Poet and Essayist Hai-Dang Phan Talks Birds, Migration, and Poetic Returns to Lineage at Literary Salon
By Sarah Tachau ’27
On a mid-March afternoon, English and Creative Writing students and staff packed into the sun-soaked Harmon Room to hear the naturalistic, billowy poems and prose of visiting author and translator, Hai-Dang Phan.
A professor of English at Grinnell College, Phan’s credentials span beyond his employment—he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been published in Best American Poetry 2016, New England Review, and The New Yorker. Vietnam-born and Wisconsin-raised, through his work he explores themes of familial roots, introspection, and, most notably, birdwatching.
Phan’s visit included a Q&A in Professor Michael Prior’s Creative Nonfiction class, an intimate coffee hour with English and Creative Writing students, and a reading of his poetry and prose open to all.
Phan recited a handful of poems from his 2019 collection, Reenactments, a work that, in his words, “grapples with the legacy of war as a generational kid who grew up across the river in Wisconsin.” He returned to “Self-Portrait With New Weapons Systems,” written in his 30s, noting that it was fun to reread it from a different, older perspective, “it feels like a reenactment,” he said. In addition to conversing with his past self, he spoke with his father through a reading of “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).”
While his older poetic work circled around collaboration with his lineage, Phan attempted in his newer work to “give [himself] permission and intention to write in the present.” He talked in his coffee hour about the “glimmer” or the “anti-trigger:” the thing that centers the writer to home and belonging. The grounding factors in the writer’s life—such as rivers, communities, birds—are all “glimmers.”
Phan read his silky poem, “River,” winding the room along in a meditation on familiarities and time. He transitioned into his “bird nerd” work with his poem “From the Pines,” a love letter to the fledgling creatures of his mother’s backyard in Georgia.
There is no better gift than the words of a poet-turned-essayist. Phan proved this point by reading a draft titled “Letter from Mekong Delta” from his upcoming prose collection. Recalling a trip back to his place of birth, Phan wrote of his birdwatching travels with his father in Vietnam, vividly characterizing their local guide and world-renowned birdwatcher on the platform eBird, “Toby,” and addressing the rare Spoon-billed Sandpiper directly.
To Phan, birdwatching is more than a case of what he calls “biophilia,” it is a lens through which one can study displacement from homelands in endangered species such as the Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Further, he credited his hobby of patient observing, or, in his words, “to put myself in the way of something I had never seen before,” as a beneficial creative practice. He recommended field notebooks as a way to shake off the analytical urge of a writer and be present.
During the Q&A, Phan credited non- fiction as a “protein form”—a challenge to balance structure, scenes, characters, dialogue, and his poetic tendencies. He emphasized the use of refreshing metaphors and language: “Ever since we had language and drew on caves, we were trying to describe things,” he claimed.
The Words would like to thank Phan for taking the time out of his busy week to engage with the English and Creative Writing department on various thoughtful levels.