It felt as if I were stealing a glance at a set of self-affirmations, or maybe self-promises: I recall a part of his poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” from Night Sky.
#Ocean vuong how to
Vuong knows how to capture the essence of survival in his work. “Not in a This town made me kind of way, like Old boy does good, you know? But the ways that it was brutal, and how I survived it.” “I do give a lot of credit to growing up here,” Vuong says, referring to Glastonbury. So I was curious to finally meet him in the place where we spent our adolescent years and visit some of his old haunts. Not very many Asian American kids went there you tend to take stock of your people in situations like that.
Though we overlapped for two years at Glastonbury High, Vuong and I didn’t know each other, which is a little feat. It was 2008, my senior year of high school, and one of my English teachers told me about a talented poetry student of his who had graduated a couple of years earlier and was making a go of writing. I’m on this miniature road trip with Vuong for a reason that has much to do with how I first learned his name, more than a decade earlier.
#Ocean vuong trial
“There’s more trial and error in a moment.” “You have much more experience negotiating the fossilization of an idea,” he says. His logic is that by the time poets write their first collection, they’ve started and finished hundreds of poems, which is a helpful building block for any other kind of writing. “If I had my way, I’d recommend the earnest pursuit of poetry for every writer,” Vuong says while I point us south and carefully follow my car’s navigation, consistently 10 miles under the speed limit, because driving and talking at the same time is not one of my strengths. I ask him about the transition from writing poetry to prose. It is studded with vestiges of the Vietnam War and the experiences of queer and immigrant folks in America, and pulls partly from his own life.īut with his new novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong wades into a different form. All this after his poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, was published in 2016. Eliot prize, and The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani has likened Vuong’s poetry to that of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Over the years, Vuong has garnered some of the highest literary praise for his poetry. Maxx about an hour away in Connecticut, near the nail salon where his mother used to work. In just a 10-minute span, it feels as if we’ve covered an hour’s worth of conversation: our jade necklaces (his, a slender carving of the goddess Guan Yin that came from his mother mine, a funny-shaped lucky peach that was a wedding gift from an aunt) his affinity for writing late at night the thunderstorm he weathered while at a retreat at an Italian castle that forced him to write part of his new novel by hand. Vuong is relaxed and chatty in the passenger seat.
O cean Vuong and I are in my car on one of the roads by his house in Northampton, where he’s lived for the past couple of years and teaches poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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