Book Report - THE DOCK: September 2014
Enjoy our prose-poem of the month, a lovely piece by Jenna Le.
HFR: "Book Report"
clearly takes an interesting form -- in a way, mimicking the form of a book
report or journal entries; and in the broader sense, a prose poem form. What
was your thought process in creating this unique form? Did the title come before
or after the final result?
JL: I was inspired to
write “Book Report" after reading Ocean Vuong’s poem “Aubade
With Burning City” in the February 2014 issue of Poetry. Because
Vuong’s poem is written in long lines, I initially envisioned “Book
Report” as a poem with long lines, even though I usually write poems with short
lines. I felt that, if I chopped “Book Report" into short
lines, I would wind up imposing my personality on the poem too much, and I
wanted the poem to have a broad scope and universality. As I sat down to
write, I struggled to decide what key I would use to open the doors of the
haunted house. Should I begin by retelling the narratives my parents had told
me about their escape from Vietnam, or should I begin by describing a scene
from a TV show I had watched about the politics that shaped the American
evacuation strategy? Ultimately, I decided to use Bulgarian poet Blaga
Dimitrova’s life story as an entry-point, believing this would give me the
necessary emotional distance from my subject matter, while also giving the poem
the syncretic, international-minded perspective I wanted. From this one
decision, the poem’s title and its book-report-mimicking form both emerged
naturally, simultaneously. Using the book-report form, so familiar to me from
elementary-school homework, allowed me to access my childhood memories more
easily. It also gelled well with the naive/faux-naive/childlike voice that I
thought would serve best to address this gnarly topic. Grown-up journalists
have already covered this topic from many angles, for many years, I thought;
why not let a child who only knows how to write book reports take a crack at
it?
______________________________________________________________
Book
Report
Jenna Le
Blaga Dimitrova was a
Bulgarian poet. She was Vice President of Bulgaria in 1992, when I was a
fourth-grade student in a small brick schoolhouse in Midwest America. The
schoolhouse was shaped like a bird, mummy-wrapped in snow.
At eight years old, I didn’t
know where Bulgaria was. I knew where Vietnam was, because my parents lived
there until war speckled their world with red and brown like a stampede of
giraffes. Last month, a Danish zookeeper shot a giraffe in the head and fed it
to a lion, who ate it slowly, just to be polite. Blaga Dimitrova visited
Vietnam as a journalist in the sixties, but she didn’t meet my parents.
In 1967, Dimitrova and her
husband adopted a Vietnamese girl. Dimitrova was forty-five and childless. I
was my mother’s second daughter. At eight years old, I wanted to be an
astronaut. I longed to be a bird, but I was mummy-wrapped in snow.
Like my parents, Dimitrova
was an anti-Communist. She believed that politics need not be antithetical to
poetry; one of her poems reads: “The sky moves through the swamp / without
becoming muddy.”
I once watched a documentary
about the fall of Saigon. In the movie, a Vietnamese woman burns all her adult
daughter’s belongings in a bonfire in their back yard. It’s so that the
Communists don’t find out you’re an America sympathizer and kill you, she
explains. The daughter never speaks to her mother again.
Dimitrova’s adopted daughter
grew up to be a writer. She published a memoir after Dimitrova died, alleging
that Dimitrova’s husband raped her. What does betrayal mean? In the
documentary, a Vietnamese woman shakes her fist because her American G.I.
friends deserted Saigon without warning and left her there to die. When I
turned eighteen, I moved out of my hometown without a backward glance.
____________________________________________________________________________
Jenna Le is the author
of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press
Poetry Bestseller. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, and
translations have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Barrow
Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Pleiades,
and 32 Poems. She was born and raised in Minnesota, but now lives
in New York, where she works as a physician.