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Some Questions about Vietnamese Poetry

Some Questions about Vietnamese Poetry Language, Poetry, Vietnam 2 Responses »

Dec 072008

As I prepare to go to Vietnam in the spring, I have been in contact with friends there, asking them about poetry in contemporary Vietnam. Part of my project involves interviewing Vietnamese poets and that means thinking of the sorts of questions I want to ask. I know a bit about the history of Vietnam and its literature, particularly in the 20th century, but I want to know how that history is affecting the making of poems now, in the first decade of the 21st century. Here is a first pass at some questions, or pre-questions — the sort of questions I need to ask in order to find out what the real questions are:

Who are the most interesting poets now working in Vietnam?
To what extent is contemporary Vietnamese poetry connected to the poetry of the past?
What is the nature of the connection, to the extent that it exists?
Do contemporary poets make use of the extensive folk traditions, for example, of Ca Dao?
What has been the effect of urbanization of Vietnamese poetry over the last twenty years or so?
Have the changes in the Vietnamese economy over the last generation affected Vietnamese poets?
Are there marked generational differences among younger and older Vietnamese poets?
To what extent are Vietnamese poets aware of and interested in poetries in other languages?

Those are the questions I’ll be asking poets I already know as I get ready to go to Vietnam; presumably, these questions will lead to others that are more detailed and take into account the individual situations of the writers I’ll be meeting. If anyone happens by this space who has answers to the questions posed above, please feel free to chime in.

Vietnam

Vietnam Personal, Poetry, Vietnam 1 Response »

Dec 052008

One of the perks of being a college professor is paid travel. Yes, you have to write the grant, but when you go it is on someone else’s dime. And of course you have to have some project and come back and write it up, but most of us consider that an additional benefit. We like writing stuff up, that’s why we became academics in the first place. All of which is by way of preview to announcing that I will be returning to Vietnam this spring for a six-week visit. I’ll be spending most of my time in Hanoi, where I lived what I was a Fulbright scholar in 2000-2001, but I’ll also be going to the south. My plan is to record interviews with Vietnamese poets and collect poems for translation. I am particularly interested in placing contemporary Vietnamese poetry in its cultural and historical context. Vietnamese culture has long venerated the art of poetry above all others and I am interested to see how that attitude is holding up in the globalizing market economy that has taken hold with a vengeance in VN over the last fifteen years of so.

On a personal level, I feel a deep connection with the city of Hanoi. Unaccountably, living there I felt at home. Perhaps because I was free to be a fl�neur, roaming the city at will & mostly without a need to do more than show up occasionaly at the offices of the publishing house where I was acting as an editor / consultant. In fact, all the freedom made me a little crazed at times, given to fits of obsessive compulsive walking. For a few weeks I went about in a kind of flaming daze, before returning to myself shortly before coming back to the states. Even that was lovely, in its way — “I have a great capacity for joy,” I repeated to myself incessantly as I walked the tree-lined streets and narrow back alleys of Thanh Long, the city of the rising dragon.

Mixed Blessings

Mixed Blessings Reading, River Notes, Teaching, Writing 3 Responses »

Sep 182008

So I’m sitting around at home this morning looking out on the kind of beautiful fall morning that would usually pull me outdoors. My favorite yard chores are autumn yard chores. But I’m sitting inside because I picked up a head cold & sore throat at school. Colleges are viral breeding grounds. I just don’t have the oomph to get out & transplant perennials. Despite the cold, it has been a good semester so far — across the board, my students seem pretty engaged, though I remain amazed at their meager abilities as readers. And by that I mean, just the ability to get the basic prose meaning of a literary text. “That’s weird,” they say immediately in response to a poem they don’t understand (Stephen Dunn’s “Men Talk,” hardly a difficult text), dismissing it before they have even tried to suss out the meaning of all its words and images. Reading poetry, they tend to not read sentences, even when there are perfectly clear sentences. I guess they are reading lines as fragments. Perhaps it is just a very weak sense of grammar. And by grammar, I don’t mean knowledge of the names of different grammatical entities, but a sense of the way the parts of a sentence relate to each other to create a meaning. I also found out yesterday that I was one of four members of my department who had been nominated to replace our outgoing department chair, though I immediately took myself out of the running. Five years ago I wanted the job & didn’t get it, but I don’t want it now. I’ve passed that particular fork in the road. All my ambitions are literary & pedagogical these days. Inspired by Stuart O’Nan’s visit to campus, I have begun working on a short story — my first attempt in 20 years — & I’m still struggling with my long poem, pieces of which are lying around on my desk, in my notebooks, and on my hard drive like flotsam on the beach after a storm.

Theodore Solotaroff

Theodore Solotaroff Fiction, Poetry, Reading, Writing 2 Responses »

Aug 132008

I was really too young to have been influenced by the New American Review during the main part of its run, but I remember in the mid-seventies picking up copies in used bookstores & feeling nostalgic for a scene I was never a part of. Ted Solotaroff is dead at 80. Those beat-up paperbacks, for my generation, were tokens of bravery to be lived up to. And they were printed (at a loss) by major publishers. Now there is something to be nostalgic for. Another believer in the efficacy of writing as an art is gone.

Pretty Quiet Around Here: Reasons for Not Blogging

Pretty Quiet Around Here: Reasons for Not Blogging Blogging, Personal 2 Responses »

Aug 132008

Seems like I haven’t had much worth reporting on the blog recently. I’ll read something & think, “I should blog that,” but then never get around to it. It’s not that I’ve been terribly busy — some work around the house & getting ready for the semester, but nothing overwhelming. Maybe the prolonged rainy weather we’ve been having since I got back from BMC has depressed my spirits. And there was a big blowup on the Poetryetc email list (a real nest of ninnies, where overt plagiarism goes unremarked & clique-politics is called “democracy”), of which I was one of the managers. My resignation from the list a week ago left a very bad taste in my mouth. Then there was the anxiety leading up to my annual physical exam — I always feel this for days — though I am routinely in “excellent health,” according to my doctor. I have been doing a lot of visual art, which is satisfying, but feels kind of mindless. I’m so used to thinking of imaginative work as involving language & a certain kind of verbal thinking that the processes of making collages don’t feel like using my mind, though I realize of course that I’m just doing another kind of thinking. And I’ve been spending too much time by myself — one of our cars is in the shop getting body work done, so Carole takes the remaining car, leaving me at home in south Colton. It’s funny, because in many ways I’m a quite solitary person, but if I don’t have conversations outside the home for several days I get way too much up inside my own head. Anyway, school responsibilities will really begin ramping up next week, we’ll have two cars, & I’ll be much busier. If past patterns hold, this will lead, paradoxically, to more posts on the blog. I think I’ve got a bunch of drafts, in any case, to finish up & post. So life will resume out here on the very tip of the long tail — somebody has to live out here!

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