Using Poetic Form as Outcry of Grief
Mourning, is unfortunately, a universal experience. It’s in this very human experience that we find creatives attempting to make tangible the emotional. Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is both excruciating and moving. Nguyen displays a precision with negative space and enjambments all while using the poem’s form to support its content.
The poem “Gyotaku” displays Nguyen’s skill in its use of form supporting text and multimedia. In this collection, Nguyen explores grief experience from her sibling ending their life; and before doing so, removing himself from all family photographs. Nguyen writes, “swimming up a head, out of the photograph; eels who ride atop each other,” as an uneven triangle inserting itself (or emerging from) the missing piece of the picture used in this poem. The text on the following page are shaped into individual triangles, as if they were the eels riding atop each other. The text in each triangle is a repetition of each other, in the way that grief seems to multiple. It is a single grief felt in multitudes. This poem evokes questions of the reader that the speaker asks themself: how does one carry the weight of this? As with other forms I’ve learned recently, I appreciate the intentionality that form poets put into their work. It is a harnessing of the emotional. It is as though the separate parts come together, each supporting each other in the whole: the emotion the fuel for the poem and the form its vehicle.
The poem “Triptych” does this in its own way. True to its name, it is a poem in three parts: the reader is presented the picture, a singular form of text where the brother was, and text surrounding the silhouette. The picture introduces to the reader the initial shock of seeing what is missing; the visual, again, supporting the emotion felt by the speaker. On the next page, the shape is Nguyen’s sibling, alone, the text opening, “with eyes closed he waits for his body to do the same.” He is alone, then and now. And in the last part of the “Triptych,” the family is without him: “it has sound but no form, what has form but no sound?”
Portrait of Home as Diaspora, Diaspora as Portrait of Mother-Daughter Relationships, My Mother as Portrait of Home My mother wakes before me. I can tell the time from the way she presses her palm to my forehead, the cool enough to lull me back to sleep. I live in a home where my ceiling is the stars. So, in the morning, I peel the mango and write on it the tally of those before us, mother and tita and lola alike. They’re not just the sky, but also string and rinds, and the plate is decorated with our x’s. Our mouths, whole and gummy, teeth sinking into everything that says I love you. And so, we wash our hands. The dishes. We wipe our lips, towel dragging against the sticky, its residue a reminder that all that’s meant to, will stay.
In the poem, “Portrait of Home as Diaspora, Diaspora as Portrait of Mother-Daughter Relationships, My Mother as Portrait of Home”, was an attempt to have the form of the poem match the item to which it’s referring. While Nguyen used varying pictures, this poem is in the shape of a mango with its peel dangling at its bottom. I’ve never accomplished this feat, and I hoped this fact would add a sense of melancholy to this piece. Only on the page am I perfectly fit into my family, namely my mother and grandmother. This is my family, and I have memories to hold and cherish. But, I’m not meant to stay.
Grief is a regular theme in my writing, as are plenty of poets I read and admire. I’ve happy to add Nguyen to this list, as her work is striking and unique. Ghost Of adds on to the lesson I’ve learned from this packet thus far: the form does not detract from the poem, but rather, gives it its home.