Some Thursdays ago I attended a TUCR event featuring Linh Dinh, a poet, short fiction writer, and photographer, who resides in Philadelphia.  I was struck — as often a convincing writer can do — by Dinh’s seeming command of the language of his work, his assuredness as he clambered over the sometimes jarring terrain of his words, which words were in a language not his first.  ”Command,” in fact, may be misleading.  Say instead the speech embodied him, his entire form taking on the stature of his speaking.  Say he was possessed, a shifting sculpture of the sound.  Suffice it to say, a person could tell he spends time reading his own work aloud.

Before him, conversely, read a graduate student, who mumbled his poems as if simply trying to get them out of the way.  I’m sure, of course, there were nerves involved.  We were in a lecture hall, though as such it seemed small, and the seats were well filled with many new eyes, including my friend’s and mine.  And yet, there was a certain discomfort, it seemed, with the words themselves —  strangeness, as in the recognition of an old acquaintance with whom, at one time, one was dear friends — by which roundabout way I mean, he wasn’t quite embracing the work he wrote. Read more »