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Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963 and immigrated to the U.S. 1975. He settled in Philadelphia in 1982, where he studied at the University of the Arts. His collections of poetry include A Mere Rica

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One-Sentence Stories

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1

Before he breathed his last, they led him outside to look at the sun for the last, and first, time.

Travel books fascinated him so much that he spent his entire life chained to his desk, with the curtains drawn, reading them.

He loves maps for their own sake, it is true, and when he shouts out while pointing at a random destination, “I want to be there,” he is not expressing a desire to be anywhere, particularly, on this great earth, but only a wish to be a fiber, a speck at most, on an intricately-folded, colorful piece of paper.

After half a century, a man returned to the city of his birth to discover it practically unchanged: all the old buildings were miraculously intact, although yellowing slightly, and the entire population of half a century ago, 2,489,863 souls, by exact count, were still alive, although yellowing slightly.

Two men were life-long enemies because of a word said decades earlier, a word misheard, misinterpreted, and exceedingly trivial, in any case, to any objective observer, a slight inflection, some say, a thread of air escaped from between more-or-less-closed lips, or a twitch of the eyebrow, and yet the results were the horrifying death of one man, and the maiming of the other.

He ignored public fascinations with movie stars, athletes, statesmen, revolutionaries, mass-murderers, and poets, by writing well-researched, footnoted, and illustrated biographies of bus drivers, cashiers, beauticians, filing clerks, plumbers, and roofers.

At the border between there and there, a young man who was caught with a generic secret inside one of his bodily orifices was forced to swallow a strong dose of laxative, then whisked to an insane asylum, where he spent the remaining years of his productive life.

Slang are crowding out real words, he foolishly thinks, forgetting that every word belongs to the shadowy vocabulary of an illicit crowd, invented to reassure and flatter its speaker, and confuse outsiders to what is being said.

The pretty woman confided, “Whenever I closed my eyes I would see its aerodynamic head, its black turf, its angle, and then suddenly the phone would ring, dispelling my vision.”

Poets Book of Days

May 13

Walter Alexander Raleigh died, 1922

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Poetry Trivia

Question:

What American poem lead to an obscenity trial in 1957?

Answer

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. The Customs Office seized copies of the poem as they were being imported from England, and sued the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for trying to distribute obscene material. The American Civil Liberties Union came to Ferlinghetti's defense and eventually won the case.

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