Postcards from the End of America (ii)
from poet Linh Dinh and Seven Stories Press
"Oil made this America-dominated, futuristic world, and with its increasing scarcity, will unravel it."
The poet Linh Dinh posted each report as he wrote it 8 years ago in 2014, then gathered and published them again as this book with Dan Simon from Seven Stories Press 5 years ago in 2017. Here it is 2022 and I may be writing about the work for another 20 years. Literature is news that stays news.
"It always amazes me how many people get on a train just to play cards, for outside their windows, a most amazing world is constantly unfurling. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Southwest Desert, Northern Plains, Cascades or Rocky Mountains, they don’t look up from their miserably dealt hands to notice that Eden is just a glass barrier away, but that is how it is with the über-domesticated."
The poet Linh Dinh is a rootless cosmopolitan, as Joseph Stalin called the Jews. He lives as Ezra Pound did who pointed out that literature is news that stays news, tirelessly trotting the globe to make meaning out of words.
Ezra was concerned with something gone wrong in the world’s meaning. He called it usury, the old Christian word for interest, what we call capital, which now fracks oil so we may play cards in Cloudcuckooland.
“When I came to the US in 1975, the very first American song I learned was ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm.’ Though I could not properly pronounce any of the words, and understood only half of them, at most, I sang along with all the other kids in Miss Dogen’s class at McKinley Elementary in Tacoma, Washington.”
Cute, the boy Linh thought, the natives here are peasants who sing about cows. The man now recognizes his mistake but wishes that he had been right. How long may we survive without peasants?
Linh chews over such issues of the expanding cloud of capital, interest, oil, usury we race through above the ground in our tubes of aluminum and plastic. He quizzes the pilgrims in his company on how they cope. They tell him, as Americans do.
“Our train was hugging the Columbia river.”
America is in the heart. This land is your land. This train is bound for glory. Bywords and catchphrases of the popular front against fascism, when my parents were young, sing in my mind at the thought of my friend following the Columbia.
Such is not the poet’s discourse. Rootless cosmopolitan, atomized intellectual, Linh’s notes on his conversations with Americans leave no Steinbeck sense of a labor movement and a new deal coming to set things right. His drunks do not live in the solidarity of Cannery Row.
My friend the poet has no hope. Pound had hope. Celine had hope. They became not only anti-Semites like Linh but fascists as he is not in solidarity with gangsters. What Linh has and those two didn’t is human interest in each damaged doomed creature he speaks with and writes to us about.
Viet Nam letters has addressed Postcards from the End of America once before, on June 11, 2022, and once afterward on August 6, 2022. The poet Linh Dinh is the subject of 1 more letter on April 29, 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.