hi, i wrote an essay/letter in The New Yorker on growing up with a mother with PTSD, and the inheritance of war. Mother’s Day can be a complicated day for many, if not all of us, and i just wanted to acknowledge that. and also, perhaps, that love does not have to be perfect, or even smooth, in order be worthy.
hugs, –ocean
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#poetry #essay #ocean vuong #mothersday #trauma #war #thenewyorkerDo you understand? I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and my mother was inside me asking Where are we? Where are we, my dear?
My beautiful humans of Tumblr! I wrote an essay on being a poet of color in America and it’s featured in Guernica! It’s an important issue from a great magazine! –Ocean Vuong
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/ocean-vuong-i-remember-anyway/
thanks to this blogger for her gorgeous reading of my poem “aubade with burning city.” this made my day : )–ocean
i have two new poems up at POETRY Magazine from the poetry foundation:
I remember the table. It exists and does not exist. An inheritance assembled with bare mouths. And nouns. And ash. I remember the table as a shard embedded into the brain. How some will call it shrapnel.
And I will call it art.
from “I Remember Anyway,” Ocean Vuong
Poetry: “Here’s / the room with everyone in it.”
i have a poem in the NEW YORKER today titled “someday i’ll love ocean vuong”. happy last few days of poetry month <3
oh my god someone turned my poem into a beautiful word song i’m crying
Roger Bonair-Agard record Ocean Vuong’s ‘Homewrecker’ from the collection ‘No’ from YesYes Books
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet who spent his teenage years in Hartford, CT. He is, even as a man still in mis mid-twenties, preternaturally wise. If my grandfather were gay and Asian, he’d be Ocean Vuong. His poems are amongst other things, patient, and always willing to step off the ledge with complete confidence that the air will hold them. Get down with this poem. Seek out his book.
And yet, in a time where the mainstream seems to continually question the power and validity of art, and especially of poetry, its need, its purpose, in a generation obsessed with appearances, of status updates and smiling selfies bathed (corrected?) in the golden light of filters, in which it has become more and more difficult for us to say aloud, to one another: I am hurt. I am scared. What happens now?, the poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to—because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions—and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will.
it was always October / in my throat.
destroymylife