A snare closes,
Another snare opens and every star pours through.

Often a book of poems is a collection, poems written in different places and times and circumstances. But for her third book, Primordial, poet Mai Der Vang chose a theme and a purpose — the saola — and spent three years doing research on the animal and working out the dozens of poems in the book.

Vang, an American poet of Laotian Hmong descent, will discuss Primordial at the Portland Book Festival on Nov. 8. In a session with OPB’s Jenn Chávez, she and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts (see story) will talk about using shape-shifting animals to amplify human experience.

For Betts, the animals are dogs; for Vang, a rare, possibly extinct antelope-like creature called a saola.

The cover of Primordial shows a dim image of a pregnant saola. The artwork, with the saola nearly invisible against a jungle background, captures perfectly the evanescent nature of the animal.

The last sighting of a saola was on a tripped jungle camera in the Annamite mountains of Laos in 2013.

Vang chose the elusive saola, hunted for eons by the Hmong people of Laos, as a totem, a symbol, a shuttle for weaving strands of history, memory, ecology, and hope.

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… I am here in California and you are
there in the Annamites. I seek you by way
of retreat, refugees fleeing a line of fire
by way of shattered twilight.…

In many of the poems, saola stand in for her, taking on her experiences, feeling her intuition, grazing on the battlefields of the jungle, present when the fetus who will be her son moves within her.

REFUGEES

The Hmong people of Laos were recruited as shadow warriors by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. When American soldiers withdrew from Southeast Asia, the Hmong were abandoned to find their own way. Vang’s family came as refugees to Fresno, Calif., one of the largest concentrations of Hmong in the United States.

Vang, 44, was born in Fresno and raised in a large extended family. The only Hmong on the block, they were misunderstood and mistrusted by neighbors. One poem in her new collection recalls eggs thrown at their house’s windows, an obscenity scrawled on the siding. Another, an old truck set afire in the front yard. Another, her large family filling all the machines at the laundromat next to the 7-Eleven.

CHOSEN BY POETRY

Vang’s (her first name is Mai Der, Vang is her surname) first language was Hmong, but facility in English came early and stayed. She doesn’t remember choosing to be a poet. Rather, poetry chose her.

In an interview, she explained her writing practice: “I usually start with just an inkling of inspiration. It’s not clear yet what that inspiration is going to lead me to do or say.… and then I take that undefinable feel in and try to put it into words.”

She describes herself as a very, very slow writer. But that is at the beginning, when she is trying to bring thoughts and images and impressions and feelings together. At this point, she said, if she can find a line she’s happy with, she feels she’s done for the day. “I want to honor whatever I’m doing.”

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Then follows the serendipity of the poet. She sits with her beginning lines, often for days, and the words come.

“I love being surprised, because I never know what it is I’m really trying to say. I think it is me trying to connect with my unconscious mind, which is saying ‘write this, write this.’ … When I let my subconscious mind take over, I come out with a poem that seems very strange to me.”

At this point, she begins to write rapidly, “like automatic writing. You’re sort of channeling.”

WRITING AND TEACHING

Vang’s two previous poetry books have garnered awards. She also has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

Her first book, Afterland, received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Yellow Rain, her second book, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a Northern California Book Award. Yellow Rain was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the California Book Award.

Vang, who has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the MFA program at Columbia University, teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State. She serves as the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

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WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry cannot be described. That is because it is poetry. Poems are stealthy, slipping inside you and capturing your corpuscles. They invade your perfect life with their disquieting images and carefully cultivated words, their rhythm and anti-rhythm, their messy and precise arrangement on the page.

Primordial is worthy of a long, smooth, airless dive into the Annamite jungle, to places where saola live and prosper, if only in the memory of dreams.

Some of the poems resist meaning. There were some in this collection that I did not understand. But there were no poems that didn’t move me.

And that — the life-changing power of words precisely placed — is the definition of poetry.

… Redwood, may you
ever root. Hmong, may you [live]. Saola, may you go and go.