Greene Reviews the Poetry in Balaban's Essential Collection
The traveler isn't looking back even though we want him to.
Passing Through a Gate: Poems, Essays, and Translations
by John Balaban
Copper Canyon Press, 2024,
$24 USD, paper.
The Poetry School of Experience Revisited: The traveler isn’t looking back, even though we want him to. Book Review by Rob Greene
When a poet sits down to finally write the poem that is meant to be written, after carrying lived experiences around for days, weeks, years, decades, half centuries and more, the poem that is meant to appear on the page shall most often appear. At least, that’s the hope. With some of us, there’s no forcing the issue when it comes to material. Reading Passing Through a Gate by John Balaban, I had a sense that I was visiting the poet’s past, and anticipating an unwritten future. As someone who admires John Balaban’s work, I look forward to the new poems that will follow this essential collection of poems, translations of primarily Vietnamese and Romanian poetry, and essays on translation and the writing life.
Here I’ll disclose that John Balaban knows me, maybe better than my own family knows me, as he together with Dorianne Laux and Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi served on the thesis committee for my MFA at NC State University over a dozen years ago. These professors did not talk very much about themselves, but they did lead by example. My mentors taught me to be brave on the page, and to write my way through emotionally laden moments from my past and present days. John Balaban was one of my more generous teachers. Like me, he wears his heart on his sleeve, occasionally speaking with a harsh clarity that isn’t always welcomed by the masses, especially in these polarizing times. For the purpose of this review, however, I stayed within the poems of this collection, allowing Balaban to be “vetted through poetry,” a phrase borrowed from the book’s eponymous essay “Passing Through a Gate."
In the poem, “Daddy out Hitchhiking at 3 a.m.,” we first meet the “traveler” who we’ll follow, in one form or another, throughout the book. In this poem the weary one seems to be expecting his first child, yet he seems to be on the run from his past. Just how far that past is away from the present leaves us all to wonder. Each section of the book opens with an effective epigraph. In a later section of the book, our “traveler” is still coming from the direction of his past, but now he’s headed in the direction he is facing; he’s not looking back. Poems in the vein of his very powerful “Driving Back East with My Dad” derive from experiences prior to Balaban’s time in Vietnam, which he has written about extensively.
In this one, as the speaker is driving East with his Father in his old pickup, we gain glimpses of how difficult his childhood was. In fact, after one too many “punch-ups” at home, the poet ran away from home at sixteen. Yet Balaban’s portrait of a harsh father in “Driving Back East with My Dad”—resembling his fierce yet rather remarkable Romanian-American father—includes room for redemption. As someone who has witnessed my family from Kyrgyzstan struggle to settle inside of America, coupled with my own difficult childhood experiences, I can relate to this poem from many angles. “Driving Back East with My Dad” was first published in Great River Review in Spring/Summer 2006, and then in Balaban’s fifth book of poetry Path, Crooked Path, and it finds new resonance inside the pages of this curated volume—poems that convey empathy and understanding of our neighbors all over the globe deserve to be seen by as many as possible.
Which brings me to a discussion of what, exactly, makes an “essential” collection of John Balaban poetry. As a lifelong fan of his pre-war material, and given my own predilection for the poetry of experience—as against the poetry of the imagination or the maps of abstract thought so many today regard as cutting edge— I suppose I want to see the “traveler” pause and perhaps turnaround from his walk along the highway, to come inside the house for a moment and show us more of his beautiful yet difficult past.
I want to get to know young John Balaban better, as someone who may have a lot in common with how he grew up. Reading Passing Through a Gate made me wish for more Balaban poems set within the schoolyards and the working class and rent controlled and section-eight housing within the rural areas north of Philadelphia. I personally want to read poems that open the curtain further on the complexity of a writer’s character.
This is not to deny the power and importance of Balaban’s more well-known subject-matters, including the war in Vietnam and Vietnamese culture. As a conscientious objector, John Balaban was drawn to learn the Vietnamese language and to serve humankind as a scholar, riding around the rice fields on his bicycle to ask five-hundred or so Vietnamese individuals, one by one, to sing their favorite poems to him.
As someone who has studied the Russian language off and on for twenty-five years, I realize I am nowhere near close to mastery of the language. I very much admire anyone who has the ability and the drive to learn another language as an adult, especially for the purpose of fostering peace. Balaban’s follow-through and grit as a conscientious objector show in the strength of his poems about that era: such as his poems that touch on his boyhood friends nailing up forts in the old neighborhood, and his young adulthood spent in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive then on to his time back safely inside of America as a young protective father during Halloween one year after his daughter was born. Balaban’s poem “Words for My Daughter” masterfully captures many of his lived experiences packaged all inside one work of poetry.
But beyond the humanitarian service he provided in the rescue of wounded children and the related poems he has provided us with, his work as a translator must be mentioned, highlighted in Passing Through a Gate are his translations of poems such as “A Tiny Bird” that convey power with the repetition in phrases from the description of the bird to how many times the bird drinks up the lotus pond “day-by-day” before flying off one last time.
Balaban conducted poetry interviews with rural native Vietnamese people, using a hand-held recorder, often with the sounds of mortar fire in the background. Through this work, and the foundation he later established, he gave new life to the folklore poetry of an entire culture and ensured its digital future. He was one of the first to provide America and the larger world a lens through which to regard the everyday people of Vietnam as the beautiful, gentle citizens of the earth we now all know them to be. This is an example of empathy at its finest—empathy, as in, the ability to see through the eyes of the Other. It is surely one of the main tasks of the poet.
There is no rulebook for making an “essential collection,” especially when it comes to a poet whose life has contained many chapters. This book from Copper Canyon will provide any reader with plenty of insight and inspiration. My only hope is there shall be more poems from my generous teacher. John Balaban has given the world and our society many contributions. Together with many others who have influenced me in life, John Balaban has personally had a role in helping me turn my life around, more than once. Perhaps, I don’t want the dear traveler to leave our lotus pond until he looks back a little more. Encore! Encore.
Rob Greene is the founder of Raleigh Review, and a father of four.
