Against Forgetting Project

Corey Roth

Intro to Literature

Ann Hostetler

4/26/2011

John Balaban: Avatar of Vietnamese Poetry

John Balaban is an imagist poet whose works are almost solely based on the Vietnam War and the aftereffects on his life. His unique style can be traced back to his service in Vietnam, his dedication to serving his country, and the darkness that followed him out of the war. But to understand the works, one must first understand the man and what he’s been through, and for John Balaban that goes double because all of his works seem to hearken back to his personal experiences.

            John Balaban was born in nineteen forty-three. He was brought up in an already oddly bisected household in terms of education; his father had learned calculus and was studying engineering, but his mother, on the other hand, was largely uneducated. Regardless of the mixed instruction of the parents, John proved himself to be a bright boy, writing his first poem at around eight years old. He was reportedly inspired by show tunes his sister would sing; a testament to the innocence found in children which would later become inspiration for some of his poems as an adult. When he was sixteen he became a Quaker as a kind of side effect to trying to find a way to stop violence in his vicinity. He then got his BA in English from Pennsylvania State, and ended up at the top of his class. His next big task was to get his MA. Luckily, and thanks to his great talent, he obtained a huge scholarship to Harvard where he then got a Masters in English Literature (Wikipedia).

When the Vietnam War started John Balaban was one of the many unfortunate souls to get drafted into service. John, not one to stand for the genocidal slaughter typically brought on by war, opted to be a conscientious objector (and obtained status as such). This is where we start to see a new side of Mr. Balaban. He refused to go into battle, as so many people were ridiculed for, but he still felt the need to serve, “He imagines how the men on the board must have laughed at this kid who ‘told them [he] was going to Vietnam whether or not they approved [his] status as a CO’” said John Griswold, a former student (Praise, 6). John himself says, “I was a conscientious objector. I don't know if that term even means anything to anybody anymore. But during the Vietnam War, and during the draft, one could plead objection on a religious basis, or a spiritual basis of some kind. I objected to the war, yet I had the strange notion that it was a kind of obligation to go” (Conversation).

And go John did; all the way to Vietnam to be a university professor with the International Volunteer Service. He served in this way for several months before the university was “bombed flat” (Conversation), during the Tet Offensive in 1968. The bombing also brought on another massive life-changing event for John; he was injured when shrapnel from the bombs got caught in his shoulder.

When John had recovered from his wounds, he promptly sent himself straight back to Vietnam with COR and spent his time saving children, sending them to the U.S. so they could receive proper medical treatment.

“After a year of evacuating war-injured children from Vietnam, which is what I did after I taught at the university, it seemed to me, considering how many lives we might have actually saved in that process, maybe a 100, maybe a few hundred more, that maybe there was something I could do on a different scale that maybe no one else could do, and that was record the poetry in which most of Vietnamese humanism was articulated” said John, in response to a question about his interest in Vietnam as a place instead of a warzone (Conversation).

 This brings about the next chapter in John Balaban’s life. In 1971, after his service term had ended, he was given a grant to collect and translate Vietnamese oral poetry. After having been recently married he went with his wife and traversed the countryside looking for stories and poems. “I walked up to country people--farmers, shipbuilders, women working old Singer pedal sewing machines--and said, "Would you sing me your favorite poem?" And they looked at me, this young American with a Harvard book bag which held my tape recorder, and they said, ‘Yes,’” he said, marveling at the idea that it wasn’t considered strange for him to do so (Conversation). He then went on to explain some of the rich history behind the Vietnamese poetry saying, “…in Vietnamese there's something that just doesn't exist in English, and that's word tone. This is a requirement of the poetry, too, and I must remind you that this is done by people who don't read or write (Conversation).

As John was traveling, collecting, and translating this lyrical poetry, he came across poems by Ho Xuan Huong, who made a huge impact on his life. He collected as many of her poems as he could, translated them the best he could, and then put a book out entirely of her work entitled “Spring Essence”. Apparently since then he’s gotten many e-mails from Vietnam expressing how funny Ho Xuan huong would have found it that her poems were so acclaimed in a country she’d never heard of.

While a lot of John’s works in the poetry world were translations from Vietnamese to English, he hadn’t stopped writing his own poetry. The war made a deep emotional impact on Mr. Balaban, and he suffered from bursts of anger possibly related to PTSD just as a soldier might have. Emotional strife gave him passion and vision for his newer poems, and the events of the war gave him a topic. Events such as the bombing of the university actually had shoved him into the action, as he found himself having to guard surgeons so they would continue medical treatment (Newsletter). Poems such as “For the Missing in Action” are all mostly the horror and injustice brought onto villagers during the war, and the terrible presence that lingers afterward,

“In that dead place the weeds had formed a man
where someone died and fertilized the earth, with flesh
and blood, with tears, with longing for loved ones.
No scrap remained; not even a buckle
survived the monsoons, just a green creature,
a viny man, supine, with posies for eyes,
butterflies for buttons, a lily for a tongue.” (Selected Poems)

If you look closely enough you can also find hints of rebirth and renewal strewn in this piece as well, even if it seems to come at a terrible price.

Sometimes though, John’s poetry is less about the horror of war; less about the damage, pain, sorrow, and death, and more about the tense aura of the warzone, such as the poem “The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge”.

“…He scrapes his heel, and sees no box bombs floating towards his bridge.
Anchored in red morning mist a narrow junk rocks its weight.
A woman kneels on deck staring at lapping water.
Wets her face.
Idly the thick Rach Binh Thuy slides by.
He aims. At her. Then drops his aim. Idly.”

Safety was constantly threatened during Vietnam. This was a fairly direct portrayal of how situations could turn dire in an instant, and may also reflect John’s newly acquired explosive anger issues. The water of the river also seems here to be mimicking a sense of almost indifference to violence, as it idly slips by with the constant possibility of bombs and the soldier drops his aim with the constant possibility of firing.

            Even after the war revved despair into heavy gear, John did still take some hope for a calm peaceful life in the innocence of children. He dedicated a poem to his daughter entitled “Words for my Daughter” in which he expresses his own generation’s bad childhood. However at the end he makes clear his desires for his child, as well as a confession that youthful purity was needed to keep him grounded to a peaceful life after all he’d been through,

“I want you to know the worst and be free from it.
I want you to know the worst and still find good.
Day by day, as you play nearby or laugh
with the ladies at Peoples Bank as we go around town
and I find myself beaming like a fool,
I suspect I am here less for your protection
than you are here for mine, as if you were sent
to call me back into our helpless tribe. (Select Poems)

John Balaban was conflicted with everything he experienced over in Vietnam, and that conflict seeps into all of his works. From his turmoil-ridden upbringing, to his conversion to Quakerism, all the way to his injury in the war, John’s life has always had a sort of chaos that reflects both the war itself, and his poetry that mirrors it. As such, getting to know the man will help paint a picture of just exactly what John’s poems are all about.

Works Cited

"Books by John Balaban." John Balaban. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://www.johnbalaban.com/books.html>.

"A Conversation with John Balaban." John Balaban. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://www.johnbalaban.com/triquarterly-interview.html>.

Jan Spiegel and Will Hochman: Beyond War Poetry: War, Literature and the Heart of a Poet." EBSCO Publishing Service Selection Page. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=108&sid=f37a16de-1458-47cf-8dd0-c2393b7995b5@sessionmgr11&vid=5>.

John Balaban: ERHART." EBSCO Publishing Service Selection Page. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=108&sid=f37a16de-1458-47cf-8dd0-c2393b7995b5@sessionmgr11&vid=5>.

John Griswold: "Praise to Those Still Coming Through On Song": An Appreciation of John Bal..." EBSCO Publishing Service Selection Page. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=21&sid=f37a16de-1458-47cf-8dd0-c2393b7995b5@sessionmgr11&vid=5>.

ERHART W.D.: Words for John Balaban." EBSCO Publishing Service Selection Page. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?hid=108&sid=f37a16de-1458-47cf-8dd0-c2393b7995b5@sessionmgr11&vid=5>.

"The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge." Canyon Crest Academy Library Media Center. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://teachers.sduhsd.net/tpsocialsciences/us_history/vietnamwar/poem.htm>.

Hickman, Kennedy. "Vietnam War - Causes of the Vietnam War." Military History - Warfare through the Ages - Battles and Conflicts - Weapons of War - Military Leaders in History. Web. 20 Mar. 2011. <http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/VietnamOrigins.htm>.

"John Balaban." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Balaban>.

"John Bradley, Review of John Balaban's Remembering Heaven's Face." Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Reviews/Bradley_Heavens_Face.html>.

"Selected Poems by John Balaban." John Balaban. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://www.johnbalaban.com/poems.html#words_for_my_daughter>.

"Vietnam War." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Tet_Offensive>.