"Space to Say 'I'm Sorry'": An Interview With Ocean Vuong

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is currently an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has received an Academy of American Poets award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in RHINO, diode, Lantern Review, Softblow, Crate, and PANK, among others. He keeps a blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com.

Vuong's poem "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" appears in Issue Twenty-Eight of The Collagist.  Here, he speaks with interviewer Amber Cook about his work.

1. “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” has such an emotional pull and weight. Where is the origin of this poem?

When a childhood friend of mine passed away a few years ago from HIV complications, I  didn’t know how to deal with the sudden actuality of grief, the slow weight of it.  I prayed and chanted mantras, I went to the temple and made offerings, asked the monks who spoke of karma and reincarnation, but it wasn't enough—I needed to speak to the dead. So I started writing letters to him. I wrote about twenty pages and, naturally, my pen started to insert line breaks. Soon, I had poems—poems I never meant to publish until a friend adamantly encouraged me to do so. Sometimes I would just sit there and fill page after page with “I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.” I think the technology of the poem, its ability to be honest yet deceptive at the same time, allows us a space to say “I'm sorry.” I think most of my poems are really just apologies—often to myself.

2. The enjambment in your poem works really effectively in pulling the reader through the work. I especially enjoy: “Your sunken chest I lathered/ until ivory streams filled the deep canals/ of your ribs. Like cream, they traced/ along your stomach, marbling/ in that flush of hair once soaked/ with whispers…” Do you have a specific technique for breaking your lines, or do you feel that these breaks come organically?

With this poem, I wanted to enact the feeling of fluidity, specifically of water—so the enjambments are meant to push the poem forward, to move towards the next line, the next life. The iambic stresses, I think, also add to this effect. The form is made to express the idea of continuation. So yes, strategy is involved, but not much: once I decide to write a poem a certain way, the rest of the attributes tend to coincide organically, kind of like switching into a certain gear if you will.

Another reason I think I enjamb this way is through the presence of the Vietnamese language, its echoes lingering perpetually in the back of my mind, even as I speak and compose in English. The Vietnamese language is extremely sensitive to stresses and inflections, so a child growing up in a Viet household would have a very fine-tuned ear for the way words sound, the texture and weight of syllables, etc..For example, the difference between love (tình) and to count (tính) is merely a matter of how a single word is lifted or lowered. I guess I find myself applying the same weight to inflections when writing poetry in English, and I think I favor the enjambments when there's a strong opportunity for tension, breaking a line when the poem continues on the left margin with a trochaic stress.

3. I’m really interested in your focus on the body and the function of the body in this poem, which I think echoes the subject matter masterfully. Do you often use the body as a vessel in your poetry? Or do you reserve its usage for specific subjects?

The body is a major vessel in my poetry. I would even go as far as to call it a slight obsession. As a Buddhist, I am trained to perpetually question the body, to study it and to never trust it. I think the fact of its impermanence, it's propensity towards aging and then, ultimately, its failure to function is quite fascinating. I think the possibility of discovering beauty and meaning on and inside the body are endless. One can spend a lifetime exploring the body and still come up with very few answers.

4. Can you name a few poets you’ve stumbled upon recently that have impacted you in some way? How have they impacted you?

I am always humbled and inspired by what poets are creating these days. Some of the younger writers I turn to again and again are Jericho Brown, Saeed Jones, James Allen Hall, Khaled Matawa, Joseph O. Legaspi, Matthew Hittinger, Kim Addonizio, Tracy Brimhall, and Ben Lerner, who I am indebted to for showing me a great plethora of ingenious writers I would otherwise never come across on my own like Micheal Palmer, Cyrus Console, Mark McMorris, Kamau Brathwaite, and C.D. Wright.

5. Is “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” part of a larger project? Are there any other projects that you’re working on?

Yes, there is currently a series of poems, each titled “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” that have stemmed from the letters I wrote to my deceased friend. In the series, I decided not to address the disease save for in the titles. I wanted the virus to exist only through its felt absence as a way of mirroring what I see as my generation's failure to grapple the gravity of HIV/AIDS in our society. For some reason, so many young people think of HIV as a disease of the past, that the threat is no longer the epidemic of the eighties and yet, alarmingly, one out of five gay men under the age of thirty in New York City are HIV positive.

I hope to eventually weave this series into my first full-length manuscript, which is what I am working towards, although I am in no hurry. I work slow and think I will be very lucky and happy to publish 2-3 collections in my lifetime.

Thank you for the interview and for your questions. They were very provocative and invigorating. I am honored and blessed to share with you my words.