Poet Truong Tran [p.3]

One of my artistic heroes, Robert Rauschenberg, was once asked what he strives for in his art during an interview. He responded, “I strive to create art that is without meaning.” Personally I think that makes sense in a way. We are all thrown into a lifelong struggle from the moment we are born into this world. We are taught language and we are taught to construct meaning from that language. To deconstruct meaning is a lifelong struggle. That’s not to say that poetry doesn’t hold meaning, but it’s you the reader who should arrive at it, not what I as the writer should dictate to you.

NHA: What do you hope that your readers will get out of your poetry?

TT: (laughs) You have just thrown me a trick question. We’ve gone from not having an audience to the hopes of an audience. But I don’t really have many hopes. You get what you get out of it. If my writing has a readership, then I’m grateful. I hope there are enough entry points in my writing that someone will find something.

NHA: Have you ever thought about writing a novel?

TT: Yes definitely! But I always start with the novel and I end up with a book of poems. My thoughts are very fragmentary so I find it hard for me to hold a narrative thread.

NHA: What do you think it takes to be a poet?

TT: I don’t know what exactly it takes to be a poet. The form of poetry kind of chooses you. I think anyone can be a writer, but it’s hard to inhabit a form that is just not feasible in some ways in the context of a modern world. Whatever it is that we choose to do, we hope that it allows us to do it and is capable of putting a roof over our heads. I’m not sure if poetry can accomplish that, thus my putting a roof over my head through teaching.

NHA: You’ve performed at several poetry jams in the past. How do you think “spoken” poetry differs from written poetry?

TT: I’m a firm believer that poetry needs to exist on the page as well as through the voice. You can claim to write spoken word, but ultimately the page holds the poem. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t fully succeed as a poem. It’s disservice to any writer to say that his/her work is “spoken word” and not “poetry”. It’s all writing and it’s all poetry. And you have to do it effectively regardless of whether it’s experimental or spoken word.

You have to also realize that we are conditioned from the moment that we are born into this world to decipher codes and language. Then with this creature of poetry, we must deconstruct everything that we have been programmed to know. You have to enter into language from an intuitive level so we can understand silence and the white space on the page as part of the poem. The white space as a character in the poem. It’s not easy to have to deconstruct our whole notion of what language is.

I think poetry is the ultimate form of expression, for me at least. It embraces both the visual and the power of sound and rhythm and the image. It’s everything.

NHA: Can you talk about your children’s book, Going Home, Coming Home? How was writing a children’s book different from writing poetry?

TT: That was a really challenging endeavor for me. There’s no denying that when you write a children’s book, you’re writing for an audience. It was really a challenge to begin structuring my language and voice to address an audience, even more, an audience of children. I’m not used to speaking to children. Part of my struggle was that I wanted to write my book as if I was speaking to adults. It was a frustrating experience because I do feel in some ways that I can articulate in an abstract manner to kids. I don’t think that everything we say to kids has to be so mapped out. I actually want to encourage the notion of having children take intuitive leaps like we do as adults. They say in second grade everything you draw turns out to be a Kandinsky. I think children are far more capable than what we give them credit for. Having said that, it is a very negative route too. These kids absorb everything, especially what’s in the media.

I think it was important for me to learn that yes, my words sometimes extend beyond this notion of writing for the self and yes, there are kids and I can’t deny that audience. But would I consider myself a children’s book author? Probably not.

NHA:Going Home, Coming Home revolves around the issue of the “home”? What is the “home” to you?