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An Analysis of "Prayer for the Newly Damned" by Ocean Vuong

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An Analysis of "Prayer for the Newly Damned" by Ocean Vuong

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An analysis of "Home Wrecker" by Ocean Vuong

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An analysis of "Home Wrecker" by Ocean Vuong

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Audio Recording of Home Wrecker by Ocean Vuong

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Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poet/ocean-vuong.

“About.” Oceanvuong, www.oceanvuong.com/about.

“Ocean Vuong.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ocean-vuong.

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Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong is an American contemporary poet critically acclaimed for his work. Vuong has been featured in many publications such as the New York Times, PBS Newshour, Vice, Harpers, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Nation, and the American Poetry Review.

After immigrating to America at age two, Vuong was raised in Harford, Connecticut and received his Bachelors of Arts from the City University of New York. Where he achieved the honors of the Academy of American Poets college prize. Later, Vuong was awarded a Masters of Fine Arts from New York University. His poetry focuses on themes of desire, transformation, and violent loss as seen in his critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. This collection was recognized as one of the New York Times Top 10 books of 2016 with high praise from critics. Other awards for this collection were the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for best first collection. Ocean Vuong has also received other high achievements such as being acclaimed into Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers alongside Hillary Clinton and Justin Trudeau, and many more. Today, Ocean Vuong works at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as an assistant professor for the MFA program for Poets and Writers. The release for Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that has already received high praise from critics is on for public release on June 5th.

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Prayer for the Newly Damned -Ocean Vuong

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Prayer for the Newly Damned -Ocean Vuong

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Dearest Father, forgive me for I have seen.

Behind the wooden fence, a field lit

with summer, a man pressing a shank

to another man’s throat. Steel turning to light

on sweat-slick neck. Forgive me

for not calling Your name. For thinking:

this must be how every prayer

begins—the word Please cleaving

the wind into fragments, into what

a boy hears in his need to know

how pain blesses the body back

to its sinner. The hour suddenly

stilled. The man genuflected, his lips

pressed to black boot as the words spilled

from his mouth like rosaries

shattering from too much

Father. Am I wrong to love

those eyes, to see something so clear

and blue—beg to remain

clear and blue? Did my cheek twitch

when that darkness bloomed from his crotch

and trickled into ochre dirt? Father,

how quickly the blade becomes

You. But let me begin again: There’s a boy

kneeling in a house with every door kicked open

to summer. There’s a question corroding

his tongue. There’s a knife touching

Your name lodged inside the throat.

Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy

no longer a boy? Please—

what becomes of the shepherd

when the sheep are cannibals?

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It’s more like the sound

a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer to the rib’s
hollowed hum. We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance. It’s not
about the light—but how dark
it makes you depending
on where you stand.
Depending on where you stand
his name can appear like moonlight
shredded in a dead dog’s fur.
His name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. We kept saying Yes—
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary.
But here we are—standing
in the cold field, him calling
for the girl. The girl
beside him. Frosted grass
snapping beneath her hooves.

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And this is how we danced: with our mothers’
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. And this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

sweeping though my hair—my hair a wildfire.
We covered our ears and your father’s tantrum turned

into heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above the fireplace.

Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god
to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car,

the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

This is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue

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Video of Vuong reading his poem "Telemachus"

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Video of Vuong reading his poem "Telemachus"

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Ocean Vuong's first poems were born of uncertainty.

In 2008, grieving for his grandmother in the Hartford, Connecticut, apartment where she helped raise him, Vuong turned to the page. He began to write, preserving the folk songs that she had sung to her neighbors from the Vietnamese rice farm of her youth - communicating news of marriages, sharing love songs and other facts of life.

He found himself guessing where she would have put line breaks and other elements of form. Already experimenting with her words, he thought, "Why don't I give my own hand a try next to hers?" The result was a collaboration across time, his grandmother's voice beside his own.

Growing up, she had taught him how to look at the blank walls in their home as a blank canvas for the imagination. And as Vuong began writing poetry, he learned to leave part of that canvas for the reader. In this way, he subverts the historical erasure of stories like his: of immigration, of queerness, of the aftermath of war.

The poems in "Night Sky With Exit Wounds," which came out this month, navigate the in-between of those realities. His piece "Notebook Fragments" states: "In Vietnamese, the word for grenade is 'bom,' from the French 'pomme,' / meaning 'apple.'"

Then, a line break. Silence. The next stanza: "Or was it American for 'bomb'?"

"I often think that, particularly in this country and in the West in general, we often look at empty space, we look at silence, as a sort of death, a sort of weakness," he said. "But I think the practice of poetry teaches us that silence and emptiness and space in general is actually quite potent."

In "Telemachus," Vuong builds a mythology from the absence of a father figure, one that disappears even on the page as we read it. The speaker pulls his father "through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail / the waves rush in to erase. Because the city / beyond the shore is no longer / where we left it."

Vuong's book is an experiment in form, which moves as restlessly between different modes of storytelling as it does between the violent and the erotic. "Anaphora as Coping Mechanism" lays out such a scene: "He dies as your heart beats faster, / as another war coppers the sky."

The reader is a part of this ambiguity. And the act of navigating that space holds political importance, he said.

"The reading of poetry is in itself an act of political resistance to the mainstream," he said. "Particularly in this election cycle, where there is this great anxiety for certainty. What is your position? What is your stance? Why are you flip-flopping? There's an anxiety of certainty and power and boldness ... But poetry acknowledges the true complexity of what it means to be human, which is that nothing is ever that certain."

The book "holds a lot of questions," he said. "Some of the questions are, how does one live in the intersectional spaces of trauma, now, in our American time? What does it mean to be a product of an American war in America?"
You can read "Telemachus," or hear Vuong read it, below. Telemachus
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair

through sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

beyond the shore is no longer
where he left it. Because the bombed

cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

I might sink. Do you know who I am,
ba? But the answer never comes. The answer

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think

he could be anyone's father, found
the way a green bottle might appear

at a boy's feet containing a year
he has never touched. I touch

his ears. No use. The neck's
bruising. I turn him over. To face

it. The cathedral in his sea-black eyes.
The face not mine but one I will wear

to kiss all my lovers goodnight:
the way I seal my father's lips

with my own and begin
the faithful work of drowning.
Ocean Vuong is the author of "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). A 2016 Whiting Award winner and Ruth Lilly fellow, he has received honors from The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His writings have been featured in the Kenyon Review, GRANTA, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.

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Ocean Vuong on why reading poetry is political

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Ocean Vuong's first poems were born of uncertainty. In 2008, grieving for his grandmother in the Hartford, Connecticut, apartment where she helped raise him, Vuong turned to the page. He began to write, preserving the folk songs that she had sung to her neighbors from the Vietnamese rice farm of her youth - communicating news of marriages, sharing love songs and other facts of life.

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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 Caff è 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 Caff è 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."

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How a Poet Named Ocean Means to Fix the English Language

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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."