I hear many things on NPR that cause me to exclaim to myself, "I need to read more about that!" By the time the next radio story has finished, however, I have remembered that my reading list is backed up until 2035 and I really don't have that much disposable income. So I make myself content with what light NPR has shed on the subject and get on with my day. Except this once.
In Lent of this year an NPR show did an interview with John Borling, author of Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton (Master Wings Publishing, 2013). Borling was an Air Force pilot shot down during the Vietnam War and kept in the prison camps in Hanoi for almost seven years. The way he kept sane in that largely solitary experience of wretched imprisonment was to compose poetry (mentally and orally) and communicate it to his POW neighbors through a code of tapping on the walls.
I heard the radio story, got home, and ordered the book online.
I only surmise what drove me to buy this one. First was the fact that my dad wrote his own book about Vietnam from a physician's perspective, and something about a POW's poetic meditations gave me a sense that I would be connecting with a piece of my dad's history. Second was the intriguing thought of poetry composed orally and memorized over years, then recorded only after returning home. Third was the thought of poetry composed in prison, as a defence against what might happen to the soul in a place like the Hanoi Hilton.
In rare exception to the usual patterns of my life, my impulsive decision to buy was richly rewarded. Borling's poetry is fascinating. Some poems stir the soul with their verbal mastery, and could have been composed by a man sipping margueritas in San Diego; "First Light Flight," a proper sonnet, begins, "Pale golden talons stir the eastern sky / Another fledgling day departs the hills," offering a genius dance of aerial and avian metaphor. That sample comes from the lighter material about the pilot's passion.
From the "dark and bitter stuff" come works like "Hanoi Epitaph," which draw the listener (poetry must be read aloud) into a cold and vacuous place where "The years have passed, the many Decembers / And no one knows and no one remembers / The sound of your voice, your face, or your name." It is difficult not to go back and read it (aloud) again, and sink deeper into the void that so many of us are blessed never to have known. These words draw us into the repugnant mystery of what it must be like to live alone in a cold concrete cell for more than six years.
Some pieces read like lyrics to rock songs; others with the half-smile twang of a country ballad. Borling's work runs the gamut of styles, structures, and content. Much of it is not "good" (I put the word intentionally in quotation marks) from a technical perspective; but oral composition and memorization in a North Vietnamese prison tends to soften my critical standards. The epic poem that closes the book tried my endurance--but then again, I was forewarned by the introduction, and by the end of the book I felt dedicated enough to Borling to see it through. He warns his readers about the abundance of pilots' jargon and provides a glossary at the end to assist the land-lubbers like myself. Nonetheless, in the more well-constructed poems I found it possible to read through the strange acronyms and let the sounds work where comprehension could not--to good effect.
The ink of erudition has been spilled across many the page of Vietnam War history; the finest film producers have applied their craft to that era of America's story. But Borling has, I think, found a unique niche well worth exploring: the poetry that comes from a special kind of suffering. I have been enriched by his work and willingness, at last, to share the versified distillation of his experience.
~ emrys
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