GREENSBORO – Acclaimed poet, novelist, professor and photographer Ocean Vuong came to the Highland Center for the Arts Sunday afternoon and read a number of his poems as well as discussing his life and work, presented as the first of three talks of authors in the Back Roads Reading programs this summer.
He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1988, and came to this country in the mid-1990s, settling in the Hartford, Conn. area. His family was working class, as a nail salon manicurist (his mother) and factory employees.
While going through school he had jobs in the tobacco barns of the Connecticut River Valley and in fast-food restaurants. He was fortunate to have a number of teachers who inspired his interest in literature and writing, in high school, community college, at Brooklyn College and New York University.
Ocean Vuong has published two novels, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” and “The Emperor of Gladness” and two collections of poetry, “Night Sky With Exit Wounds” and “Time is a Mother.”
He received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2019, got a Whitney Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the American Book Award and has been given widespread recognition for the excellence of his writing.
He is a professor in modern poetry and poetics in the MFA program at New York University and also spends his time in Western Massachusetts.
Vuong began by reading some of his new poems, the first entitled “Independence Day,” which had a kind of rotating kaleidoscope succession of images, ending with the phrase, “You can be anywhere, be anyone in this land, the freest thing I know.”
“Sixteen” was a rather surrealistic meditation on how Abraham Lincoln might have felt during the Civil War, knowing the human cost of slaughtered soldiers.
“Theology” had amusing observations, “I thought that gravity was a law, which could be broken,” and, “The crickets sounded a language I didn’t understand.” It goes on to him being shot as a squirrel and then the vision of a man digging a hole for a casket.
“American Legend” was a more sequential fantasy of driving with his father to a veterinarian to put down their old dog, but deliberately causing an accident on a hairpin turn at high speed so his father slammed into him and died, fulfilling a deep need to touch him. And next he let the dog free to escape into the woods.
“The Last Dinosaur” got inside the mind of a lone dinosaur who survived the extinction of his species, with the amusing last line, “I was made to die but I’m here to stay.”
“Nothing” is more in a prose form that narrates the tragic story of a sister and brother’s escape to the West at the end of World War II in Germany, framed by the seemingly mundane act of shoveling snow and baking bread with another man.
The last poem he read was “The Seventh Circle of Birth” from his first volume of poetry, based on the circle of Hell reserved for punishing homosexuals in Dante’s Inferno, in reaction to hearing of the murder of a gay couple in Texas.
In the second half of this program, Vuong answered questions from the audience. He was asked about the difference of writing a novel rather than poetry, responding that he never sees any distinction. Above all he is a teacher more than a writer, and that we should share our knowledge freely.
Vuong called himself “an apprentice to the sentence,” for the sentence becomes a form of magical transmission, hopefully to inspire and delight his readers, getting sentences to do more and more.
Given his family background, he thinks it is so unlikely that he ever became a writer. But the women in his life growing up were all storytellers from a rich oral tradition of Vietnamese culture, and quite naturally they were his first teachers.
He was always very close to his mother and inevitably has been haunted by the ghosts of his Vietnam war in his writings.
Ocean Vuong had a remarkable presence as a speaker with a warm personality enlivened by wisdom and humor. He is extremely articulate and speaks from his heart. His creative imagination and originality give his poetry and novels a momentum and energy that makes it hard to set his books down. He draws us into his world, a characteristic of all great artists.
As a very observant person who immigrated from another country, he has many insights into the U.S., beyond what most people growing up here might be able to see. He takes the experiences of his personal life and gives them universal resonance: he is able to turn human suffering into beautiful and powerful words and encourage our compassion.
The Back Roads Reading project began in 2013 with the intention of providing poetry and prose readings around the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Its founder and director is Lisa von Kann. The next two programs will be a celebration of the poetry of David Budbill on July 19 and the personal appearance of the well known poet and novelist Julia Alvarez on August 2, both at the Highland Center for the Arts at 3 p.m. For information, go online to backroadsreading.org or email [email protected].
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
