Ocean Vuong Interviewed at Split This Rock

At Split This Rock, Tanya Olson talks to Ocean Vuong about his debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon 2016), citizenship, performing poems, Zen practice, and a bid for poet laureate of the US??? Yes! From the top:

Vuong’s poetry is notable because of the strength it displays. His isn’t the most recognizable, American version of strength- Whitman’s long line, bluster, and reach- but an interior strength American’s might associate more with Emily Dickinson. When that interiority and steel comes out of the Queens-based poet, it sounds like little else in American poetry today. His first full-length work Night Sky With Exit Wounds is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in April 2016. Ocean and I spoke by email for this interview.

***

Tanya Olson (TO): Night Sky With Exit Wounds will be available soon. It's your first full-length work. What are 2 things you would like people to know about this book before they open it?

Ocean Vuong (OV): I hope it will be a book that speaks to our American moment by expanding and extrapolating on what it means to be an American. And by American, I don't mean in citizenship, but in the way our lives are experienced under the traumas, joys, and tensions concerning the historic and cultural geography of the United States.

I also hope this book will be carried in someone's backpack or tote bag. That would make me smile.

TO: I'm excited to hear Night Sky explores "our American moment". It's one of the things I think your poems do best--capture perfectly and in full complexity what it is to be in America, in a specific time and place. As someone who has left a country, arrived in a country, stayed in a country, what are your thoughts on the idea of "citizen" right now?

OV: For me, our citizenship is only as valuable as how we treat our most marginalized people. This idea, of course, is not novel--and yet it is so difficult to achieve because the language we use to communicate with one another is often one of distance and hyperbole. The risk is that we end up dismissing or, at worst, shunning the particularities of an idiosyncratic life.

Although not a remedy to this, I think poetry creates a space where we don't have to clear our throats, where we can be as strange and obsessed as we actually feel. And someone can read these thoughts and hopefully recognize their own strangeness and uniqueness as a human being. In this way, poetry is the side door to our inner selves, where we can see one another, without shame, more closely. Because maybe it's these things that make us care for another: when we can recognize each other's fears, vulnerabilities, joys, and histories. Poetry and language, to me, is the DNA of our personhood. What a gift, then, to share that with one another. In this way, poetry achieves something regardless of the employment of superior craft (although that certainly helps), it builds a bridge we can actively cross and, hopefully, value one another better. I know these are lofty, even grandiose intentions. But making good poems is hard. And with a task that demands so much care and attention, and is so fraught with the limitations and impossibilities inherent in language, why not attempt something this embarrassingly ambitious? What do we have to lose when we are losing everything anyway? I think, maybe, this has something to do with citizenship.

Go to STR now to learn more.