“Poetic Structure & Genre in The Tale of Kiều” — by John D. Phan (with support from Asia for Educators)  —  shows how Kiều is at once a story and a poem—a plotted narrative cast into Vietnamese verse—so its meaning unfolds through both plot and lyric form.

What you’ll learn

• The fundamentals of lục bát (six–eight) meter and why this form powers the poem’s emotional movement.
• How Vietnamese tonal prosody (level vs. oblique tones) and interline rhymes knit lines together.
• Why Kiều reads like a narrative poem—a chain of lyrical “arias” retelling a prose story through heightened verse.

Watch the lecture here.