It’s supposed to be solemn and settled
And in celebration of the individual human life,
Whatever it is. It’s each of us of course,
And yet the view we have of it is so oblique
It might as well be one of nobody at all,
Or of a vague interior with a figure in a room
Who could be anyone. This sense that it’s so close
It must be you: what do we really know of it,
And how could anything that simple be that real?
We would be kings of our domains, alone in majesty
“Above this Frame of things,” but those are idle thoughts,
As idle as the vacant pleasures of a summer afternoon.
The truth is much more down to earth: we make things up
And celebrate dejection when we see they can’t be real.
Instead of clarity, self-knowledge is a study in confusion,
Driven by the need to see what isn’t there. Begun
In gladness, something carries you away until you’re
Everyone and no one, for no matter where you are
Or what your name is, it’s the same styles
Of thought, the same habits of contemplation
That carry you along to the inevitable conclusion
That life is either ludicrous or not worth living
Or both. But why does it have to be worth anything?
It’s just there, the way we’re all just there, moving
And needing to be moved, without knowing why.

John Koethe

Monday afternoon I picked up Đán and Xuân after school. On our way to their piano lessons, Xuân kept asking me if I could buy him two Robux gift cards to give to his friends. I thought he wanted to do something nice for his friends; therefore, I didn’t see any issue. I told him to talk to his mom because she would know more about those things.

At dinner, he brought up the gift cards again to me and my wife. She told him “no,” except for special occasions such as birthdays. Xuân didn’t give us any reasons for the gift cards. He dropped the subject and we didn’t think much about it.

Before bedtime, he confessed to me that he dared a girl in his class to kiss him on his cheek. Even though the girl didn’t do it, the two boys told him that they would tell on him unless he gives them Robux gift cards. Xuân was afraid that they would snitch on him; therefore, he kept asking us for the gift cards.

My wife and I talked to him about it. We thanked him for telling us about the incident. We advised him to talk to his teacher, but he wanted me to communicate with her first. I couldn’t believe he was being blackmailed. He’s only in first grade.

Update from his teacher:

Good afternoon Truong Family,

Thank you again for letting me know about this incident. After talking to Xuan and the other classmates involved, both students have apologized to Xuan. As a result of our conversation, we agreed that our families will buy us the toys that we want, not our classmates.

Thank you for your support.

As one who thinks of poetry
As a way of talking to yourself,
I probably do too much explaining,
But that’s what talking to yourself is like:
The things you can’t explain to anyone
Are suddenly made clear to no one, as though
Nobody mattered but yourself. And it’s the same
For each of us, whether you’re listening to me or not:
An enveloping cloud of not-quite-language
Hovering on the verge of sense that puts you
At the center of a world that doesn’t quite get you,
But of which you’re part, a world in which
Each individual life is so completely ordinary
And at the same time so extraordinary it never ends
Until it does: each individual life eternity
In miniature; each life a world.

Yet here I am, lying on my bed
In the middle of the day, feeling the years
Tick by with nothing much to say about them,
As though I’m supposed to. That’s the point though,
Isn’t it? Without the sense of an individual self
Creating time and bounded by it, I wouldn’t be real,
I wouldn’t matter, nor would you, despite our
Sentiments and appetites and dreams. It’s how we
Differ from our animals, however much we love them-
Something you and I know, but Daisy, sleeping
At the foot of my bed, can’t know. Dream on, Daisy.

John Koethe

As I was reading Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s Dust Child, I made note of all the Vietnamese proverbs sprinkled throughout the novel so I could put together a Vietnamese typographic sample. For the design of the page, I wanted to use sticky notes to highlight the proverbs. To complement the sticky note concept, I set the proverbs in marker-style Shantell Sans, designed by Shantell Martin, Stephen Nixon, and Anya Danilova. The header and footer are set in Aneto, designed by Veronika Burian, José Scaglione, Azza Alameddine, and Roxane Gataud. Take a look and enjoy.

We have them, and live and think about them,
But then, what are they? Some seem like
Bigger deals than the rest, like those of big enchiladas
Or the CEOs of banks too big to fail, but why? Some seem
Meaningful for their commitments and accomplishments,
As no doubt they are, though most are unexceptional
And ordinary, and just fine for that. They’re all equal
In value, but what that means is difficult to say:
That each one matters more than anything
To whoever’s life it is, though each is barely real
To anyone else? The world exists before and after it,
Yet while it breathes it is the world, its world.
Whenever I attempt to gesture at it, all I find are words
For where I am: this room, this place I live. Stay with me
I want to say, yet it can’t, not because it’s unreal,
But because I am. Is what I want to say instead
That everything comes down to lives? The thought
Is true enough, but it’s a way of feeling, not explaining,
Of poetry rather than a paper. They’re real enough I guess,
Just “metaphysically thin.” But each of them is everything.

John Koethe

In the first part of The Writing of an Hour, Coultas shares her writing process, which is fascinating. I didn’t catch everything in the remaining parts of the collection; therefore, I can’t honestly say much about her work other than I had read through it.

I hate Christmas, but I hate people who hate Christmas even more.
–James Schuyler

No one really knew, though everyone knew what it should be;
And now it’s just a way of being famous on a small scale.
It was supposed to be significant for its own sake,
Though that was never entirely true: human feelings
Got in the way, for while it was possible to remain unmoved
In the face of all that language, no one really wanted to:
They wanted to talk about it, to explain what it had let them see,
As though the world were incomplete before poetry filled it in.
And now there’s nothing left to see: oh, poems come and go
And everyone complains about them, but where there used to be
Arguments there’s just appreciation and indifference,
Measured praise that’s followed by forgetting. I’m as bad
As anyone: instead of reading I reread, instead of seeing
I remember, and instead of letting silence have its say
I fill it up with talk, as if the last word might be anything else.

And yet despite all this it matters. Sometimes in the midst
Of this long preparation for death that initial solitude returns
And the world seems actual and alive, as it assumes its opposite.
I think the truest thoughts are always second thoughts,
But who am I kidding, other than myself? I hope there’s
Someone, that it casts its spell beyond the small cone of light
Hovering over my desk, and that what started out one night
So long ago in silence doesn’t end that way. I fantasize
I can hear it somewhere in the realm of possibility,
But only now and then, in intervals between breaths.

John Koethe

Last year, when Ms. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai announced her forthcoming novel, Dust Child, I immediately pre-ordered it. Having read and loved her debut novel, The Mountains Sing, I expected her new book, in which she spent seven years writing, to be excellent.

Dust Child arrived in my mailbox last Tuesday and I read it every chance I had. The book lived up to my expectations. Ms. Nguyễn is a gifted writer with an ear for language and a heart for humanity. In her stories, she puts the suffering of her characters over the conflicts from all sides. She sheds light on the dust of lives of Amerasians, dark-skinned children in particular, who had to face hatred and discrimination. Although her characters are fictional, I heard similar heartbreaking stories growing up in Việt Nam.

In addition to the devastating consequences, Ms. Nguyễn weaves together the sweet, erotic romance and the cultural references. As what she had done in The Mountains Sings, Ms. Nguyễn incorporated Vietnamese proverbs with her excellent translations in Dust Child. I appreciate both her clear writing style as well as her level-headed approach to the war—all sides are responsible for the human loss and suffering. It’s an engaging, eye-opening, heart-rending read.

And God was there like an island I had not rowed to.

—Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God

I stand in the Punk Rock aisle of Rhino Records
mindlessly watching an old video of a Supremes
concert, trying not to think of anything, really,
giving myself to sounds from fifty years ago
that celebrate nothing now except my own youth,
my own Sixties when the world was ending
and beginning all over again, and it would be
all about love and the absence of war forever
once Nam was over, and the lies would stop,
and the boys would come back home, and Nixon
and McNamara and Westmoreland would pay
the price, and that’s of course when it happens
and I can’t stop it, my son died last week,
until the young woman standing next to me
bends down quickly, reaching to help pull me up,
and I try to make a joke of it, saying Thank you.
You know, fifty years ago I would have asked you
to dance, and she says, Sir, I would be happy
to dance with you, and so we do for a few seconds
there in the middle of the Punk Rock aisle, she is
so very sweet, I am terribly sorry for your loss,
and I thank her, and once again I know as if by
physical touch alone the innocence and kindness
of the hopeful before the world disappoints them
and it all seems like some awful rowing toward God
in a hard rain, one wave, one lie, after another, and
they are so tired, the oars so heavy, that they slowly
open their hands and pray and lean into the dark.

B.H. Fairchild

…stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

—“Preface,” The Stories of John Cheever

My father was wearing a double-breasted suit
and green Homburg hat, and had just emerged
from the war in the Pacific, bearing in his arms
the chaos and nightmares of a thousand days
and evenings on Guam, Saipan, Tinian for deposit
in the First Methodist Church in Houston, Texas
where he would fall asleep in sermons preached
to aid his resurrection from a foxhole’s grave.
But the stone would not budge, and he stood
with my mother for photos outside the church
and apologized for breaking up the Eucharist,
that Homburg resting in the sunlight like
a helmet or perhaps a halo starched and ironed
for Sunday service and lunch afterwards at
Gaidoux’s. And, as I recall, one Ezra Brooks
or two or five too many. And my mother’s pleas,
and then the sound of Benny Goodman’s clarinet
all sweet and mellow rising from a nearby store
so that we all stopped on the sidewalk, tilting
our heads and just listening to Benny Goodman,
and then turning to begin the long walk home,
to begin forgetting, to begin, again, an ordinary life.

B.H. Fairchild