Che Lan Vien's poetic voice - 11

The place you left left behind an abyss, a vortex.

The wound has no bottom But life fills it right away No one remembers anymore

(The place you left)

The poet has many verses about the oblivion of people towards poetry, towards creators. However, with a hasty mindset, creative will and intense love for life, Che Lan Vien still tries to create continuously:

All dawns are promising, except that dawn. The dawn is treacherous, treacherous, and evil!

But don't be so quick to condemn the dew and the rooster's final cry.

Sometimes I said goodbye in the middle of that light, at noon, at dusk. More than that, I said goodbye since the moment my pen in poetry became powerless. Since the moment my sap dried up, I saw the apricot blossoms but didn't know that spring had come.

(Death Hour)

Che Lan Vien's artistic qualities are clearly evident in this poem. For him, when the creative ability is gone, the artist is dead, and only the biological human remains. The artist is dead.

The poems sympathizing with the creative person about to "pass away" have a sad, poignant, and tormenting tone. It is the sadness of a person who loves life too much, loves poetry too much, has a big dream, feels that he has not completed the "poem of life" but has to go to the other world. Therefore, that sadness is not hopeless, not gloomy because the poet still has a way to cling to, to life through the path of poetic creation - Creating "gems" for life:

"Drawing bright verses through the chaos of the world"

(Reason)

So many emotions for the day of departure: pain, anxiety, calm acceptance, messages, pity, regret, forgiveness... Che Lan Vien left them all in his poems, so the tone here has many different levels, but the most prominent tone is the passionate, passionate tone for life and poetry; because in fact, no one is happy when having to say goodbye to life.

3.2.4. Love inspiration:

The number of poems about love in the three volumes of Posthumous Poetry is not much. There are only twenty-eight (28) out of a total of 568 poems, but they have immense inner depth.

In fact, Che Lan Vien's love inspiration in epic lyric poetry also has depth, but it still tends to be more extroverted than introverted.

For example, the songs "Morning Love Song" or "Early Cold, Missing the Person Walking by the Sea":

The first cold of the season, I'm cold away from you. The cold night is divided into two halves. One covers me in the river and sea.

A cover for myself on the side without you

In these two poems, emotions come from real things: separation, longing, covering oneself with a blanket...

In the Poetry Posthumous Works, emotions come from deep premonitions in the hearts of people about to say goodbye to each other:

We will greet each other with happiness sweeping across the sky for a while.

Then I went to the void, you went to the Truong Xa.

(Comet Cycle)

The attitude of saying goodbye to each other to go to the eternal whistle creates a deep, piercing feeling about the love of people who are about to go to "nothingness". It highlights the impermanence of love: "happiness sweeps across the sky in one morning". We also encounter these feelings of anxiety, emptiness, and sorrow in the poem "Chung mot noi den":

Then you are as far away from me as two galaxies, celestial bodies are separated

From you to me is easily a million light years

To find your scent, I must cross thousands of infinite skies.

It's like breathing from a common light bulb, a common flower.

Here, the deep love of " a shared light bulb, a shared flower" is placed in contrast with "a million light years, a thousand infinite skies" to cherish the time of "a shared light bulb" even more because that time is just a moment compared to that endless time. So we must cherish each other even more because that eternal separation is forever.

Che Lan Vien's inspiration about love and nostalgia in his Poetry Posthumous Works has something uneasy and restless:

Love is as unstable as a falling storm

It's sunny then rainy, then clear, then suddenly raining. You suddenly stay, suddenly go, suddenly come back, suddenly leave me. When will love be a patch of blue sky?

(Storm falls)

The poet also feels anxious about forgetting in love:

The River of Love is also called Ben Lu. All my life I crossed the river once. The River of Love, all my life I will remember Ben Lu, you will soon forget.

(River of Love)

The inspiration for nostalgia in Che Lan Vien's poetry is not as tormenting as Xuan Dieu's, nor as self-sacrificing as Xuan Quynh's. But that nostalgia is deeply human and completely meaningful. When putting love in a position of eternal separation, Che Lan Vien has the opportunity to express the completeness, the depth, and the impermanence of love:

Then we will be as far apart as two wooden statues in a temple, metaphysical and immortal. Breathing the same scent, hearing the same bell.

But your wood and mine are both dry and the oil paint is peeling off. Would you give me a poplar branch and a string of beads?

Recalling the day we became people separated by the cloudy sky and missed each other with the same color of clouds.

(Statue)

Here, Che Lan Vien puts love into a false immortality to prove that our mundane life, human love, despite its many twists and turns, is still the most beautiful. The intimate whispering tone here is very suitable to express Che Lan Vien's deep and complete love.

Although there are not many poems about love in the Poetry Posthumous Works, the humanity imbued in those love poems makes us live more meaningfully, more responsibly in the life and love we have. Che Lan Vien's love poems have also fulfilled

My mission is to enrich and enrich the hearts that are still loving and still beating.

3.2.5. Inspiration for poetry and the profession of poetry:

You passed through the earth leaving behind so many poems Please love me, I don't have much A little bit of fading sunlight, a flowing stream A poor heart but still believes in love

(Send)

Che Lan Vien is a natural born poet. At the age of 16, Che Lan Vien had a very unique concept of poetry and poets: "A poet is not a human being. He is a dreamer, a drunkard, a madman. He is a fairy, a ghost, a demon, a spirit, a demon... (Desolation)

Over time, Che Lan Vien's concept of poetry and poets became more and more mature. During the period 1945 - 1975, he believed that poetry must be useful. Poetry must originate from the reality of life - The creative process is a process of contemplation, incubation to turn objective objects into inner needs to express, is the process of conceiving, nurturing, recreating life with the beauty of images:

I hear the saltiness of life is crystallizing. It is not yet formed, I give it form. It is not yet a grain, I make it a grain.

Then pay the person with your blood

(Thinking about poetry)

The stature of a poet during the anti-American period in Che Lan Vien's poetry is very heroic and glorious:

The poet's stature stands at the same level as the ramparts.

With the brave soldiers chasing tanks in the fields

and down the helicopter

(Has the Fatherland ever been this beautiful?)

In the 80s, Che Lan Vien had a new concept of poets. The previous noble role and position of poets gave way to the humble, everyday position of many paradoxes:

You are very short, just a broom

Why do you make me sweep the sky like a cluster of stars?

(How)

In the past, Che Lan Vien struggled to make his poetry a weapon, a warrior poet, but now he humbly and honestly admits the shortcomings of his situation and his poetry:

I don't have any poems yet.

Help her raise her children

In the midst of sadness and bitterness, one can still smile.

... Oh, literature has wronged so many people.

(For example)

Che Lan Vien's later poetic inspiration is closer to the truth, closer to the "eternal law" . For Che Lan Vien, poetry is "My life plus countless things that are not it" (Against Tang poetry).

Each verse is a game of even and odd, gain and loss.

(Lucky)

It is clear that the poet objectively recognized the difficult role of poetry in a market economy. At times, the poet was skeptical about the time of appearance of poetry and poets compared to the timelessness of time:

Poetry is a hopeless howl in the white sea of ​​time. After howling, the snow becomes colder.

The howl is drowned in the snow What if the earth were a poet?

What about that person?

Would it have been better if there had been no howling at that time or would it have been better if there had been?

(Howl)

Obviously the poet has many different perspectives to perceive the essence of poetry. There are times when poetry is very real, as real as history:

Knowing that they would forget, they wrote poems to record history.