212 contemporary poetry
requires that the reader select her way through sixteen items of
tourist memorabilia from Vietnam, including a hotel information
card, a tin of lip balm and a fragment of manuscript. Each object
reveals a narrative, giving sixteen aspectual readings of Vietnam.
One direction, clicking on a small red cardboard box with a croco-
dile branded upon it, reveals that: ‘The previous things never /
happened to me in Vietnam. I / acquired the Vietnam experience
/ on the internet before I left / Australia. It was vastly more /
effi cient. Then, to get them out of / the way, I wrote these poems.
/ Whew.’ Radically transforming our expectations of the travel
narrative, Weight playfully indicates how we create the conditions
of our experience through a pre-established narrative. Moments of
lyrical intensity emerge from the setting of Vietnam such as: ‘At
dawn a sampan splits / the silence on the / Mekong River’. These
are placed in conjunction with ironic commentary on advertising
images: when one clicks on an icon for Wrigley’s chewing gum,
three words are thrown up on the screen: ‘TRUTH FREEDOM
HAPPINESS’.^ Weight explains that Rice examines ‘my experi-
ence as a Western tourist in Vietnam. Issues of colonialism, war,
poverty, and cultural difference arise. Technically and aestheti-
cally, Rice belongs to an early period of web-based poetry. It uses
Shockwave, popup windows, and frames’.^15
Most alluring and self-referential is the search elicited in the
poem for the ‘poem factory’ since ‘The cyclo drivers say they
know where it is, / but we never actually get there.’ As we con-
tinue through the hypertext we are told ‘On the third-last day /
we found the poetry factory’ which turns out to be a ‘Temple of
Literature’ where / they made ‘laws, / letters and literature for
over 900 years.’ Against the accolades made to scholars ‘ 500 years
dead. They are / engraved into the backs / of stone tortoises’ and
we are faced with the ‘Army Museum / (where touching / photos
of War Mothers / serve like slaves / for poetry).’ On clicking a
red script with ideograms, Weight gives us a history lesson of the
‘ 12 -point plan’ which includes the ‘stimulating poem’, ‘Long live
the victorious Resistance!’ and citations from Ho Chi Min extol-
ling ‘victory is built with the people as / foundations’. Through
the hypertext Weight presents an aspectual impression of Vietnam,
rendering in effect multiple Vietnams which succeed in fracturing