Entering the Spiritual, Unconscious, Surrealist Zone

First of all, that individuality is expressed in the creative ego of each poet. In the general trend of innovation, poets today have sought for themselves a separate path, bearing the personal mark of a multi-dimensional ego, full of pride and independence. “Leaving the herd” has become a common declaration for a generation of poets, establishing a solitary mindset on the creative journey: “I am a fish with a mouth full of moonlight/ Leaving the herd to wade into the rough sea ( Holding you in my mouth - Mai Van Phan), “Leading myself along the summer/ Finding a path to autumn” ( Following the summer - Phan Huyen Thu), “I travel with paintings in EL/ leaving the herd/ silently like a storm” ( Storm - Thanh Xuan), “Solo/ Determined to do what I want/

… I am me” ( I – Vi Thuy Linh), “I broke away from the collective/ The verse broke away from the blood with its roots intact” ( Lightning Sense – Nguyen Huu Hong Minh), “I am a bird that molts late and is practicing its voice with its soft beak still filled with diluted blood…/ Waiting for the song to be born from the grains of rice stuck in the feet of wild grass/ From the sad egg that has just peeled off the shell of time” ( Song – Nguyen Quang Thieu). If the New Poetry writers’ disillusionment is due to being pushed out of the flock, the disillusionment of contemporary poets is due to their proactive choice, acceptance of loneliness, even turning their backs on the collective to establish their own voice. The creative ego of contemporary poetry is thorny and rebellious in a brave way. Therefore, the characteristic of contemporary innovative poetry is not to rely on any standards, to reach out to the vast horizons of creativity, to break away from all old standards of values to find a new creative space: “Through all roads.../ Chasing forever, chasing forever following the verses/ To the desert of the green sunlight” ( Song Ma - Vi Thuy Linh), “Wake up, young horse of the young chest/ Wake up and shake your mane and gallop/ Gallop like crazy/ Only madness can save you from fear/ Cowardice/ Before crossing the shore.../ Wake up, stomp your feet and shake your head proudly/ Before the colorful saddles/ Wake up to drink the morning dew/ Welcome the sun every morning/ Wake up, young horse/ That has slept deep in the heart for many years ( Song of the young horse - Tran Le Son Y). Indeed, like enthusiastic, passionate young horses, contemporary young poets are bringing new winds to poetry.

The phenomenon of naming a poem or a collection of poems after oneself is no longer rare ( Trang Thanh - Trang Thanh, Vili in love - Vi Thuy Linh...) as a way to affirm the ego right from the title of the work. People today have the desire to create a unique portrait of themselves in poetry. It could be a physical portrait: "I look/ I/ have a high forehead, a pointed chin, high cheeks/ a deep philtrum/ have suffered hardships/ pursed lips/ do not share with others" ( Trang Thanh - Trang Thanh). But the most important is still the spiritual portrait. The individual ego dares to do and dares to take responsibility for what has been done, even if it is in opposition to everything: " I release everything from the rules/ Rush into the night to sing the things I like/ In the indifference of silent masks/ In the noise of protest masks " ( Flying silently - Trang Thanh). The proud person has become a motif in poetry today. Pride in the journey of searching for aspirations and ideals: “Lighting up the sky with hope/ I entrust my soul to the vast blue sky/ Even though behind those thousands of clouds/ there may be a deep, deceitful wilderness/ Then my dear, the remaining months/ my heart is proudly wounded” ( The Heart Song - Le Khanh Mai). Pride even in mistakes, pain, disappointment: “The heart is not easy to tame/ Pride in exile” ( Sweet Tears - Doan Thi Lam Luyen). People never fall after failures: “We grow up after each failure” ( The Broken Pieces - Bui Sim Sim). That is a respectable mindset!

In today's poetry, we still encounter the confessions of the player as a way to affirm his personality. The player here is understood as someone with a free, liberal lifestyle, who likes to wander around without being entangled with life. The player is not unfamiliar to Vietnamese poetry. In the Middle Ages, within the strict rules of Confucianism, talented Confucian scholars with a philosophy of hedonism still appeared, of which Nguyen Cong Tru, Pham Thai, and Tan Da are typical names. In New Poetry, there are dreamy poets "I am just a lover / Craving the beauty of a thousand forms and shapes" ( The Thousand-Tone Guitar - The Lu). The player is absent in revolutionary poetry because it is disheartening and unreasonable in wartime conditions. After 1975, when life returned to normal, the player returned to poetry. If in poetry from 1975 to 2000, playing can be an attitude of reaction to the absurdities of life "Wandering soul into the lonely whistle/ Forgetting oneself in asceticism, forgetting the chaotic life" ( Wine in a foreign land - Luong

Dinh), or playing is a way to affirm personality in contrast to the boring, stereotypical life "I split my head and divide everyone / In this world, those who are pacifying the world / Still have the guts, the courage to play / Are like Quat carving poems on the cliff / Are like Xuong stuffing words under his butt to sit / And are there those who dare like me to read the heroic words / Then invite Ho Xuan Huong to play Chinese chess one-on-one" ( Looking back at the ancestors - Bui Chi Vinh) then in the poetry of the early 21st century, the image of the person playing has a new beauty. The person playing today is not in a position of opposition to the circumstances, the living environment but in a position of overcoming the circumstances, reaching a level of leisurely, free "Perhaps there is nothing more joyful / Than going all the way to the end of the afternoon / Perhaps there is nothing more free / Than now I live alone" ( Free - Pham Van Doan). For them, playing is both to affirm their unique personality and to explore the colorful beauty of life "I/ am a street eater/ The beauty of the night/ The moon is dizzy and fermented/ The rhythm of the primitive color is intoxicating/ The soul sings with the body/ Wanting to invite the ghost to play with the wooden lid/ The mound of the sky/ The love and sadness of abandoned trees and grass" ( Da ca - Truong Thi Kim Dung).

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3.4.2. The ego

Not only searching for oneself in relation to the world, people also delve into the ego to discover different aspects of the ego, the multi-ego egos: “The ego that previously had to rely on the group, found its strength in the group, now, conscious of itself as a complete individual, it separates itself, contemplates, discovers itself and the world” [195, p. 61].

For the poet Cat Du, the desire to find the essential self begins with ontological questions such as the poet's confession: "Where do I come from?/ What do I come for?/ Where will I go?" ( She ). And the questions in Cat Du's poetry are philosophical issues, always existing as an obsession of an existential consciousness that the poet is forever searching for, like searching for his essential self. It is a self that is both real and illusory, both close and distant like an illusion, so when looking into the mirror, a mirror also made of the illusion of impermanent dreams, the poet doubts his own existence: "What are you doing?/ Looking in the mirror/ Looking in the mirror for what?/ Looking for you/ You?" ( Oh, how strange !). That is why, even though the poet has transformed into many different existential selves: Sometimes like "Nguyet Nga wearing ancient costumes and

Sitting on a horse-drawn carriage, I glanced at Luc Van Tien affectionately. Sometimes I “see myself as a civil servant wearing a collar and a lapel/ a civil servant with a serious face and no smile”. Sometimes I “see myself harvesting in a rice field/ the storks fly peacefully”… But then, these transformations are just illusions: “The velvet curtain closes/ Where are you?/ I don’t know” because when “Looking in the mirror, I only see life” and those are only “lives without you”…!? ( Oh! How strange !)

The desire to discover oneself is expressed by Ly Hoang Ly in a haunting metaphor in Unbuttoning the Night : “Slowly, unbutton a button/ Look in the mirror, slowly, unbutton two/ buttons/Slowly, unbutton three buttons/ Look in the mirror, slowly, unbutton the fourth/ button/ Slowly, unbutton five buttons/ Look in the mirror, slowly,/ unbutton the sixth.../ Can't find the sixth button/ Look in the mirror, trying to find the sixth button,/ the seventh, eighth, ninth button.../ Open forever, want to open forever/ Open the night sky in the chest”. But the shirt only has five buttons and the night is endless, so “Open forever, want to open forever/ But the chest is still white, no night/ Open forever, want to open forever/ This chest is full of night/ Look in the mirror/ Helpless and crying/ Among countless tears/ A drop of night flows from the white chest”. The desire to find the night sky in the chest is the desire to find the self, to discover the mysteries within oneself. That journey is not easy, it seems hopeless, wanting to open forever, opening forever but not seeing the night in the chest. But in the hopelessness, people discover a little mystery within themselves "a drop of night oozing from the white chest".

In The Woman Through Two Hair Seasons, Mr. Hong not only searches for the “existing I” but also searches for each “fragment” of the “I”: “Each piece of Me/Each piece of Me/Broken/Adrift/Finding a place to hide/On the grass…/The ground is sparse/The grass is short/Each piece of Me/Quietly…/Finding Me…” ( Opening ). That I is incarnated in the lives of women – the central images of the collection of poems: The woman – dreams; The woman on the rocky plateau; The woman with the relay game; The woman sitting by the window ,… Mr. Hong writes about them but the poet also sees himself in them, from which he utters haunting verses about the pain as well as the aspirations of the “woman” status: “The half of love left for me/Is

The shadow flickers in the wilderness/ Silently kneeling between two seasons of hair/ I am confused... startled/ Rose ashes scatter white in space..." ( Leave it for me ).

The ontological self in Nguyen Quang Thieu's poetry is exploited in another form. In The Tree of Light , a short epic about the anxiety of searching for one's own self: "Who are you? What is your mission in this world? Are you a sinful insect?/ To spread your wings and fly from one tree canopy to another and lay eggs on the leaves?/ Or are you a Thien Thi punished by God for your desperate and crazy verses/ Or because your flesh is heavy and slimy like a giant leech clinging to your skeleton." In his journey to find answers to these existential questions, Nguyen Quang Thieu imagines the poet as a hybrid with many polar opposites of the multi-ego: an insect, a camel, an eagle, a wolf, a giant leech, a lonely star. And finally, inductively, those metaphorical fragments are gathered into the original pair of opposites, the light and the dark: "You are me, the darkness, and I am you, the light." Both the light and dark parts combine to create the poet's ego with the contrasts "One is the light and the other is the darkness/ One is filled with light and his mouth is full of wise language/ One sits on the execution chair filled with darkness, punishing himself, only his heart never rests and echoes." After all, perhaps it is not only poets who have multiple egos, but in each of us there is another hidden ego, so sometimes we do not understand ourselves.

In the journey of searching for the self, people are often haunted by loneliness. It is not the loneliness that comes from the outside world but the loneliness that is inherent as an origin of human life: "Who is left to take me to the end of the road/ With the loneliness of fate lingering/ Even though there are thousands of strange faces beside me/ The remaining cup of tea, the wine is no longer intoxicating." ( Cold Tea - Dang Thi Thanh Huong); "I am a surreal world, surreal love, death/ Existing a tsunami of loneliness" ( Flying Silently - Trang Thanh); "Suddenly I burst into tears/ In the midst of immense loneliness." ( In the midst of the immense ancient capital - Le Nguyen Ngu), "No one is waiting for me behind the door/ Not passionate, not warm and tolerant/ I seem to live half my life hiding the fire at night/ Half of the road is hidden in the distance" ( Half of the road is hidden - Dinh Thi Thu Van)... There is even loneliness

full of illusion and horror: “The woman with sad eyes/ Wandering in the summer afternoon/ Loneliness spreads to the rocks...” ( The Sadness of a Woman - Thuy Nga). People cannot find a place to cling to to escape the feeling of loneliness, all connections with the human world are severed: “No one sees me even if they want to ask who I am. But because my head is also white, there is no answer” ( The White Room - Ly Hoang Ly). Such loneliness is absolute.

To express loneliness, poets often use the motif of wandering alone, lost in thought: "A face without morning, without noon/ A smile without sunshine, without rain/ A heart without afternoon, without evening/ We go - a lost land..." ( The broken pieces

- Bui Sim Sim); or the motif of dialogue with one's own shadow: "One day, I turn around and stagger/ The shadow follows me around in the afternoon, it's also fun/ I still have a shadow to play with/ Why do I still complain about my lonely life?" ( Friends with my shadow - Thu Nguyet); "I talk to my shadow/ The shadow moves its lips" ( Monologue - Vu Thi Khuong). Haunted by loneliness, people fear that they will still be lonely even after death: "Tomorrow, when the earth buries me/ Will my soul still have a shadow?" ( Friends with my shadow - Thu Nguyet).

The search for the self is a step forward in individual consciousness, where people discover themselves to the fullest and bring poetry to another dimension of humanity.

3.5. Entering the spiritual, unconscious, surreal zone

Going deep into the inner world of human beings, poetry will inevitably at some point touch the spiritual world. The concept of spirituality is often understood as a mysterious spiritual life in contrast to purely rational consciousness. “It is possible to emphasize the intuition, premonition, and mysterious abilities in the concept of spirituality, but we should not completely exclude the participation of consciousness as a settled experience” [6, p. 81]. Before 1975, spiritual life was rarely mentioned. Even from a mechanical materialist point of view, it was often classified as superstition. In reality, spiritual life always exists, causing people to sometimes face the profound nothingness, with eternal laws and values. In fact, the deep spiritual realm of human beings has been mentioned in medieval literature. The following verses of Kieu have touched many generations: "In the future, no matter when/ I burn that incense burner and play this zither/ I look out at the grass and leaves/ I feel a gentle breeze and know you've returned." But my heart

Spirituality in medieval literature only stopped at religious beliefs or the concept of the whistle or the other world. Poetry after 1975 witnessed the return and expansion of the inspiration of spiritual life, besides the religious worldview, there was also the world of illusion, intuition, premonition, the world of dreams or even the vague, obscure unconscious. At the end of the last century, spiritual life was most clearly expressed through the works of Hoang Cam, Phung Khac Bac, Duong Kieu Minh, Nguyen Linh Khieu, Che Lan Vien, Nguyen Quang Thieu,... At the beginning of the 21st century, spiritual life was concentrated in the works of Tuyet Nga, Pham Thi Ngoc Lien, Mai Van Phan,... Pham Quoc Ca commented: "Spiritual life in recent years has been considered a humanistic value, legitimately existing, recognized and expressed by artists" [6, p. 82]. At this point, a question arises: why, at this time, poetry has turned so strongly towards the spiritual horn, the mysterious and surprisingly surprising mental world? The answer lies in the fact that the young poets at that time realized something that the previous generation of poets, due to historical limitations, did not realize (or even if they did realize, they did not dare to pursue), that life is always complex, rich, mysterious, infinite and unknowable. Along with consciousness that governs life, there is also the world of the unconscious, the subconscious, the instinct; along with direct, clear, explainable causality, there is also non-causality, non-linearity, multi-dimensionality, and inexplicability... In the war literature from after 1945 to the 1980s of the 20th century, there has not been any perception that can probe into the dark areas of the spiritual horn like that.

Mai Van Phan's poetry is filled with spiritual elements. It is a mysterious world created mainly by premonitions, intuitions with a strong religious sense. Reading Mai Van Phan's poetry, we sometimes encounter a ghostly atmosphere. The poet brought to the reader a state of horror and horror when he told about a guest who appeared in his house, chatting with him, but was actually a ghost: "Finished making a pot of tea/ Turned around/ The guest was no longer there/ Called the phone/ Family said he had been dead for seven years" The host thought he was mistaken, but he was wrong, after leaving he went out and returned home: "Inside the house/ The tea was still hot/ Pushed the cup of water towards the guest who was sitting/ The death aura was about a meter high

six standing upright in front / Every now and then bowing down” ( Still calmly seeing guests off to the restaurant ). The poet has a strong belief in the existence of the spirit world – an invisible world that exists alongside the world of the living and the living can communicate with the spirit through intuition: “Bathing for spring to come / diving into the light / silently calling grandparents, parents / body rising towards the lamp / pouring water strongly while calling your name / the light is floating in the pregnant belly / trying to call someone far away / the silent lamp becomes brighter / brighter” ( Bathing at the beginning of the year ). “Following the wind that opens the early morning fields, rushing into rooms mixed with dust and light, wiping away sweat while bathing in dreams./And so, the origin is just a hair's breadth away, when returning, it is the end of one's life, or waiting to reincarnate to the next life./ Those souls have not yet reincarnated, are stopping in the worship space, floating and hiding in the motionless idolatry... ( The Photo, the Fruit and the Dream ). A poetic space filled with Buddhist colors, that space with "rooms mixed with dust and light" is also the sacred space of "worship". In it, it has the ability to freeze life, so that people have the opportunity to look back at their origin, life and life after death. The image of a person appears faintly but leaves a deep impression of the existence of "second life".

The Buddhist sensibility raised to the level of philosophical enlightenment is clearly shown in Nguyen Viet Chien's Temples in the Night . It can be said that this is the most Zen- filled poem in contemporary poetry. Buddhist philosophy blends with the noble spiritual values of the nation: patience, tolerance and optimism "The slow and steady singing of a person/ Like water flowing in a rock/ Like the moon shining in a rock/ Like blood awakening in a rock/ The tired and passionate singing of a person/ Bringing a hand closer to a hand/ Bringing an eye closer to an eye/ Bringing a person closer to a person". The poetic voice is deep, soulful, and deeply philosophical. This is not only poetry but also like a prayer.

Also entering the spiritual and unconscious realm, Tuyet Nga exploits a special aspect: hallucinations . There are terrifying hallucinations created from painful obsessions: “My words are pieces of glass falling forever/ my heart shivers and stands on tiptoe in fear/ blood drips down silently as memories/ drops of moss color ( Hallucination 2 ). But there are also hallucinations

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