How a Poet Named Ocean Means to Fix the English Language

The New Yorker | 7 April 2016

For Vuong, who learned to read at eleven, colloquial English was “a destination.” Credit Photograph by Peter Bienkowski

Ocean Vuong is not an experimental poet, but he is a poet of the American experiment. In “Notebook Fragments,” a long poem of questions and collisions, he writes, “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.” Then: “Yikes.” A few lines down, the speaker kisses a man’s body,

lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade

before hurling it into the night’s mouth.

Maybe the tongue is also a key.
Yikes.
I could eat you he said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.

Vuong was born in 1988, on a rice farm outside Saigon; two years later, he and six relatives emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut, where they lived together in a one-bedroom apartment. At school, Vuong was buffeted by English long before he could use it—his family was illiterate, and he didn’t learn to read until he was eleven.

“For an American who was born here, the mundane might be boring, but for me colloquial English was a destination,” Vuong told me on a recent Tuesday evening, folded into a booth at Caffè Reggio, the Greenwich Village haunt. Now twenty-seven, he is a recent recipient of the Whiting Award, and this week the Copper Canyon Press published his first book, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” Two years ago, when Vuong was told over the phone that his manuscript had been accepted, he was riding the elevated train from his home in Astoria to his first workshop at New York University, where he’s about to complete his M.F.A.

At Caffè Reggio, Vuong drank jasmine tea and wore a black silk shirt with white polka dots. “This place is a time warp,” he said, pointing out a silvery vat that once produced espressos—America’s first such machine, Italian-made—and the counter where Joseph Brodsky, another English-language poet who did not start with English, once retrieved his mail. It was an appropriate setting for someone influenced by both the plainspoken ironies of Frank O’Hara and the exotic folklorism of Federico García Lorca.

Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful (“You, pushing your body / into the river / only to be left / with yourself”) and wonderstruck (“Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. / Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn”). His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.

In his right ear, Vuong wears a tiny pearl stud that once belonged to his mother’s mother. He often speaks of having been brought up by women—his father was imprisoned for hitting Vuong’s mother shortly after the family’s arrival in Hartford, and the couple soon divorced. When Vuong was a boy, his mother and grandmother taught him their field songs and aphorisms. One of the “Notebook Fragments” is a paraphrase of such a saying: “Even sweetness can scratch the throat, so stir the sugar well. —Grandma.”

It was Vuong’s mother, a manicurist, who gave him his name. (He was born Vinh Quoc Vuong.) On a summer day at the nail salon, she told a customer that she wanted to go to the beach. She kept saying, “I want to go to the bitch,” Vuong told me. The customer suggested that she use the word “ocean” instead. Upon learning that the ocean is not a beach but a body of water that touches many countries—including Vietnam and the United States—she renamed her son.

The ocean is a poetic cliché, and Vuong takes clichés very seriously. “They come out of a crisis in language,” he said. “They have lost their use.” In “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” published last year in this magazine, Vuong imbues his name with new significance. It begins:

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets.

Later, Vuong fuses oceanic address with another familiar trope, the language of self-motivation: “Ocean, / are you listening?” “Ocean— / get up.” The sea becomes an organism in need of impossible repair, and the speaker becomes the sea itself, protean and powerful. The idea, Vuong said, is that “we can be more than one thing at once.” He referred me to “Katy,” by O’Hara. Its penultimate line reads “Someday I’ll love Frank O’Hara.” Its final line: “I think I’ll be alone for a while.”

Vuong also likes O’Hara and the other New York School poets for their frank sex talk. “What can I do?” he said. “I like penises.” Growing up, he answered phones at the nail salon, and watched Oprah and Ellen while working. He read a little poetry in middle school, mainly Dr. Seuss and the children’s magazine Stone Soup. In high school, he had the notion to record his family’s wisdom in a journal. On the blank facing pages, he jotted down his own “little things,” as he described his first poems.

In 2008, he went to Pace University to study marketing, in the hope of supporting his family, but quit after three weeks. At Brooklyn College, he became an English major, writing poems on postcards and handing them to friends. Sonnets, he told me, were once passed around like little notes—“in the time of Shakespeare, before texting.” When the poet-novelist Ben Lerner joined the faculty, he introduced Vuong to the notion that a life of writing might be possible. Before that, Vuong said, “I thought all poets were preordained. The government decided. Obama or Bush or whatever said, ‘You, you, you.’ ”

Vuong’s grandmother died, of bone cancer, while he was studying at Brooklyn. She was buried in Vietnam, and Vuong travelled there for the funeral. “I was overwhelmed, because everyone looked like my family,” he told me. I suggested that some people might find this familiarity a source of comfort. “I like to be more precarious,” Vuong said. “Then strange things can happen.”

He finished his tea. Outside, Thompson Street had darkened; inside, the college crowd had thinned. “My mother would unfold and count dollar bills in tips, and with that we would go and buy dinner,” Vuong said, as we got the check. “Every dollar was tangible, a felt symbol.” His family finds his career difficult to fathom, so they call him “scholar,” and he doesn’t correct them. “Their voices are in my head when I’m writing, when I’m thinking, and I don’t think there’s ever a day when I don’t ask myself what I should be doing with these hands.”