This Way to the Sugar (ii)

from poet Hieu Minh Nguyen and Write Bloody Publishing

What thoughts I have of you this afternoon, Allen Ginsberg, as I read of another poet searching the supermarket, where you found Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman. This one is in Minnesota. Man is looking for his demented mother.

I found this poem searching the poet’s first collection This Way to the Sugar. I was looking for a title poem, one Hieu Minh Nguyen had chosen to represent them all.

Instead I had to read most of the book carefully. Clever poet. I found “This way to the sugar” in the twenty-sixth of 38 poems, most of them each also fitting easily on 1 page.

The poet put the poem with the title in it deep within the collection, the twelfth of 15 poems in part II of III parts, on the fifty-first of 75 enumerated pages of the book,

where I found the title phrase deep in the poem, the seventeenth of 21 sentences in the first and only stanza. “This way to the sugar.” is one of only 4 or 5 sentences without a verb assumed or written, 1 of 2 quoting signage.

This is plainspoken English, that is, fancy. Allen and Walt wrote this way and Garcia would have too did he compose in English.

Hieu’s whole book reads that way. It’s a language of acceptance, or bluff, direct, address, of moral and purposeful seriousness. So, why This Way to the Sugar?

First, why At the Supermarket? Well, it does invoke Allen. Fine. Knowing Allen he likely has stopped cruising the supermarket and run across the gutters to the poem at left, verso, the one with the gay parade.

Grandly I may say that Allen wrote of his Supermarket in California when it was new and strange soon after 1945. I recall my grandmother even 20 years later, a landless peasant, leading me on her own path through the A&P starting out back where they threw out perfectly good stuff.

Hieu’s mother, maybe not a peasant but from the poor world no matter how well she may have lived over there, is doing performance art at least 50 years later about the abundance and waste of our crazy-making retail establishments.

Her son has captured her show. He reports a good Samaritan pitching in with the poet to cry out for her, Mẹ, Mẹ, Mẹ, like lost lambs. “And of course just like that, like traffic, or magic, or winter she is there . . .”

It’s a poem for sure. You can read it yourself in the first photograph above under permission showed by the third one.

But why This Way to the Sugar to title the whole collection? Grandly I may say that we speak here in American of sugar in reference to love, when we don’t mean money, when we don’t mean the disease that chops away at our bodies from eating too much.

More specifically I can say that in looking for the phrase through most of the book before I found it I ran across licking more than once. Sour and sweet. This Way for the Sugar.

This is the second of 3 Viet Nam letters to have addressed This Way to the Sugar, by poet Hieu Minh Nguyen, so far. The first appeared on August 10, 2022 and the third on June 5, 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.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.