Happy New Year - I can't resist this quotation - Hoa Nguyen

Yes, here's a huge picture including fire. I can't decide whether to send an email to my entire address book, so this is a lot easier:

...

The last section of this paragraph made me chuckle, my bolding:

Anyway, yes, I've had people say that they didn't understand my works, especially my earlier ones where I was submerging the narrative. And I've had people, like my sister, say that they understood the same poems differently (better) when they heard me read them. Once, at a small gathering of friends, my mother read my poems with me. The poet Linh Dinh had translated several into Vietnamese (and I can't express how much that means to me). So she read them in Vietnamese and then I read them in English. Afterwards someone asked her what she thought and she said "I have no idea what she is saying." To which I just laughed. Sometimes I don't know what I "mean," too. But I don't think you need to hit people over the head with content and meaning. Whenever I encounter that in poetry, I feel pandered to, manipulated and/or bored.

So, goodbye content and meaning.

The full interview is at Bookslut from 2008.