A Life Worthy of Our Breath
Poet Ocean Vuong in his words
I remember the first time I even heard of Ocean Vuong. It was when I’d read a poem of his called Kissing in Vietnamese. There was something so tremulous and heartbreaking in those lines, that it sent me into a journey to discover more of his poetry. That’s when I bought his Night Sky with Exit Wounds. And I still have to fathom how someone could capture evanescence and the passage of fragrance and pain in the the way he does.
The book, of course, went on to win numerous awards, and a boy born to a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier, has become a voice of sanity and a chronicler of ruptured grief. The New Yorker described his poetry thus - “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....His lines are both long and short, his prose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."
I give below the first poem I ever read of him. But more importantly I give excerpts from his interview with Krista Tippett, the incomparable host of the podcast “On Being”. I also give quotations from his interviews in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
And finally I give you a video of Ocean reciting his poetry, in his trembling, charred, accusing, quiescent voice. You have to hear the voice of Ocean Vuong to understand the depths which lie shimmering in him, waiting to be plumbed and discovered.
Kissing in Vietnamese
My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,
where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes
through the kitchen window,
as if somewhere, a body is falling apart
and flames are making their way back
through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,
as if to walk out the door, your torso
would dance from exit wounds.
When my grandmother kisses, there would be
no flashy smooching, no western music
of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe
you inside her, nose pressed to cheek
so that your scent is relearned
and your sweat pearls into drops of gold
inside her lungs, as if while she holds you
death also, is clutching your wrist.
My grandmother kisses as if history
never ended, as if somewhere
a body is still
falling apart.
Ocean Vuong is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University. His latest collection of poetry is Time Is a Mother. He is also the author of a novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.
From his fabulous interview in The New York Times:
When did you start reading poetry? What books made you fall in love with poetry?
“When I was in community college a couple of my friends were in punk rock bands and they introduced me to Arthur Rimbaud, who of course was and is highly influential to musicians, including Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, etc. One day, while they were practicing, I picked up a back-pocket-worn copy of his poems and read the poems “The Drunken Boat” and “Phrases” and I was just in awe. I thought, if a 17-year-old boy peasant in the 19th century could make something like this, there’s a chance I, too, might make something this propulsive, this illuminating and courageous.
The next day I raced to the tiny college library to look up all of his works. Of course, it was organized via the Dewey decimal system, which meant I was immediately in the French literature aisle. From there I found Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Camus, Barthes, Césaire, Glissant, and from there other parts of Europe to Lorca, Vallejo, Rilke, Benjamin, Arendt, Calvino. It was all quite coincidental via this arbitrary organizing principle, but because of this my education as a writer began with European writers. I would not read an American poet seriously until a year or two after, when I found Yusef Komunyakaa in the stacks.”
From his conversation with Los Angeles Times
“When you read a book ... you’re choosing to privilege a center, a space somebody else made for you,” he said. “That’s a beautiful thing, and it’s always in your hands. You can always turn away from the news that is meant to depress you and make you feel miserable and choose a book that you decide for yourself. Reading is to me the last saving grace that I know.”
Excerpts from Krista Tippett’s conversation with Ocean Vuong, from the On Being podcast:
Tippett: You were born in Saigon, and when you were two years old, in 1990, your family came to the U.S. I have this question that I ask at the beginning of most of my conversations: an inquiry about the religious or spiritual background of someone’s childhood, or however they would define that now. I wonder how you — if there are aspects of your childhood to which you would attach that language of “spiritual,” “religious.”
Vuong:My family is traditionally Buddhist, but they were also illiterate, and so the extent of their Buddhism was rooted in rituals and care. And so every day before school, my mother would get me to the altar, and we would start to name this sort of roll call, the people in our family, and try to bless them and think about them and tend to them and to ourselves. And so spirituality began with care, rooted in physical bodies. It didn’t extend beyond the household. There was no mythical presence to it. It was almost like this abracadabra that we did before we stepped out of the house into the rest of the world, and thereby, the rest of America. And I think, for me, whatever my mother presented to me those early mornings in front of the altar is still true.
And I think I embrace that in everything I do — writing, sitting with you now — how do I do it with care. And even in the temples — in many Asian American households, when you enter the house, you take off your shoes. Now, we’re not obsessed with cleanliness any more than anyone else, but the act is an act of respect. I’m going to take off my shoes to enter something important. I’m going to give you my best self.
And I think, even consciously, when I read or give lectures or when I teach, I lower my voice. I want to make my words deliberate. I want to enter — I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care, so that I can do the work that I need to do.
Tippett:Was there a moment where you can look back and where you started to feel in your body the power of words, which you now work with?
Vuong:Right away. I mean, I was surrounded by storytellers, by survivors and storytellers. And so my grandmother and my mother and my aunt would tell stories to recalibrate their past, to make sense of their past. And my root in the narrative and literary techniques and embodiment begins way before I entered a classroom.
And when you think about how people tell stories, stories are carried in the body, and it’s edited each time the person tells it. And so what you have, by the time someone tells a story, is a masterclass of form, technique, concision, imagery — even how to pause, which you don’t really get on the page. Arguably you do in poetry, with the line break. And this is what these women were giving me. I didn’t know how valuable that gift was.
Tippett: It’s also very moving and interesting to me, the way you — and you’ve started talking about this. You write about how Vietnamese culture that you were immersed in, how language is so embodied. Someplace you said, “a lot of love is communicated in Vietnamese culture through service”: “We cook, we massage, we scratch each other’s back.” There’s not a lot of saying “I love you,” but it’s communicated in those ways.
Vuong:The body is the ultimate witness to love. And I learned that right away. We don’t say, “I love you.” If we do, we say it in English, as a sort of goodbye.
Tippett:Really? That’s so interesting.
Vuong: Yeah, it’s almost like a cultural thing, just — we almost say it in lieu of goodbye. We don’t know how to say goodbye, either. It’s just …… we say, “Bye-bye.”
And I think — because what happens is that through the body and through service, you articulate it through paying attention. Nothing can say “I love you” more than feeling it from somebody. And I think this relationship is how I started to see words. I looked at them as if they were things I could move and care for.
Tippett:Your mother worked in a nail salon all of your life and her life, and you worked there, and members of your family worked there. And I love it that you were eventually able to buy her a house — and she always wanted a garden — because you are now seen. She watched you.
I love the story — I wonder if you would tell it — about the experience she had when she first came to hear you read. And of course, she couldn’t understand the English, but her reaction to you.
Vuong:The first time, I was reading at the Mark Twain House, of all places, in Hartford. And it was nearby, so I asked her to come, and it was the first time she saw me read. And of course, she doesn’t understand the English, but she was so proud to just see her son up there in the spotlight, a small spotlight. And I went back to her — I read, people clapped, and they stood, and it was lovely. And I went back to her, and she was sobbing. And being the dutiful son, I said, “What did I do? What happened? Are you OK?” And she said, “No, I just never thought I’d live to see all these old White people clapping for my son.”
And I thought it was interesting, because, I said, I’ll try to understand what that means; what it means; what kind of validation is that. It’s not necessarily one that I share myself. So I almost had this arrogant gaze to it. I said, “That doesn’t seem like victory to me, just because a bunch of White folks clapped. Victory is something else, to me, something more.”
Until, the next day, I was at the salon again with her. Her makeup’s off, and she put her nice dress away that she wore at the reading. She took her earrings off. And right out the gate, in the early morning, I saw her and watched her kneel at the pedicure chair before one old, White woman after another. It was so humbling, because I thought, Finally. She was below their eye level for so many years. And for one brief moment, in Mark Twain’s house, they saw her, face-to-face, as an equal. And that’s when I understood, that is victory.
Tippett:I would not have traded the experience of being with you, physically, but I really love — most of my interviews are remote, and I’m in a studio; somebody is coming in through my headphones, basically. But there’s often an assumption, in people who don’t work in this medium, that that makes it less intimate. But to have the human voice to work with, and to get everything that the human voice carries — it is the body — is really magical, to really be able to completely focus on that.
Speaking of the body and walking and movement, I want to close — you wrote this beautiful essay in The Rumpus, in 2014, called “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation.” Part of the context of that piece was your uncle’s death by suicide. He was three years older than you, and you’d grown up together. And that wove into you reflecting, on these walks you do through New York City, on fire escapes. I’m going to read a little bit, and then I want you just to say more.
“All that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental and exquisite language” — you’re looking at all the buildings — “and yet only the fire escape, a clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting, spoke — in its hardened, exiled silence with the most visible human honesty: We are capable of disaster. And we are scared.”
Vuong:It was such a blow. Anyone who has lost anybody to suicide — I lost my uncle; I lost a few friends. The great mystery and the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture — I’ve been grappling with that for so long. And I think one of the things that lead us to that is that you start to feel that you are always out of the picture — this loneliness that language does not allow us to access. The way we say hello to each other — Hi, how are you? Oh, good, good, good, good, good. So the “how are you” is now defunct. It doesn’t access. It fills. It’s fluff.
And so what happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function, and it starts to obscure, rather than open? And I think the crisis that my uncle went through, and a lot of my friends, was a crisis of communication — that they couldn’t say, “I’m hurt.”
And looking at — I remember when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York. I went for the longest walk. And I kept seeing these fire escapes. And I said, what happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, Are you really OK? I know we’re talking, but you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth?
And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture — Not at the table, not at the dinner table, don’t say this here, don’t say that there, don’t talk about this, this is not cocktail conversation, what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.
And I thought about that. What if literature, my participation in it — that’s my field, if you will — what if the poem, the story, the novel, at its best can serve as a fire escape? Because on the page, you don’t have the awkward reality of a body bumping into someone in the supermarket. You don’t have to say, How ‘bout them Patriots? You don’t have to talk about the weather. You can go right in, deep. And I really have been — it changed the way I thought about writing and literature, in that if we have the fire escape as a reality in our buildings, what does it look like in the reality of our communication, in our language? What does that look like?
And I’m still figuring that out. I’m still — every book, every poem, I think, is my attempt at articulating a fire escape. But I think it was a great reckoning for me, because here I am, supposedly a writer, and then my uncle dies, and I’ve lost so much. We talk all the time, we say all these things, and yet I never knew what was happening. And if that’s the case, language, this field that I chose, this thing that I feel so much hope for, failed me. And it was a reckoning, I think, existentially, with myself as an artist.
Tippett:I wonder if, to close this incredible time together, if you would read — I just copied out a paragraph from the end of this essay from 2014, “The Weight of Our Living.”
Vuong:“The poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to — because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions — and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”
Hear Ocean read his poems.
His voice - gentle, insistent, trembling - is like an instrument strumming songs, sometimes ratcheting like a rifle firing bullets, sometimes whispering words, words which should not be told.