Berkeley Talks: Poet Ocean Vuong on disobedience and the power of language

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Nat Reese: Good evening. Welcome to the UC, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. My name is Nat Reese and I’m the film program manager here. We’re excited to welcome you to today’s program. And I just have two quick announcements before we get started. One is please refrain from video recording or taking photos during today’s event. And the second is that at the end of the conversation, the center stage conversants will exit the theater first, so please stay seated at the end of the program. And then once they’ve safely exited, then everyone’s welcome to leave. And now it is my pleasure to welcome Stephen Best, the director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Stephen Best: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this year’s Townsend Center Avenali Lecture. I’d like to begin by thanking the staff of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Julie Rodriguez and the staff of BAMPFA, Beth Piatote and the staff at the Arts Research Center for all their hard work in making this event possible. I’d also like to thank the English department for hosting a watch party in the Maude Fife room for those who didn’t make it into the Osher.

I think I echo the sentiments of past directors when I say that the Townsend Center is deeply grateful to the Avenali family for their generosity. The Avenali chair in the Humanities has been made possible through the gift of Peter and Joan Avenali. Their goal back in 1987 was to make it possible for a distinguished figure in the arts and humanities to come to Berkeley every year. Past Avenali lectures include the historian Jill Lepore, the sculptor Maya Lin, and last year the critic Ciane Ny.

This year, it is our distinct pleasure to welcome the author and poet Ocean Vuong to the UC Berkeley campus. Ocean Vuong is a writer of extraordinary talent. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother and the novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His books of poems have been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Forward Award and the Tom Gunn Award, named after our former Berkeley colleague Tom Gunn.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous received upwards of eight prizes including the American Book Award. Ocean has also received the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, and surprising no one, the MacArthur. The LA Times described On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a book of sustained beauty and lyricism, earnest and relentless, a series of high notes that trembles exquisitely almost without break. A letter from a son to his mother who can’t read English, the novel is considered an epistolary masterpiece, “A bruised, breathtaking love letter never to be sent,” in the words of the Novelist Marlon James. Almost without exception, a reviewer will note Ocean’s skillful balance between the personal and the political, delicate imagery and powerful emotion, his lived experience and the long arc of violence experienced by the women who raised him. It seems almost silly of me to recall these prizes and reiterate this praise. Admirers of Ocean’s work live not here but in his line breaks in.

The essay “Invisible Ink, Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading,” Toni Morrison draws on the metaphor of invisible ink to suggest that one aspect of flawless writing is the room a writer leaves for a reader to participate in the text. The reader’s participation is more than what they might achieve through interpretation, what she calls reading as a skill, it involves reading as an art or how the reader helps to write the text. Morrison explains, “Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines hidden until the right reader discovers it. By “right reader,” I am suggesting that certain books are obviously not for every reader. Even a reader who loves the book may not be the best or right reader. The reader who is made for the book is the one attuned to the invisible ink.” End of quote.

I know I’m not the only one here who thinks that I’m the right reader of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the one uniquely attuned to its invisible ink. A child of West Indian immigrants who struggled their way to Hartford, Connecticut, so they could have me, the feeling that I was the book’s right reader was often pedantic. All of Ocean’s landmarks were my childhood landmarks: the YMCA across from the state Capitol, the tobacco fields in my hometown of Windsor, the Union Street Amtrak station, its hollowed-out architecture, my first taste of fallen majesty.

But Ocean’s writing gives the cheerless landscape of suburban Connecticut back to me vitalized by a series of what he likes to call moral questions, his own so evocative of those weighty unasked questions that would often hover between my immigrant parents and me, the sense of being sent into worlds my parents could barely comprehend, the pathos of their social condition, preparing their children for a social situation, a world for which they all along knew themselves to be unfit. The situation, the existential condition of seeking to create a world that would not have them. The intimate worlds of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous helped me to see my own so much more clearly.

Tonight we are blessed with two literary greats. Joining Ocean is Cathy Park Hong. Cathy is a poet, essayist and class of 1936 Professor in the Department of English here at Berkeley. She’s the author of the poetry collections Engine Empire; Dance Dance Revolution; and Translating Mo’um and the book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Please join me in welcoming Ocean Vuong and Cathy Park Hong to the stage.

Cathy Park Hong: Hi, everyone.

Audience: Hi.

Ocean Vuong: Hello.

Cathy Park Hong: I think it’s an understatement that the Berkeley community is happy to have you here. My students at least have been waiting for months and months and months for you to come. Are you out there?

Audience: Yeah.

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, my God, yeah, look at you. Yes, and I said that there’s an overflow where people who haven’t made it into the theater, apparently there’s a video, a jumbotron, I think, for those who are not privileged enough to be in this theater. You have touched many lives here, and we’re very, very happy to have you here.

Ocean Vuong: Well, thank you so much for having me, and thank you for talking with me. I’ve been a deep admirer of your work for so long. I was in Deborah Landau’s class at NYU when you visited us, and I was just … Well, thank you for just making space for what felt impossible at the time, and then after you graced us, suddenly felt very possible. I never got to thank you in person for that, so thank you. And thank you all for being here. This is my first time at Berkeley, but I got close enough about 12 years ago when I gave a very memorable reading as a baby poet at Eastwind Books, which is no longer here. But that was a lovely moment that I cherish with me for a long time, so it’s good to be back.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, I wish the weather was nicer, but the flowers are at least out blooming for you. I thought I would start with maybe we could talk a little bit about your poetry and how you’re able to actually bounce back and forth. I personally feel a lot of affinity with you as a writer for many reasons, but I think one of the key shared experience is how the English language has, once a site of estrangement and inadequacy for you, became this playground for bounty and experimentation. And part of that bounty and experimentation is how you refuse to delimit genre by the way you swing from poetry to prose without feeling tethered by either. I guess I wanted to start by asking the question of how you begin. When you begin a project, do your ideas already have a form in mind? Does the form come later? Yeah, how do you begin?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I was … Oh, sorry. Hello, hello. OK. The ghosts follow me around. How do I begin? Well, I began as a poet. I learned. I dropped out of business school after about four weeks. And I was too ashamed to come home to Connecticut and tell my mother that I was a failed college student. She was bragging to all her clients that, “My son, the first in our family to go to college.” And so I just went around and I couch surfed and I started reading in open mics in the East Village. And that’s where I learned how to write. That’s where I learned how to write the first pantoum and a Glissant. Before the open mic, you would pay five extra dollars and someone in a community workshop would teach you. And so my education, I stumbled in it, and it was outside of … Poetry was much more fluid already. It didn’t come from the syllabus.

And so I think for me, genre was always as fluid as gender and all the … Even punctuation. The rigor of punctuation to me I think is arbitrary. They’re still up for grabs. And then the dialect of standard English, how legitimate is it? The linguists would tell us it’s no more efficient or better or capacious than AAVE or other regional dialects. However, standard English is attached to the court system. It’s a dialect that is also attached to an army and a navy, and so within that comes great immense power.

And so I think for me, I’m interested in genre as tendency rather than an ontological position to be. And I think there are tendencies that could be utilized and then left aside or even departed. What is a tendency in us stylistically that is then abandoned? I’m interested in abandon not as a way to cast away or to denounce, but as a restlessness. I will use this mode until I’m done with it. I’ll find something else and then return to it later. There’s a kind of cyclical relationship. And I think maybe if I’m trying to put order to it, I’ll say there’s a kind of inherent queerness in it, right?

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-hmm.

Ocean Vuong: That for me, my queerness demanded an alternative route always. I looked at the world around me growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, as Professor Best so wonderfully depicted for us, and I said, “There’s no place for me. These are all various tracks that will then be traps. I have to find an elsewhere.” And I think for heteronormativity, elsewhere is so terrifying. It is a kind of death that they would do whatever it takes to move away from. 

But for me, elsewhere was pure potential, pure curiosity. And I think that’s how my relationship to the poem, the tendency in the poem … There’s variation. I think there’s more variation inside the poem than there is in the novel, in that the novel is like paragraph, paragraph, plot or no plot, plot, what have you. But most of it, since the first novel in our species in 1011, Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. Isn’t that amazing? Often we were told it’s Don Quixote, but a Japanese woman wrote the first novel in our species. And when she was asked why, she said, “I was bored.”

But I love that because it goes back to this, the foundation of this great interior, because the novel’s gesture is interiority, was out of boredom, was a way to turn the self into a site of rich imagination that could be sustained. And so to me, I think the precedent is already there. Reviewers have said, “Oh, this book is so strange. I’ve never read anything like it.” But I actually think my work is actually quite conservative, formally, relative to what’s already been done historically.

We are so lucky to be this late to history. The experiment, the playground has already been played. And I’m just so fortunate to already have a Morrison, to already have a Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, to have a Carlos Bulosan. Imagine if we had to be them and then have the stuff that we have. Imagine being them without having them. What a great teparation. And so I feel like I’m afforded a great luxury for experimentation because of where I am in time.

Cathy Park Hong: That’s beautiful. I love the idea of genre as a tendency rather than genre as an enclosure that attracts a certain kind of audience and how genre fluidity is a kind of queering of genre as well and that it’s already an inherited form. I think that reminds me of this quote by Jeff Dyer, this non-fiction writer, who says that cross-genre is so popular now that bookstores, they can have their own genre section called cross-genre. Yeah, it’s true, we have many influences.

Back in the green room, if you could call it that, we were talking about disobedience. And this is based on Alice Notley’s essay, The Poetics of Disobedience and how she insisted that poets should be able to write about anything or everything, that we shouldn’t be constricted to any kind of way of writing. And I was curious if you could talk about your interest in disobedience and if it had something to do with queering genre.

Ocean Vuong: Beautiful, beautiful. I was always called a disobedient child. Leelam is the Vietnamese word for it. And I was always ashamed of it because it was the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And my mother warned me of that. But I think as a writer, you are coming from the outside of the center. And I think disobedience is not just a reaction, but I think it’s an obligation because it comes from skepticism. If you’re skeptical of the center and you say, “Well, what can I do with it?” The first reaction is to turn through opposition.

And I think the idea of oppositional work in this country is so, so important, and it’s all in the shadow of Black writers. And I think the great danger of this 21st century ethos of stay in your lane of identity, this idea of identity being like one lane in the rainbow, it starts to close off. It presents a façade or a mythos of discrete lineages when in fact it’s much more organic. And I do believe that the foundation of robust oppositional textual resistance, which comes from disobedience, comes from Black writers going back to Jupiter Saturn and Harriet Jacobs and then Frederick Douglass, on and on. The great shadow of those writers made it so that writers like myself, you, Viet Thanh Nguyen, so many writers, Maxine Hong Kingston are then legible amongst this praxis of disobedience. And I see the room, the space-making endeavor that those writers did. And that is too, or perhaps even more so than the traditional canon, an American tradition. It is a tradition of disobedience, it’s just not always presented that way in the pedagogy.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, I think about that stay in your lane and how it’s … My problem with how territorial it is and how it’s so much based on … We were also talking about Glissant, how it’s so much based on this illusion of the root, identity as a root rather than something that’s relational.

I wanted to talk about your two books of poems before we dive into your novel. Night Sky With Exit Wounds, your debut is a book that I’ve taught multiple times to students of all ages from undergrad to graduate students. And what is remarkable about that book is how it is able to enchant students who are normally absolutely resistant to poetry. And that book is a gateway to, if you don’t mind me saying that, to students to understand that words are not just carriers for meaning but that it could be something in between: song, mood and semantics.

And so when I start teaching a class and I ask students what they’ve read, what kind of poetry they’ve read, they mention Whitman or Dickinson and they mention you. And I’m so grateful for that, that it’s not just this smattering of white poets, that now they can be inspired by you as well as a cohort of other incredible poets of color.

I cut it, and I think … It’s interesting, when poets turn to prose, it’s not often that they go back to poetry. And I was happy to see that after your novel, you went back to a book of poems, which is Time Is a Mother. And the book is different, it’s different than your debut. And definitely there are the similar obsessions, but stylistically I think you take risks with a looser voice. It’s more playful, I think, and it’s a little bit more … It’s beautiful, but also a little hard edged. I guess I wanted to ask you about what changed. How was the process of writing that debut collection different from Time Is a Mother?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, thank you so much for asking that. The first book took me eight years to write, and it was very … In a way, I think it’s a very quintessential debut where there’s an eclectic smattering of voices. There’s an attempt to find what works, but there’s also a kind of obligation to the form or what I perceived as the tradition, showing my work, showing that I’m a good student. I think to me, there’s a lot of that immigrant persona and that baggage that I carried into that book, which is like, look, I read the canon; it’s all right. And I want to debate it. I’m tangling with it.

One of my favorite theorists, cultural critics, Terry Eagleton, British Marxist scholar, he says, “The canon’s all right, but it doesn’t come close to the office.” And I think he’s not wrong. And you realize that the canon is also an ideology. How does it arise out of this facade of greatness rather than prominence?

I think that when I began my seminar on hybrid text, I began with that where the canon comes out of Matthew Arnold’s anxiety, that if the working class Brits were losing religion, the aristocracy will lose control of them and then they would have their own French Revolution with guillotines. And so his great quest was then to formulate a canon that could replace religion. And it so happens that for him, it was all works that humanize the aristocracy. Sounds familiar, right? Corporations are people too.

And that ethos is an ideology. If you see that the rich, through fiction and poems, were also heartbroken, were also stressed out beneath their chandeliers, you might not want to overthrow them. In a way, it was much more myriad than the church because you can build a canon that is complex, robust and overwhelm the culture with its weight, with its monolithic presence.

And when I started to see the root of that, you start to realize that greatness has really haunted and hindered literary pedagogy. I’m sure you’ve been in classes or you’ve seen syllabus like this, and I’ve certainly been in classes like this where the greatest American novels after 1945. Now, what happens when that obsession with greatness is that students then come into a class feeling that they have to learn how to conform to preconceived ideas rather than investigate.

I very proudly teach Whitman, but I teach Whitman knowing that there’s a diachronic weight of his presence on the imagination of the great American grandfather, poetry, what have you, this democratic utopic, barbaric yawp. But when we do it, it’s about not so much how great Whitman is, but why was he important? Why was his failures in imagination important? His racism, his incredibly innovative first book, but then leading to poems like Old Pioneers, which also became conservative cheerleading for settler colonialist genocide.

And so to me, it’s about opening the investigation. Reading is not celebration. And I think in literary classrooms, we forget that. We look at a syllabus … First thing I said, “These are not Professor Vuong’s favorite books. You are at no obligation to celebrate them. We’re not going to mindlessly clap.” But you don’t learn about genocide to condone it, you learn it to understand it, to prevent it. And so I take that vantage, the vantage of historiography into literary work and say, “Why was this important? What did he failed? Who picked up on it? How did Lucille Clifton picked up on this in Generations? And then Claudia Rankin, et cetera.” And I think that to me is such a great privilege in pedagogy is that we quest backwards. And again, I insist that we are so luxurious in being this late to it. We have such an archive to work through and debate with.

Cathy Park Hong: I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here a little bit, but wouldn’t you say though that when you’re … I completely agree with you, that they should not be hallowed and that the canon should be opened up. I also wonder if there’s also the perils of too much of that, what Eve Sedgwick calls the kind of paranoid reading where someone would read Whitman or read poets of the past and then shut them down immediately because they’re not willing to acknowledge that they’re also writers of that time period and we’re judging them from where we are now to the past.

Ocean Vuong: I think that’s true. One of my favorite theorists, Yuri Lotman, he brings up this diachronic effect where he says, “There’s no way to read Shakespeare contemporaneously. That ship has sailed. There’s no way. We only have it diachronically.” And I think that is a kind of trap, but the tension through that effort I think is still worth it. I think the experiment of approaching it with thoroughness, with a desire for thoroughness, to look at the context of a work coming out of its time, that also there’s this Marx’s materialist theory of the work being a manifestation of its conditions, material conditions. Nabokov sentences got shorter when he went from handwriting to the typewriter, right?

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah.

Ocean Vuong: That matters craft-wise too. Craft is not ahistorical or completely removed from politics. I think it’s an imperfect model because you fall into that very trap of just pure judgment and then you lose something I think also very important which is pleasure and joy in that. But I think at this juncture in history, the quest is still out to see what would happen if we were more thorough and less immediately obligated to celebrate just because it is old. But we shouldn’t throw it out because if we throw it out, we seed the ground.

When I teach Whitman, I accompany it with two phenomena. And there’s two commercials. One is a Volvo commercial and another is a Levi commercial directed by Ryan McGinley wherein O Pioneers, O Pioneers, sharpen your pistols, pistols is an incredible connotation. It’s about murder, it’s not about hunting. That idea of O Pioneers, the brave pioneers moving west is then reformed into a commercial to sell Levi’s, that you have the strategic, multiracial group of young people running through this field in Pennsylvania where it was shot.

And so then if we take it off the syllabus, we seed that ground, we surrender the debate, we leave the dialectic. And who picks it up? Levi’s and Volvo. And I think the positions of power and commerce are so powerful that even though it’s very righteously intoxicatingly true to say, “Not in my class. There’s too much harm here. There’s too much lack of consideration.” I do think, however, that a tendency to employ care in keeping these writers accountable to their time but also accountable to our standards. Because we cannot be purveyors of truth. I’m very skeptical of truth because truth is too historically variable. Once upon a time, it was truth that certain amount of people had to die in a certain way for this country to realize itself. That was divine truth; manifest destiny.

And so I think I don’t see the classroom or myself as a purveyor of truth but as an imperfect praxis for a more thorough investigation. And we only have 14 weeks to do it. That’s the cop-out. Oh, it’s May. Don’t you want to go out and look at cherry blossoms?

But you’re right, you’re absolutely right. But I think just historically in this country particularly … Because we go back to the ’60s, it’s all about telling us why Proust is great, period. You literally had to write essays. I had to write essays like that. And to me, it was no longer the sight of agency, but more the idea of learning ideologies and spitting it back up. I think there’s still more room to try something else.

And academia is imperfect. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how long I have in it. I’ve been doing it about 10 years. I do it with one foot in, one foot out. It’s an experiment for me right now, just like anything else, just like my literary work. So far it’s been rewarding, but I don’t know if it’s the way just yet.

Cathy Park Hong: Do you think it informs you, it inspires you as a writer?

Ocean Vuong: Absolutely. Absolutely. The stakes are never higher than when you research for your students. I’m lazy with my own research, because I’m like, “Eh.” There’s PS5, there’s The Last of Us just came out. But already I’m like, “All right, I’m teaching C.D. Wright’s Cooling Time next Wednesday.” I need to go back and look into the Library of Congress, a website wherein the video of Billy Collins reading a poem to a joint session of Congress to perform the state sanctioned performance of austere somber grief so that the state could then vote to invade Iraq. 

Then the poet and the poem becomes a function just like Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. What happens when the poet gets coerced into the state apparatus of a death machine even as it works or voices elegy for death? I’m already thinking of that and building that for them.

And I think that is so important because there’s 15 people who have sacrificed so much, taken on loans, moved across country. Many of my students move across the world. And I think that pressure of showing up to the ambition of creativity as a north star is to me … And I’m not embarrassed to use the word sacred. It does feel deeply sacred to me to do that. And I think without that, I would just be playing PS5 all day.

Cathy Park Hong: I doubt that. I want to switch it up a little bit. I’ve been thinking about the mother figure a lot for my own writing, and the mother figure has been a subject in more than one of your books. For Time Is a Mother, you write about your mother as an elegy. Now, the elegy is a form or mode that you’ve been drawn to in your first collection and in also parts of your novel. But the book, Time Is a Mother, you could say is a book; it’s an elegy. And so I was curious about that book of poems and if grief changed your writing at all.

Ocean Vuong: Oh God, absolutely. I think if I look at the first book, I have many regrets. I was so ashamed of that first book. When I wrote it, I didn’t give it to my mentor, my teacher, Ben Lerner. And for a long time I kept just putting it off. And then one day he wrote very upset. He’s like, “When a student graduates and publishes a book, what they do is they sign just one copy.” And I was putting it off, and finally I said, “Ben, I’m just so sorry. I don’t think I achieved what you taught me. I don’t think I met the promise you saw in me and the effort you put in me. I don’t think I did what we set out together to do.” And that was really hard.

And I think it’s because I felt obligated to a historic impulse to lay down a position of the Vietnamese diaspora. I had to do that. It’s similar to when Baldwin says, “I had to write Go Tell It on the Mountain in order to write anything else.” I felt that deeply. Because he said, “I have to write about the formation of a Black family in Harlem before I could write about whiteness.” That’s so touching to me because it would be easy to just go past that. It’s so easy to go past that and say, “Let me just do what I want to do.” I learned it, I spent all this time; let me just go into the playground. 

And Night Sky was not the playground. I had an obligation to … I knew how rare it was as a Vietnamese poet to set the record straight. So many white writers have written about us in ways that abandoned us. And so that book opened up with my elders’ perspectives, and then it moved to an American queer ethos, and then it moved finally towards love poems at the end. I had to tend to them first. I had to do salvage work.

But it left a lot of regrets because it was not the kind of poems I wanted to write even back in 2016, but sometimes you have to be faithful to time and narrative. They were very narrative poems. Bodies have to start in certain places. In certain aftermaths, they have to be named. Vietnam and Saigon and Củ Chi tunnels, those were named. And then I could leave them.

By the time I got to the second book of poems, my mother’s already gone, but 60% of that book I was writing in between the years. But I edited it again when she died, and every poem changed. You tell yourself that you’re this experimental, innovative writer. You tell yourself this. And you believe it some days. On good days, you really believe it. But after my mother died, there was a kind of fuck it. I didn’t know how self-conscious I was before. I tell myself, “I’m going to do what I want. I’m a writer. I’m a poet.” The root of the poet is maker; I’m going to make. 

But I think I was actually really scared in my first two books, even the novel. I just felt like, Oh, my goodness, will people like this? Will I get a job? Will I be able to be a professor so I can tend to my family, get my mother out of HUD housing? When Night Sky came out, all my family members were still in tenement housing. And so there was this kind of fear that I think retrospectively tamed my craft ambitions, my formal ambitions. And when my mother died, “I said, what will I do alone as a writer? What will I do? What will Ocean do for himself?” And it was a very terrifying question.

And Time, to me, is the only book that I’ve written that I don’t have regrets on. If you give me another shot at the other two books, every page will be different, but Time Is a Mother is the one where I felt the glass really filled up. And I wanted to write poems like that in 2016, but I chose not to because the task was much greater than just playing in the playground.

Cathy Park Hong: I have a lot of thoughts. First of all, I think you’re being very hard on yourself, but I understand, I understand. I think you’re being very hard on yourself for both your books. It’s changed a lot of people’s lives. But one thought I was having was that so many poets feel ashamed of their first collection. And I feel the same way. I have a lot of regrets about my first collection, Translating Mo’um, which I have a box of that collection of poems hidden shamefully in a closet somewhere under other boxes of lampshades and whatever. And I’m wondering, is that an Asian thing or is that … But …

Ocean Vuong: I think so.

Cathy Park Hong: Huh?

Ocean Vuong: I think so, personally.

Cathy Park Hong: You think? You think it’s an Asian thing? But it was like, I do remember the first time I saw my debut collection, it just reminded me as you were talking about … I was having a flashback when you were talking about Ben Lerner. I felt queasy when I saw instead of being thrilled. And it was not the reaction that I imagined having. We have to love ourselves more when we’re young poets.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, it’s hard, it’s hard. It’s a lifelong endeavor, I think. I think one day I’ll be much more forgiving. Right now, I don’t know, I think I just saw so much fear. I reread those poems, I saw moments where I should go deeper. And I just learned the right amount of craft to get out of the kitchen when it got too hot.

Cathy Park Hong: But I also find it interesting that you were talking about how the first book and maybe your second book, you felt this need to correct the record, or that you had to set the record straight. That’s what I meant, set the record straight. And I also agree with that sentiment too. That was my compulsion with Minor Feelings, that when there is a narrative that is written for you, it’s almost unfair. Instead of playing, you have to take a step back and you have to set the record straight. And it almost seems like those two impulses are in opposition. I’m not saying they are, but that to set the record straight historically or just about your racial identity and so forth means that you can’t innovate or play the way you would like to. And that doesn’t sound right, but I also understand where you’re coming from, that you can’t write the absurd, ridiculous poem that you want to.

Ocean Vuong: It was an active choice. And I also must say I just didn’t know how to do it. I did not have the chops to, for example, write as openly as I did in Time Is a Mother. That does come from a sum total having written the other books. But one thing around humor, which you mentioned, is that when I published my first book, my friends were like, “It’s so sad, but you’re funny, Ocean.” And I think that’s right.

I think, for example, I just did not want to employ humor in that first book because I was really afraid that a white audience would read it and laugh in the wrong way. It was too fraught for me to risk having people laugh at my elders, so I did not want to even have jokes amongst us. And I warmed up to it in On Earth. And then in time, I felt like I got what I wanted to set that out, and then I was by myself laughing amongst myself. But I also knew how to humor better. Humor is very hard without having it seem disingenuous or deflate the poem tonally. It’s very, a fragile element. And quite frankly, to be very honest, I just did not have the skill to do it then.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah. It’s also harder to employ humor in poetry, I think, because there’s something about the line break that makes it difficult. And also there’s an expectation, a readerly expectation that a poem is going to be sincere, and so you have to work against that. What does fearlessness mean going forward?

Ocean Vuong: Oh. I have always been doubtful of myself, of my work, of my life, but when I’m writing, when I’m inside the poem, I rarely feel true fear. There’s concerns. There’s, oh, will this make sense? Am I honoring my teachers and my influences? Am I repeating myself in a gimmicky way? There’s concerns; you can call them fears. But true fear, I don’t think I’ve ever felt true fear as a writer. And I want to be honest with that. I don’t mean that in a glib or pretentious way.

People ask me, “How can you be so vulnerable in your work? Is it costly?” It’s hard, but for me, there’s no question than to go all in, to wager everything because I’m not really supposed to be here; I fought my way here. But I came here through a lot of accidents and hard work, but a lot of accidents too, a lot of error. And when I look back at how I got here, a lot of it is through the labor of the people who raised me. Every single one of my aunts and uncles and my mother working in those nail salons, taxing their bodies, working in those factories, all of them putting their head down so that one writer could one day put his head up. 

And so to me, the cost of innovation and attempting and writing and concerns, the bill is already paid. It’s been paid by them in full. It’s like you go to a restaurant, someone puts down a meal and someone says, “Your family already paid for this.” Will you not eat every single thing?

When I’m working, nothing is left unturned. Sometimes it’s too much. My problem is that I go every single route possible. I flip over every stone almost with a voraciousness. And I have to pull back because then the moments of luminosity won’t be amplified without the valleys and the lulls like a bass relief. But to me, at the end of the day, I’m writing at a desk and I’m working in a virtual reality. The page is a virtual reality. And a lot of error can happen there, and my body will still be all right.

And most of my elders in my family can’t say that, and so I have a different reference point to my life as a writer in that at the end of the day, I get to try, whereas a lot of the folks who made my life possible, everything they did, it had to hit. They didn’t get a try. They didn’t get to crumple the paper and throw it out. This job has to work or else we’re not going to have light, we’re not going to have meals, electricity.

One toothache, one rotten tooth in my … when I was growing up, chaos. You had to call shark loans. You have to pull strings, owe someone an arm and a leg. It was chaos just to get someone to get their tooth filled. And so to me, this is not risky work. It’s hard work, but I don’t have any fear in it. I have a lot of fear in the world, I’m an anxious person naturally, but when it comes to that, I owe it to that labor that’s already been done to do the best I can and to go hard at every angle.

Cathy Park Hong: It’s beautiful. I’m thinking of that poem you wrote, “Amazon History of a Nail Salon Worker.” I have so many questions. I want you to read a little bit of that poem, but then I’m like, but I want to get onto the next question. But maybe you could just read, too, and then I could just use that just maybe … It’s not like a … Well, it’s a list. If you could just read maybe two or three, and then I’ll make my observation, and then I’ll talk about my next question.

Ocean Vuong: It’s a fake found poem. 

Mar.

Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack

Sally Hansen Pink Nail Polish, 6 pack

Clorox Bleach, industrial size

Diane hair pins, 4 pack

Seafoam handheld mirror

“I Love New York” T-shirt, white, small

Apr.

Nongshim Ramen Noodle Bowl, 24 pack

Cotton Balls, 100 count

“Thank You For Your Loyalty” cards, 30 count

Toluene POR-15 40404 Solvent, 1 quart

UV LED Nail Lamp

Cuticle Oil, value pack

Clear Acrylic Nail Tips, 500 count

Cathy Park Hong: Thank you. This is a different kind of … An atypical elegy because it’s like first of all, an elegy of humanize as a subject, whereas here, it’s like you anonymize your mother. And by referring to her, describing her by her labor as … And the way you sum up her character is by itemizing her purchases through Amazon as if she’s a sum of her purchases. And what I’ve noticed, first of all, was that her purchases are often related to her job as a nail salon worker, and it’s quantified, all of the supplies she gets.

But I also noticed that there’s also this constant mention of aspirin. What I notice here is the kind of toll that her labor has on her body and on her health. And the modesty, the bare modesty in which the purchases … There are so few purchases that cater to her own vanity. And I just thought, just from that, it was really beautiful. I was thinking of that poem where you were talking about the debt you feel that you have for your own mother, and I was wondering if you could talk about that poem and what you were thinking there.

Ocean Vuong: That’s a perfect example of a poem that I could not have written in a first collection. I just did not have the courage to do so. I always felt that the poem, Oh, my good, a poem should be lyrical, it should enact … That’s the first poem I’ve ever written that had no sentences in it. And to leave that as is, to borrow William Carlos Williams’ ideals of no ideas but in things. 

And I thought, to me, there’s this kind of modern faux democratic utopic, but also devastating effect of this apocalyptic of lay capitalism wherein there’s a biography through desire and how we showcase desire, or the receipts of our desire is our purchases. In that poem, there’s also gifts for her children. There are ways to decorate herself: a garden, a windowsill garden, a candle with her favorite scent. And it’s also not my mother’s. My mother never used Amazon.

And so this is important for me in the autobiographical angle is that … We talked about this backstage where I don’t replicate my family members in my work. I’ve never interviewed them for material. I would probably never write a reportage or a memoir about them. And many people feel that, oh, it’s a memoir, it’s … And it is in a sense that it’s contextually true. And then to me, the work of imaginative writing is to then launch a simulation that is very different, or the results might be very different from the life I lived.

And that curiosity of, What would a simulation look like?, interests me greatly because it demands an imagination. I think I was too cowardly on one hand, but I also think it was an ethical line I couldn’t breach to mine my family’s experience for my work. But I could experience them. That’s mine. I experienced the world, I experienced them, but I did not want to force them to reveal things for me. That’s where the imagination came in The mother in On Earth is very different than my mother.

And in that sense, my mother never bought any of those things, but she bought things like it, but she went to a nail supply depot run by a Vietnamese woman, and then they gossiped for three hours. And I would sit there listening to all this. But then I felt like the Amazon was a way to bring this life into the contemporary space and equalize it on its surface but then realize that so much of it is worked through labor, life, and desire. I felt like an autobiography is truer as a list of desires rather than a rendition of a son of a mother like, this here’s language transforming something to this mutable, elegiac dirge that could then be shared, whereas the object, as Williams says, is the common ground, that it exists in and of itself. And that was the interest. But I couldn’t have done it years ago. It took three books to really do that.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah. I’m going to ask one more question and then we’re going to open it up to the audience. I can’t believe it’s already that time. This is just a quick follow-up question, is to this idea of imagination as a simulation of truth. I also think of it as a kind of verisimilitude of truth because there’s such a vulnerability in your writing, which I think is what people really relate to. And it’s such a vulnerability that’s so unique that it’s luminous. There’s a luminous vulnerability to your writing. But because your imagination is so keen in finding, in shaping that simulation, how do you feel when people conflate your writing as memoir or as autobiographical?

Ocean Vuong: I thought it was going to be inevitable as a racialized subject because that becomes the only tenable space. And so I could have avoided all this by setting all of these conditions into a historical novel, which I’m interested in eventually, but it was very important … Or a sci-fi novel. All of this, I could just throw it onto a true fantastical simulation, which many writers have done: George Lucas, George R. Martin, what have you, Octavia Butler. But it was important for me to begin my career grounded in the aftermath of Vietnam as a mis-imagination that Americans have of it. No, I too will speak this. Tim O’Brien is not the last word. And it felt simple on one hand, obvious, but also deeply important. 

Because I want to add to that though, that me writing about this also does not exhaust the Vietnamese American experience. I’m very skeptical of the word representation. Representation is cheap. It’s much easier to publish a book, hire one professor, put one person or two people on stage and say, “You will represent all of them.” 

We don’t think of Vonnegut and Hemingway as representatives of white men, and yet the word representation is forced upon marginalized cultural makers in order to do away with what’s more costly and deeply valuable to me, which is presence. I don’t want to represent anybody, but if my work makes room for more Vietnamese American presence so that all of us can articulate everything that is true to us and idiosyncratic to us, that’s a major win. 

Why I began my three books, or my career deeply invested in autobiography, or the gesture of autobiography, is mostly in part due to Maxine Hong Kingston. And …

Cathy Park Hong: I was going to ask about her, but anyway.

Ocean Vuong: In her letters, she mentioned the woman warrior as her desire to write the great American novel, her contribution to this lineage. And somewhere along the line, her publisher said, “It will sell more if you call it a memoir.” And if you read that book, it’s not a memoir. There’s Fa Mulan, there’s dialogue, there’s ghosts. It’s so deeply crafted as a novel. It borrows all … it’s right out of Faulkner, Morrison, who’s a contemporary.

But I looked at that and I said, “I cannot have that moment, that anthropological moment be in vain.” Whatever pressured her to lose that footing, if I come out with a memoir, nothing will be reclaimed. It’s been decades. And if I just came out with just another memoir, if I didn’t impose myself in the imagination and to insist that these are Vietnamese characters, Vietnamese people are inspiring to me.

I’m not a marginalized writer. The people I write are in the center because when you say marginal, you have to ask marginal to whom? I’m not marginal to myself. The people I write about are not marginal to me. And I think to me, it was a statement. It wasn’t like this big statement to the world or whatever, it was a statement to myself. I had to start by centering the people around me. I could have dodged this whole thing. And maybe it would’ve been more exciting to something completely different, which I liked eventually, but I had to do it this way because, again, historically I’m deeply interested as a scholar in what has happened with Asian American lineages. And I wanted to see, it was really an experiment: How would I be received after Maxine, after Carlos Bulosan, after Cha, after Alexander Chee? What would that look like?

And I hate to say it, it’s still pretty bleak. I get immediately racialized. Reviews often talk about biography for most of it. But again, I do think it’s better. It depends on a lot of you. The present is an incredible moment to be together because we are the minority. The living are the minority. The dead outnumber us. And we get to make decisions. We get to say, “How will we carry each other? How will we carry our tax? How will we render each other?” And that’s an open question, and it’s a very powerful one. And I think it’s important to take it seriously.

Cathy Park Hong: Thank you. We have a little time for questions. Please don’t hesitate. OK.

Audience 1: Hi. Thank you for your work. You may have already answered this the entire afternoon, but what comes to my mind is in your own elegant words, given that we’re in the midst of at least two genocides, a psychopath running for the White House and the planet in the state it’s in, in your own elegant words, why does poetry matter now given this very difficult state?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I think poetry has always mattered, but I think in moments like this, there’s a false binary that is set up to almost test it in ways that I don’t see happen in, say, sculpture. We rarely ask, “Can sculpture save the world? Can dance, music?”

I opened a couple of weeks ago when there was this purported vote for a UN ceasefire, and it felt really bleak for my students and I, too, feel so relieved for a temporary ceasefire. And so it felt really apocalyptic for us to feel like there was a win, although it was devastatingly bleak. It felt absurd that if we were all in class, we were all an institution of learning and curiosity and supposedly progress, and here we are having a moment of gratitude for the briefest and ultimately the most brutal of reprieves is a momentary ceasefire.

But I told him, I said, “Every time a crisis like this happens, the culture will demand the poet to, one, either solve it, or two, that poetry means nothing. How dare you? You’re going to read a poem, you’re going to write a poem, while people starve, while people are murdered?” And I think that false binary creates the mythos of ultimatums that actually allides the center of what poetry can do, which is function in all of it. Poetry can function alongside all movements. It can also, in the example of Billy Collins and Lord Tennyson, assist the state in murder. Ultimately, I think the romanticization of it comes out of that question, well, will it save us? Or, oh, you think it’s going to save us? You’re an idiot. That allides the most potent mode of language or the most capacity for language on both sides.

All genocides begin with speeches. They begin with document. And what do politicians use but poetic tools like anaphora? Anaphora is a wonderful moment of launching into a promise without identifying how it’ll be executed. It’s a speech that builds itself by interrupting the protocols of its success through restarting again. Poetry and language itself has always been co-opted, and so when we charge the poet or the vocation with this hyperbolic false dichotomy, what we’re really saying is we’re alliding the harder questions, which is that language is this territory that gets occupied, coerce, manipulated. And we’re always in this to take it back.

My answer is that, write all the poems you want while you fight for each other. There is room for that. Not every day. It’s incredibly hard. But I’m not saying that in this surge of optimism or hyperbolic raison d’etre, I’m saying that as a historic truth. That has already been true — with Baidu and Tiananmen Square, with Amiri Baraka coming out of the Black arts — it’s been done.

I taught Césaire a few weeks ago, the notebooks of The Return of the Native Land. And that book is incredible because it begins with an accounting of colonial crimes on the people of Martinique literally by the list, by the catalog, and it ends with an anachronistic flashback of the revolt on a slave ship. Why does it end with the past? Césaire is saying that we’ve already been here. We have already overthrown the colonizers and the abusers and the murder. It’s been done. 

This is not a utopic dream that the poem can assist. And Césaire of course will be head of state, go on to be head of state of Martinique. That book is not the beginning of a literary career, it’s the beginning of a political one, and it was a book of poems.

To me, I encourage all of us, anytime a crisis happens … I lived through 9/11, I lived through … My book was coming out right after the murder of Trayvon Martin. And these questions arise again and again. And I think that false binary, demanding poetry to adhere to its false romantic ideals, either by denouncing it or demanding it as a panacea is a disservice to language. And at worse, it allows the corrupters of it to take and salvage that work and put a different kind of ethos into the center. 

(Applause) 

Ocean Vuong: For your questions this whole night. It’s beautiful.

Audience 2: My name is Teo and I’m a choreographer. And I’ve been really inspired by a lot of your work, specifically one of your pieces in Night Sky, “Seventh Circle of Earth.” And I really admire your ability to use yourself and also your subconscious to tell these really creative and imaginative stories. And sometimes I find that creating art is really easy and I feel like it just flows out of me, and sometimes I find that I’m fighting myself. And I’m wondering for you, how do you tap into your self-awareness and your self-actualization and explore memories and your past in a way that allows you to create?

Ocean Vuong: Do you have anything to say about this, Professor Hong?

Cathy Park Hong: I’m just hypnotized by what you’re saying.

Ocean Vuong: Well …

Cathy Park Hong: Sorry, I’m …

Ocean Vuong: Well, I was always skeptical of the anxiety of production in our culture. And I was really stifled creatively as a young writer. I started in New York. That’s just where I was after business school. And so it was a very competitive space, naturally. There’s a lot of voices. And I felt that productivity amongst my peers when I was 20, 21, trying to find my voice was deeply toxic. It was weaponized. We all have that friend who writes a poem a day and is on their fourth novel, and, “Oh, are you still doing that thing with that little sonnet?” And they mean well, for the most part. But I tried that. I said, “Oh God, I’m not really a poet, I’m just fucking around.” I think in that sense, it is like a deep Asian guilt. It’s like, oh, I’m not doing. I can’t. Rest is failure. And I had to really resist that.

And ironically, it was the study of Buddhism and the Eastern philosophy that really helped me. And in Buddhism, particularly there’s a Japanese Zen philosopher called Nishida, and he’s deeply important to me. He’s coming out of mid-century Japan. And he borrows this Buddhist idea that there’s a separation between consciousness and thought in that … Because in the West, from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” so thought is self. But in Buddhism, there’s consciousness and then there’s thought. And the metaphor he uses, that consciousness is the sky, thought is the cloud. Consciousness is there, it exists, it exists, and then thought arises when all the conditions, the moisture, wind, et cetera, brings forth thought. So for most of our lives, we will be conscious. In Buddhism, we’re conscious even when we’re asleep, and then thoughts come intermediately throughout.

When I turned to that, after struggling and with a deep sense of imposter syndrome and unproductivity, I looked to the Eastern philosophies, and it really nurtured me in saying, “Oh, all this is work.” Paying attention to the world is work. The writing is the residue of attention. And we trick ourselves into thinking, “I must make, I must make at the desk.” But when I tried to do that, I felt like I was making out of nothing. I didn’t have enough attention. I did not have enough thought. And if I slowed it down, if I stopped writing, I could live and pay attention. And attention is the greatest form of generosity. I think Simone Vale said that. And it’s an art in itself.

I have this fantasy of writing just eight books, if I’m very lucky, and then stopping. I have three so far; I just finished a fourth. If I get to eight, I want to be able to stop. I feel like, because writing demands so much care and attention, so much consideration — when you open a book, it’s a miraculous thing because you’re getting someone’s most considered self … their most worried, their most concerned, their most meticulous self.

On Earth, that’s 12 drafts of me. Usually I can only have one draft of the world and I mess up. But wow, that’s 12 versions of me. That’s really beautiful. Any book, Professor Hong’s book, my goodness, it’s so deeply raw and considered, and it feels like such this plentiful bounty, but I know she doesn’t just … Unless you do just …

Cathy Park Hong: Wrote it overnight. Yeah. 

(Audience laughter)

Ocean Vuong: Pray, tell, pray, tell if you do. But there’s so much labor in that. It’s years. I read Minor Feelings, I’m like, “This is decades, decades of thinking and being,” and how wonderful that is to be. But I think my ideal is not to be an author that just makes books and fills my corpus with it, but rather that the writing of books is an apprenticeship to see the world better. And I want to be able to use writing as a medium, as a means so that I can eventually, I think after eight books, look at the world much better, much more robustly without the pressure of turning it into something. That, to me, is the telos for myself. Can I one day use writing to train myself to look carefully at everything around me and let it just be? That’s the hope. I think that’s the ultimate goal for me.

Cathy Park Hong: Are we out of time? We are out of time. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this brilliant, brilliant evening. Yeah. Thank you.

(Applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)