![]() ![]() ![]() In the poem "Aubade with Burning City," I took Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," the lyrics, and wove it through a scene about the collapse of Saigon. In a sense, all Vietnamese farmers were poets, because while they were working, they sang, and the songs helped the rhythm of the harvesting and the seeding of the fields.īut, also, the daily news of life, and ultimately, when the war came, where the bombs were falling, information started to come into the rhyming couplets in the poems and the songs. One needs to have the body - in a way, the body is a book, that one needs the body to remember the poem, sing the poems and pass them along. In Vietnam, there's much dependency on the body. ![]() They were not documented.Īnd it's interesting how poems are carried from one culture to another. OCEAN VUONG, Author, "Night Sky With Exit Wounds": Sometimes, people say, well, how does it feel to be the first poet? And I say, I'm not the first poet. His new book, "Night Sky With Exit Wounds," explores the legacy of the Vietnam War and the power of oral history. Tonight, Ocean Vuong, recently chosen for the prestigious Whiting Award. Finally, the latest in our occasional series on poets and what inspires them. ![]()
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