“This rain reminds me of rain”: Contemplating the Archive in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Hoa Nguyen was, and is, my teacher, so I have had the pleasure of hearing her read selections from her new book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, for some time. I asked her if I could create a hybrid review/interview and she kindly agreed. What follows is a condensed and slightly edited conversation with illustrative examples of her poems and commentary interspersed.

KJB: One thing that jumped out at me reading the book was that it feels archival. There’s something about archival research—you never feel like you have the complete story. After a while, if you’re a sympathetic researcher, you realize that you only have what exists on paper, what exists as a record, but that there’s more that you’ll never recover. I think you captured that feeling in the book. Was that something you were aiming for, or is it a by-product of the fragmentary nature of what you were able to find?

HN: That’s a great question. I was interested for the book to interact with archive. An archive becomes this repository of information that shapes our narratives about ourselves as a people in a moment of history, then what gets preserved in the archive, what falls out of the archive, what gets preserved in an archive, that is inarticulated still. There are these whispers behind the evidences we see there. Saidiya Hartman is a writer whose work in the archives inspired me. Her essay “Venus in Two Acts” was really influential in my thinking about the ghost in the archive that doesn’t get to speak. Especially when the archive is also tracing the outlines of great violences. So I was interested in both presenting archival material, also investigative material, like research-based materials, to draw out some of those more ghostly imprints, to let the absences come forward at the same time as the materials are coming forward.

There’s a relationship between the missing people, the missing perspectives or even what gets overlaid by the archive. I think that you might remember I’ve long found the image of Sappho’s manuscripts, the remnants that we have, very provocative. The things that are left out are also partly what brings forward these remnants and frames them. And I think you might remember that I’ve shared this dream with you before, that I was in the attic of my childhood home, and there was a player piano in there and I took the Sappho piece and it became the player piano roll that I rolled onto the drum and then the piano played the song. It was a recognition that the player piano plays the punctuated piece or parts of the scroll. Even though it was Sappho’s song, it was also the pieces that were missing that made up the song. That became an image for me across the manuscript. But also, I think it is a kind of poetics that I have, that it’s about the way the isolated fragments can create a charge that holds across even the missing materials. And it’s like the arrangement of those things that becomes the material of the music. And it’s like the tensions between those, what’s there and what’s not there.

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In both the archival elements and the contemporary vignettes, the disrupted narrative and Sapphic fragments press the reader to fill those gaps. “Last Letter” ends with the promise of “talk to you later in another letter” that the poem’s title tells us never arrives. Like most family letters, it shifts topics seamlessly—an update on money sent, stuck in the bank, pleasant inquiries after the children, “growing up steadily,” a compliment, “I hope you will always be this beautiful lady.” Here, the running-on of disparate epistolary conventions contrasts in feeling with the imagistic fragments of “Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones”:

stuff the alarm clock in my bag Clouds

and black in the afternoon (untranslatable)

Despite their syntactic differences, both poems juxtapose dissimilar phrases and images to create a sense of story which is partially lost, partly without language.

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KJB: The ways that you work the war bits into it feel almost cinematic: meanwhile, this is happening, they’re dropping napalm over here, over there’s a personal story. That made the book feel almost like a war movie.

HN: Oh, I know what the cinematic reference feels like. It feels like the newsreel.

KJB: Yes. Exactly. That jump cut. I think about World War II movies that are Western and romanticizing of war. I don’t mean to suggest that you’re trying to do that at all, but it has that same feel to it.

HN: Yeah, that was intentional for sure. But I wanted the perspective to be not this raw, raw, Western perspective. But using a suggestion of that, yes, to bring it in as an element. It was delicate because I didn’t want to foreground it, particularly because those are the stories that we typically get, and I wanted to be sure that they didn’t overtake the space. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I put on my mining hat and I…

KJB: Thinking is work.

HN: It is work. I had it up on a wall and I had a flagging system. I wanted to understand the ways in which, tonally, things were mapped—here are fact-based, or creative non-fiction, based moments in the manuscript, here’s more levity, more of the triumph or the joy.

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The newsreel feel comes from actual film footage, in “O My 4FH Planes: Cries of Johnson: A Folk Opera,” drawn from a North Vietnamese performance, which is part of a French anti-war documentary from 1967: “o US Air Force / if the Gods love you / find your way back / to America!” (10-13). This poem captures well the archival fragments approach Nguyen takes; what is revealed on the page is decontextualized, lyrics from another language, mediated by a documentarian, yet about a well-known American imperial atrocity.

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KJB: I’m interested in the construction, the pieces, how it gets built. It feels like a departure in some ways. Your other books are not centered on a person, they’re not centered on an event. At least I don’t feel that when I read them, maybe I’m missing something in those other ones, but this one just….

HN: No, no, you’re absolutely correct. And I appreciate your attentiveness to my craft.

KJB: And your philosophy, right? Because you taught me, so I know what you think about craft.

HN: Exactly. It was a delicate balance too. There’s a pressure I was feeling to ethically manage personal narrative, biographical narrative of someone close to me. There’s also the delicacy of managing historically traumatic materials, needing to manage tone. I wanted to make a container that the feeling, that the emotions that I’m addressing, could contain correctly, which felt like I needed to take a lot of care, a lot more care in the management, or like you said, the building out of the form. So you’re correct, absolutely. I’ve never proposed for myself that kind of aim before. I’ve typically been a poet who is writing out of my engagements with poetry in my life and the things that I’m concerned with and noticing and considering and in conversation with, but I hadn’t set forth this ambition that I had for this one in advance of the poems.

KJB: There were a couple of poems that are less fragmentary and are more narrative-driven. “Mexico” and the ghost stories were the ones that jumped out at me, although there were probably other examples as well.

HN: I think “The Flying Motorist Artist”—that’s another one. For those, I was interested in trying out more of a relationship to more straightforward storytelling, and it was definitely about telling. For those pieces that you mentioned and maybe other ones in the poem, the organization feels more speech-based and more typical modes of telling a story, rather than writing a story like that, that seemed to be a distinction that was important to me. I think honestly it goes back to a long fascination with story songs. Some of my earliest memory of listening to music was of Johnny Cash reel-to-reel. We had a reel-to-reel player that my mother brought back from Saigon actually. And she also had these reel-to-reel tapes of Vietnamese folk songs. They were women’s voices. I always remembered them. I like to think in a romantic way that it’s also a body memory of Vietnamese language that I didn’t have access to except for this body memory and that sensation, especially the women’s voices, because my caretakers in Vietnam were women, like my mother’s aunt. So song is deeply embedded in my poetics. Those poems are a way to step inside or to be in conversation with those traditions. Also ghost stories, telling ghost stories.

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How to tell your mother’s story? With exposition that also carries emotional weight understood best in retrospect, on re-reading. For example, in “Mexico,” one of the longer poems in the book, some exposition is required: “she named her stand Mexico / and Minh came by often / would send his soldiers there / to buy drinks.” This simple telling sets up the later painful entanglement between these two characters. In “The Flying Motorist Artist,” exposition is woven into spare, emblematic details: “she made things burn or break / they said spilled / rice in the dirt bad luck they said / and banned her.” This detail shows us a young woman who is unwilling or unable to perform socially expected feminine household tasks; this is a girl who will be drawn to the unconventional, even to danger.

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HN: I don’t know, I think I’m funny. I try to be funny and…

KJB: I think you’re funny too. I did think there were humorous bits. One of the things I find humorous in your work is how you employ rhyme and other sound elements in unexpected places. In a poem that’s presenting itself as free verse, suddenly there’s a rhyme or strong assonance and it throws people off a little in a way that I think can be charming and humorous.

HN: Yes. I’m glad you picked that up.

KJB: There’s a wry, sarcastic line that runs through your poems. I find that to be really humorous too.

HN: Yeah, it’s kind of a wink that goes underneath.

KJB: Yeah. Like the Pill Box character in “Made by Dow.” That’s hilarious.

HN: Thank you. I think it’s hilarious too.

KJB: It made me think of your friend Joanne Kyger’s poem, “I’m Very Busy Now, So I Can’t Answer All Those Questions about Beat Women Poets,” the one where she’s at a party and she’s pissed off at some woman who’s being a total asshole.

HN: I probably have absorbed that from being really close to Joanne Kyger’s work, actually, because I think she’s hilarious. She’s also a really good storyteller. But you wouldn’t necessarily call her a storyteller poet. You know what I mean? But she has these poems that are also aligned with biography, aligned with travel. She definitely is a guiding light for me and my poems and I definitely use unexpected rhyme, especially to close a poem. I think we’ve all been in that moment, right? Where you just are like, “Oh God, what are you doing here?” There’s a horrible other person. She was drunk too. She insulted the other two people I was reading with. It was like, “Fuck off.” Anyway, she was horrible. So it’s a super revenge poem too. There’s definitely some real revenge happening in this book.

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Nguyen sets up the revenge poem with deft use of assonance to tell us what we need to know about Pillbox: “rather thin with a cinched / vintage coat.” As she slowly lets anger build, the sonic playfulness grows:

“You could say she ‘slung’ it or ‘slanged’ it / (the small plastic lighter) with velocity / or maybe I could simply say ‘she threw it’ “

The poem teases the reader with similar rewordings throughout; it’s often hard to find the right way to tell the story of out-of-bounds behavior, and Nguyen’s linguistic joking reminds us of that feeling. As Kyger’s poem does, “Made by Dow” skewers a familiar type, the one trying hard to be edgy while actually being offensive. This polished little revenge poem is linked to the larger themes of the book despite its distance from other topics.

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HN: Rebecca Tomas said something in an essay about a definition of a witch; it’s a radical woman who uses language to change things. So here’s a way in which the revenge poem is also… It’s like the hex or the curse. To transform the shit you’ve got into nectar. The “Mexico” poem too, it’s to expose wrongs.

KJB: Yeah. That poem is really powerful. I heard you read that before and when I read it again in the book, it’s a fascinating poem. … I think about it outside of reading the book. There’s something about it that stays with me. It feels like a folk tale or a traditional story. I know from the context of the book, it’s a true story in some sense. But it feels archetypal.

HN: It does. And thank you, oh my God, that’s like the best compliment I’ve ever gotten. That it feels like a folk tale, because that’s definitely because that was the other inspiration point for me. It’s like talk songs, folk tales, ghost stories. These narratives—they are really just about regular people. Have you listened to any of the Dolly Parton podcasts?

KJB: No, but I need to.

HN: Oh they’re so good. One of the features of her song writing that she hadn’t really stopped to think about is that she tells a story from this perspective of the woman in a more complex way than is generally given. As I was listening to that I was thinking—that’s definitely a similar aim. I think that’s what folk tales can do.

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Here’s a Dolly-Partonesque folk tale fragment, from the ghost story poem “High School Clock Tower”:

A purple áo dài ghost haunts the hallways / A purple áo dài phantom / wanders the courtyard / sits under a banyan tree

A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure blends and blurs memories. Photos, letters, ghost stories, Vietnamese language lessons, a mother’s daredevil girlhood and later failing health, family stories from Nguyen’s life in Vietnam—unremembered, because she was so young—shape this enigmatic, beautiful, memorable book.