It felt so constricting. Ocean Vuong’s writing is steeped in memories, the history of which sometimes precedes him chronologically. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the. It wasn’t so much: Does my story matter to the larger population, or does my story matter to white people? The editors discuss Ocean Vuong’s poem “Not Even This” from the April 2020 issue of POETRY. It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire. In his poems, he often explores transformation, desire, and violent loss. Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights. Get our next issue and any updates delivered straight to your mailbox. Because to me, art making is not a way to tie the neat knot around complicated, painful histories. Ocean Vuong. It’s something to do with that space on the other side of the tree. Ocean Vuong (born Vương Quốc Vinh; October 14, 1988) is a Vietnamese American writer, poet and essayist.. About. Hear Vuong read and discuss “Toy Boat” by listening below. I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. That’s 20 dollars for a full year of the freshest voices in contemporary poetry featured in 11 book-length issues as well as free digital access on our mobile app. I can say it was beautiful now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else. These lines accumulate and the impact of them accumulates in the story and the emotions intensify. Need help? Now, in his highly anticipated debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, out June 4, Vuong reexamines themes of violence, trauma, and identity through the eyes of Little Dog, a Vietnamese immigrant who writes a letter to his illiterate mother. We're a nonprofit (so it's tax-deductible), and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget. MJ: If there is no reckoning or ending, what do you hope the book accomplishes? That was the world he deemed inspiring to him. thanks for submitting! The presence of the father was so daunting that he never pulled the trigger. So I just accept it as it is. We are either the subplot or the servants accommodating the larger, often white characters. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought, Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight boys play video. To each his own, and that was their choice. Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns. The men were gone; they did their harm and were gone. And Ocean did, in the introductory remarks, talk about how verse works, which is kind of something that often starts in a margin, reaches the end of a line and then turns back around. She goes, and she looks at the audience. So, the fact that each line is set off on its own with that white space you were talking about emphasizes each line is a moment of stillness in a sort of individual attempt at conveying an experience or an emotion that cumulatively comes together, but also allows each line to be on its own. Truth #4: When we go to work, we're in the fight. Copyright © 2020 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress. Which made me. Born in Saigon, poet and editor Ocean Vuong was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned a BA at Brooklyn College (CUNY). The Novel. MJ: There is definitely a powerful movement toward self-discovery that happens for the narrator. It felt specifically American to me, the crisis of whether our voice matters. OV: It’s an interesting question because it’s not a question that people ask, say, of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. That novel employed a Japanese narrative form that Vuong says he carried through to the poem, “Not Even This.”. Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah, as the poem says, “I am now the ultimate linebacker. For me, it was important to write about folks in poverty, white folks in poverty, Asian Americans in poverty, black folks in poverty. In 2014, Vuong was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. One of the things the book attempts to negotiate is, what is American identity? I realized that the more I learned Vietnamese, I started to learn words that they didn’t know,” he says. He’s best known as an award-winning young poet, and he’s now getting attention for his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.But I first knew him as a … “So I consciously decided that my Vietnamese will stay where their Vietnamese is. moves you, as if  the seconds Reclaiming power from those who abuse it often starts with telling the truth. Vương Quốc Vinh (* 14. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero” and then as it moves forward from that, which is a state of, I can’t really describe it other than by saying it’s like almost despair. Linday Garbutt: Vuong admits he finds more pleasure writing poems than writing novels. On his childhood and the stories told by the women that surrounded him in. Certainly on the larger political scale, does my voice matter? There’s no actual coming to terms. // Time as a mother” and then it moves from there, from that one word, one line enough, later on just a few lines down, “Enough is enough.” It’s that brilliant control over the rhythms and patterns of thinking and speaking and prayer that really allows something to kind of grow from this, where there’s grief for a mother who has died, where there’s plants that are dying, where there’s damage and shittiness and that commitment to make sure that that shittiness doesn’t enter the world is kind of clearing a space for life to happen, for humanity to happen in spite of everything. Tamir was seated on a swing in a park, playing with a toy gun, when he was shot by a 26-year old police officer, Timothy Loehmann. So my project was to take the same questions into a different form and see if anything changes, if there’s anything new that I can discover. I will say that the novel does invite an autobiographical reading—that’s purposeful. You need to enable JavaScript to use SoundCloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts. OV: Exactly. My mother loves going to my readings. His work has been translated into Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Vietnamese. Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010), which was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association. photographer’s shadow, and stopped thinking, I saw the graveyard steam in the pinkish dawn and knew the dead were still. It has despair in it, it has grief in it, but that’s not all there is. It could go many other ways; they could be disappointed that I’m not a doctor or a lawyer, something that’s very common for Asian American folks. This page was last edited on 7 November 2019, at 12:25. And he says in the book, “The very fact that you won’t read this makes the writing of it possible.” So, again, the question is: Does it matter? Why did you choose that? & never left, toy boat — oarless At times they do find peace, but I didn’t set out to make all these characters come to terms with their ruptured histories; I knew that was something I consciously did not want to do. His honors include fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Poets House, Kundiman, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize, an American Poetry Review Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, a Pushcart Prize, and a Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. I think that’s important, because often the pressure on people of color is, “Well, how do you come to terms with being queer and Asian American? And in some sense, it is, but they think it’s like sorcery. I think we expect that of a novel, of a movie, of any narrative structure. And that’s how we see a lot of the Western canon: Literature with a capital L is written for and about a white, aristocratic milieu. And not people with artistic craftsmen-like skills. But we don’t have a moment where we have an internal crisis and then build agency towards change and survival. arrows It invites that but ultimately rejects it. But it’s the constant internal tug of war in Little Dog’s attempts at connecting with his family—at writing a letter, even if he knows his mother will never read it—that are some of the most moving and emotionally arresting in the book. Again, I think it is made possible by the accumulation of the units of the lines of the poem. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. That’s the pitfall sometimes of writing as an Asian American, because they only see us as a bridge. The family of Tamir Rice was recently awarded a settlement after a police officer fatally shot him. But here, I wanted to really question what happens when language itself is almost another character in the book. more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting. We’re often accommodating somebody else. I wonder if balance is possible, but I think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going—all of which are means toward self-knowledge. And it’s a real question. It's us but for your ears. So as much as it is an epistle, a lot of the book is about self-knowledge, about Asian American coming of age, which is something Asian American bodies are rarely afforded. Ocean Vuong: Überhaupt nicht. ” “ Vuong writes with a clear beauty and insistence unlike any other writer working today. a green lamp I write to sustain myself. And so that when you get to the line in the poem that talks about being real, “I’m trying to be real, but it costs too much,” it moves forward and it says “It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire. Literally I can’t die. I mean, I think among the things that move me, sort of behind the scenes a little bit, is that question of when a poet becomes a novelist or a fiction writer or successful in another kind of writing, the difficulty of kind of returning to poetry technically, in other words, how do you do that? But these bodies do know joy, and they know it by acknowledging and honoring the tribulations they outlived. It’s a really courageous commitment, I think, because the tension in the lines is sort of like, you think from line to line, you think, well this is someone at the end of their rope or this is someone who might be letting go. The poem "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" is the thirty-fourth poem in Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and it is the eleventh poem of the book's third section. So there’s a lot of pride. I like Vuong’s poem and like the new poetry spot that you have on WFMT. The theme music comes from the Claudia Quintet. So long as things can be said and said sort of purely and honestly. It’s a rare poet who can do that, but Ocean Vuong does that. But the novel ends on a flashback; it ends in a spiral. I think that might not have been enough, were it not for me being my family ’s only hope. I Killed Them.”, A Conversation between John Kinsella and Thurston Moore, John Kinsella and Thurston Moore read “Signal Jamming”, Carolyn Forché and Fernando Valverde read “The Balada of New England”, A Conversation with Jeffrey Yang on Mary Oppen, Dujie Tahat reads “salat to be read from right to left”, Jack Underwood reads "Poem Beginning with Lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning". In this episode of PoetryNow, Ocean Vuong remembers Tamir Rice, the 12-year old boy killed by police in Cleveland, OH in 2014.

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