from the End of America.

Dan Simon, who sports at least two Jewish names, published a collection of those postcards which I urge earnestly upon you. My friend the poet found the third world of the USA and spoke with those who live it, with interest,

without pity. I find his accompanying photographs voyeurist, as a postcard should be. An instructor of ethnography would say, one has said to me, that the poet’s method never goes beyond contact, into community.

Right on. Linh reports from the public surface of a life world abandoned after assault by bullshit. Each postcard makes sense in itself and he has kept them coming all century. It is a work of mercy, of witness to the poor.

And, lately, a matter of hating the Jews.

Viet Nam letters have addressed the poet Linh Dinh’s book Postcards from the End of America 4 times. First on June 11, 2022, second on August 6, 2022, third on August 22, 2022, and fourth on May 11, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.