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For Buddhist poet and novelist Ocean Vuong, being an artist requires a willingness to get close to what scares him. As a writer, he sees language as an architecture to reckon with loss, both personal and communal, and his poetry is informed by his decades-long practice of death meditation. His latest collection, Time Is a Mother, was written in the aftermath of his motherās death from breast cancer in late 2019 and offers an intimate portrait of grief, loss, and survival.
In todayās episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen and co-host Sharon Salzberg sit down with Vuong to discuss Buddhist rituals of mourning, the poem as a death meditation, and how he protects his sense of wonder. To close, Vuong reads a poem from his new collection.
Life As It Is is a podcast series that features Buddhist practitioners speaking about their everyday lives. You can listen to more of Life As It Is on Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio.
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Ocean Vuong: After losing my mother, and then being in lockdown, I looked at the material, and I realized Iām always grieving. The poem is always an elegy and a love poem as well. And I think thatās also very close to my Buddhist practice, particularly with doing death meditation. For me, the poem is a profound death meditation. Itās a place where death doesnāt even have to be mentioned in order to be felt, which is something that Iām really interested in as an artist: how do I have a felt absence effect in the work? Sometimes you can feel that death and dying haunt the work without it having to be named. James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. Iām James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Youāve just heard Buddhist poet and novelist Ocean Vuong discussing his new book, Time Is a Mother. Written in the aftermath of Vuongās motherās death, the collection offers an intimate portrait of grief, loss, and survival. In todayās episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Ocean to discuss Buddhist rituals of mourning, the poem as a death meditation, and how to navigate the eight worldly winds as a writer. To close, he reads a poem from his new collection. James Shaheen: So Iām here with poet and writer Ocean Vuong and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Ocean. Hi, Sharon. Itās great to be with you both. Ocean Vuong: Thank you for having me. Itās a pleasure. James Shaheen: Itās a pleasure for us too, and congratulations on your new book. Ocean Vuong: Thank you, thank you. Itās strange, publishing, I think, particularly as a Buddhist because itās just another manifestation of your ideas. So I try not to see it as a parade, which is very antithetical to how my publisher wants to see it, but we make it work. I do all this stuff, but in my heart, I have to remind myself that this is not the top of the mountain, if you will. James Shaheen: Right. The new collection is Time Is a Mother, and Iām wondering if you can talk a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it. Ocean Vuong: Itās hard to say. I write one poem at a time, and I write very slowly. My first collection took eight years; this one took about six. I realized that so much of my work is around loss and grief, and so much of Buddhism is the investigation therein, and so I think, for me, the American enterprise of curiosity and artmaking is one in which we reckon with loss. This is a country filled with ghosts. And so the private and then the personal and then the social loss all came to a head after I lost my mother to breast cancer in November 2019, and then in March, we were in COVID. So it was a profound moment that I think we all go through when we lose our mothers, our parents, that this is samsara. This is why weāre here. This is dukkha. And the question for the artist is how do I make sense of it? To me, language is the perfect architecture in which you can build something where we can then enter collectively, because itās a communal tool, in order to feel and think, and so poems happened to be the perfect medium for that. James Shaheen: Did you write most of this in lockdown during the pandemic, or had it already begun? Ocean Vuong: I wrote about half of it before. But after losing my mother, and then being in lockdown, I looked at the material, and I realized Iām always grieving. The poem is always an elegy and a love poem as well. And I think thatās also very close to my Buddhist practice, particularly with doing death meditation. For me, the poem is a profound death meditation. Itās a place where death doesnāt even have to be mentioned in order to be felt, which is something that Iām really interested in as an artist: how do I have a felt absence effect in the work? Sometimes you can feel that death and dying haunt the work without it having to be named. James Shaheen: You grew up in a Buddhist family, and youāve described your introduction to Buddhism as coming through rituals and care. Can you share more about the Buddhism of your childhood? Ocean Vuong: Yeah, like most Vietnamese Mahayana traditions, itās heavily ritualistic: incense and making offerings. Because a lot of my family was illiterate, they were not that privy to the lectures or the sutras or the teachings. They would hear the oral teachings at the temple. But most of it was this adherence to these rituals. And it wasnāt until my mother passed that I realized the great wisdom and value in having these rituals and why so many Buddhist traditions have been doing this for over 1,000 years in so many contexts, kneeling on this tiled floor for two hours and prostrating over 100 times, holding an incense to your forehead as it burns and burns your fingers. Your hands are trembling from the ache. I realized that this whole ritual was for us. It wasnāt for the statues or the bodhisattvas. It was for the grievers because now our pain, the pain that we felt inside, was now manifested bodily, and in fact, that act was a sort of communion with body and soul. And so I felt utterly relieved to see those around me, my family members, the sangha, in so much bodily pain from all this, which is on the one hand nothing compared to the pain of the heart of losing your mother, but it suddenly made sense. It was a realignment of body and soul. And I said, Oh, this is why. This is why weāve been doing it. And whether you believe it or not or understand the teachings or not, the rituals kind of force you, or rather recruit you into aligning with your suffering. So itās a prolonged meditation. It was no different than walking meditation. James Shaheen: You later studied Buddhist texts. How did that change your relationship to the Buddhism you grew up with? Or did it simply affirm it or deepen it? Ocean Vuong: It deepened and expanded it because now I realized, āOh, this makes sense.ā That incense was about intention. It was about making offerings. It was about mentally, bodily meditation, somatic meditation, about intention. When you put the fruit on the altar, my mother would say, āThe Buddha is hungry,ā or āOur ancestors are hungry,ā or āLook at this, thereās so much dust on there. We have to be better, we have to clean up the dust and be at our best when weāre offering something to our ancestors and the Buddha.ā And it was this profound moment of dignifying being present. It was relieving your own concerns, your own selfishness, and literally cleaning and sweeping the small altar. And it was still impactful, even if you donāt know the teachings. Knowing the teachings really do just affirm this. This was all part of the practice. And the beauty of it is that it works whether you understand it or not. Thatās not always true with literature. You do have to know the words as a medium to finish the book and talk about it. But so much of the ritualistic aspects of it recruit the community to commit to mindfulness, even without knowledge of the text. And that was really beautiful. James Shaheen: Youāve also spoken about the tension you experienced between being a Buddhist and being a poet. In fact, you said that you plan to stop writing at some point. Can you share a little bit more about this tension? Will you actually stop writing? Ocean Vuong: In the contemporary context that I live in, being an author, publicity, touring, those are things that Iām speaking specifically to that I feel are very antithetical to being a successful, or rather a skillful, Buddhist. I think of the eight winds. The tree must stay firm in the eight winds, and itās really hard when you enter spaces and thereās a worshipful attitude to it. I joke and say if I were to assess myself, I would say Iām severely overrated because thereās so much praise out there. And thereās also criticism. But I think I realized that for me, the work is finished. So if my work is finished, the writing is complete, why does the praise still live on? I think Iām very skeptical of that. Iām suspicious of that energy, and Iām very wary of that because to me, making a book is akin to sending a raft downriver, and you have to stay on the shore to live your life. You canāt live on the raft. I think Iāve seen a lot of my peers live on that raft, and that raft starts to chip away and before you know it, theyāre neck deep in the river, and itās a big struggle. Itās a big shock when that raft goes away. And so for me, there has to be a difference between living and making. You make something, you send it down river, but you have to stay on the steady ground of the shore. So I donāt know. I havenāt found a way to do it well. If I do, then I hope I can still write because I love this. This is the only thing that I can do really well. I would still write for myself, but I guess what I mean is this public, commercialized function of publication. James Shaheen: Thatās what I wanted to ask about, the act of writing itself. It seems to me that when we do something really well, we have to get out of our own way. Ocean Vuong: Absolutely. You realize that youāre really a conductor of energies. I talked about this when people asked me about the themes and subjects in my books. When I wrote my first book of poems, right away, my peers and editors and even teachers would say, āWell, now what are you going to do? You already wrote about the Vietnam War and American violence,ā as if I should now write about Mars. But thereās this capitalistic anxiety to reinvent yourself, to kind of see the book as an ultimate and finite container of ideas. Thatās akin to this market anxiety of āNow better tasting,ā Now, with a brand new look.ā We see this when we shop all the time. But I wanted to have a different approach to my work in seeing the books as conductors. Theyāre conduits of the same energy. They are material manifestations of conductors, and every book actually carries the same themes and obsessions, but with a different medium, a different approach. James Shaheen: One more question before I turn this over to Sharon for a moment. How do you stay on shore? How do you stay grounded? Ocean Vuong: Itās hard. You have to keep doing it. When the praise comes, it feels good, and then you have to watch it. Itās like watching the breath: āOh, there it is. I feel the rush of dopamine.ā And then when you start watching it, you realize itās divorced from you, and thereās a certain truth that happens when you realize, āOh, this has nothing to do with me. This is someone elseās projection, which is valid, but I canāt hold on to it.ā I canāt become possessive of good news because then I will drift away. It will take me down with the current. And sometimes Iām good at it, and sometimes Iām not. Iām not among the monastics, who can be very stoic and control their demeanor. Sometimes I get a good email, and I scream and jump. So to me, that would be a failing, but sometimes, it goes beyond you, and then you get swept away a bit. So I donāt think Iām firmly on the shore. I think I get pulled a little bit, and then I struggle upstream back on the banks soaking wet. Thatās actually probably more accurate to my experience. Sharon Salzberg: So you grew up surrounded by storytellers, and youāve spoken about how you see writing as a kind of communal exchange. Iām wondering if you can share more about how the styles of storytelling you encountered as a child influence your poetry. Ocean Vuong: Absolutely. I think when we think of the refugee, we often think of a passive, needful, and often pandering subject and a victim of something. Thereās this perennial victimhood that is reductive to the identity of people, people who are very complex. For me, I like to reorient how we see refugees as people who are actually incredibly creative and innovative and have to make life-saving decisions not only for themselves but for the people they love. In other words, nobody survives by accident. Survival is an innovative act. I saw that right away with the women in my family in the stories they decided to tell. They had to make decisions. The mind can only hold so much, so what do you remember? What do you leave behind? Theyāre doing cultural work. As a culture, weāre having discussions now of which work do we read and which work should we leave in the past. Who do we carry? Whoās problematic? Which texts are harmful? Weāre doing this all the time as a culture, and often itās in institutions and discussions and syllabuses. Iām in institutions now as a professor, and this happens. But I realized these women were doing this already on the boats. As theyāre fleeing, theyāre deciding: What do I give to my children, to my grandchildren? What stories do I pass on so that they can make use of? And then before you know it, youāre at the heart of civilization. You can go back to the epic poets of Gilgamesh or Homer and the Iliad. Those texts were so vital to the flourishing of our cultures because they were civic treaties. Itās all about oneās obligation to the community through reciprocal civic bonds. I felt the same thing happened with how they told stories because there was always a lesson. There was always a purpose. There was always an allegory or parable. Even when they told their own stories, you realize that they were edited down every time they told them, and these were actually master classes for a young future writer. I realized that I was at the heart of a master class. How my grandmother would pause over details, what details to leave in, what to gloss over, how she sped up time and how she slowed it down. I would learn much later in college in Faulkner and Whitman and Toni Morrison, and I realized my grandmother was doing this intuitively. And so when I look at my personal canon of creativity, the women who raised me are right up there with the Faulkners and the Joyces and the Virginia Woolfs and James Baldwins. James Shaheen: Youāve talked about the ālanguage labā and the linguistic innovation that takes place in queer communities of color. Iām wondering if you can share a little bit about the role poetry plays in articulating different possible futures. Ocean Vuong: Yeah, it was always poetryās role. I always felt that as long as there were soldiers, there were poets, and I think thatās always true, that the history of poetry is the history of displacement. Itās the history of war. Itās our species-wide condition. And thatās why I think it can never die, regardless of how we read it. Thereās this conversation about the crisis of printing, but now thereās Twitter poetry, thereās Instagram poetry because itās so portable. Anytime you have a marginalized community, you realize that innovation occurs at the most portable and malleable forms of art. This is true with hip-hop and how hip-hop blurs into poetry for communities of color in spoken-word traditions. You just need the self, the body, and it could happen anywhere. It has the power to interrupt. You donāt need a plot or context. There doesnāt need to be a setup. A poem can happen at any given moment. The power to interrupt and the power to be portable is why it can cross so many borders and so many communities and why it means so much to so many people because you can participate in it. I tell my students this. I tell them that to be a nurse or a doctor, you have to get a nursing degree, you have to go to medical school for eight years, maybe a decade. But if you want to be a poet, you could do it tonight. You could do it right now. And thereās an incredible exhilaration of power that the form really offers you. Sharon Salzberg: Poetry itself I find intimidating, even though I love language and words and I write. Thereās something about that particular kind of creation. Maybe I have to think of it more as just speaking a truth and not getting fancier than that because in my mind, itās incredibly beyond me. Ocean Vuong: Yeah, poetry is up against so much, and often, particularly in the 20th century, it was kind of cajoled into institutions. The project of canonization, started by Matthew Arnold in the 19th century, was to prevent the working class and the peasantry from revolting. He saw that the Enlightenment created a lot of suspicion amongst Europe with the church, and so the church was losing its hold on its power over the populace. Matthew Arnold was asking how do we prevent what happened in France and America? How do we prevent revolutions? This was at the time of Marx, Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, and so he said, āWhat if we replace the church and Christianity with literature?ā And thatās what began the English canon. The English canon was very middle class. The books and the poems that went in there were a way to kind of empathize with those who live under chandeliers so that we realize that the rich also suffer. Itās actually interesting because at the heart of that is Buddhist rhetoric, but for absolutely sinister means. Itās like, āWe all suffer, so therefore, donāt overthrow us. Weāre just like you. We suffer too.ā And so right away, itās now institutionalized, and thereās a sense that you have to decode it to know its secrets. That was the great flaw of the institutionalization of poetry in the 20th century. And it still sticks. People feel frustrated with poetry because they feel like itās beyond them because weāre taught to plunder a text for a thesis. As soon as weāre in elementary school, itās like, whatās the summary of this passage? Critical thinking and close reading tell us that we are outside of meaning, and reading will help us enter, and then we become hunters in the text. But thatās only one way of reading, and itās a failure of our pedagogy because another way to read is to read a poem the way we experience weather. What is the meaning of rain? Rain doesnāt have a secret. It exists. Itās the same with music. You experience music. Why do we cry listening to Bach? Thereās no meaning inherent in the notes. This is true with mantras. Thereās no inherent meaning, but the intention creates a profound effect on the sonic wave and then the brain and then the emotions. And so part of my work as an educator is to undo a lot of these strict ways of reading that have been hammered into our students, and they get really excited but also really nervous, just like you described. Theyāre like, āOh, my God, what do you mean, that could be anything?ā And I say, āYeah, just like weather and music, just experience it, and then you realize that thereās so much pleasure.ā And I have to turn to the Eastern poets, who, by the way, were influenced by Buddhism, like Issa and Basho, the 18th- and 17th-century Japanese poets. One of my favorite Issa poems is the haiku, āCrickets on a log, floating downriver, still singing.ā You donāt need to decode that. You can get a PhD on it if you like. Nobody will be upset. But you donāt need to. Itās there. To me, poetry is both rhetoric and the inaction of life as it is perceived. Itās a phenomenological approach, and thereās no right or wrong way to experience it. Sharon Salzberg: Thatās beautiful. Thank you for that. I want to go back for a moment to the influences you had as a child. You attended Baptist church services with friends, where you say you developed an infatuation with Noahās ark and the idea of building a vessel for the future when the apocalypse comes. Can you speak a little bit more about Noahās Ark and what it means to you? What would you put in your vessel for the future? Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I thought it was real. I was seven years old, going into a church. In the neighborhood I lived in Harford, it was mostly a Black and brown church. I experienced these myths, and to me, they made perfect sense with the myth of Leloii that my grandmother would tell me about, the king who defended the Chinese invasion in ancient Vietnam who went to the lake and summoned the turtle who leapt out of the lake and gave him the sword to defend the country. I thought that was real, and so when I heard Noahās Ark, I was like, āYeah, that sounds right,ā this great flood coming and then this responsibility of discernment, which is so important for Christian thinking. And I think for me, itās important for Buddhism too. Another way to translate mindfulness is discernment. What good things will you put into what you make, regardless of what youāre making? You can be a shoemaker or a poet like myself, but when you think about that, it becomes no longer a task or a job but a vocation that is invested in a spiritual intention. And that makes the work so much better. And it also makes you so much better because youāre now imbuing the object and the task with a personhood, a DNA of a selfhood. You can see it in someone who cooks a meal. They cook the same recipe, but the person who cooks it with intention and with love, that meal comes out a lot better. Weāve all seen that when weāve cooked a meal when weāre stressed or weāre hurried or anxious, it comes out not a little sloppy, not the way we want it. So Noahās Ark was so important to me, because I realized thinking back on it is that I always had the agency to decide what words. If the poem is the arc, then which words? And you have to interrogate yourself, why this word, as opposed to the others? Itās a profound, elongated practice of imbuing care into what you do. Sharon Salzberg: Itās almost like reclaiming the right to poetry or the right to creativity is like reclaiming the right to love. Because if we donāt have a sense of agency, if we think itās all in the hands of another, someone judging us, someone assessing us, someone deciding if our effort is worthy or not, itās like feeling that love is in the hands of another, and they either bestow it upon us or take it away, in which case we have nothing. But we can think of them both more as a capacity within ourselves that other people may ignite or inspire or threaten, but itās ultimately ours. And we need to claim that with some joy and self-respect, and then itās like a whole other endeavor. Ocean Vuong: Thatās such a beautiful way of thinking about it because I think we slip in too easily to seeing love as a transactional endeavor where itās like, Do you love me? And do I love you? And so thereās almost this one-to-one transaction that we demand of each other. And itās so much more beautiful and proactive to see it as a capacious potentiality that we have. James Shaheen: You know, you talked about Noahās Ark and the turtle leaping out of the lake and how you believed these things. I associate those sorts of beliefs with my childhood, and itās kind of like the obsession with literal truth ends up stamping those out. You mentioned at one point that you begin with truth and move toward art. I wonder if thereās anything analogous to coming back to that symbolic language as opposed to this forced literal truth that expunges any kind of creative thinking in terms of myth or the stories that we learned as children. Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I think about this all the time. I think for me, as an artist, there has to be an allegiance to wonder and awe and mystery and a willingness to quest beyond facts and truth. I think thatās the artistās role: to go to the cliff of knowledge and look over it and say, āIt looks terrifying and thereās no light, but what can I see with my little flashlight, with my little lamp?ā Sometimes you set your lamp down, and you just start digging. Sometimes thereās nothing there, and sometimes, all of a sudden, thereās a flash of bone, and you stumble on something. I think that is a very difficult endeavor for the soul. Itās very expensive on the soul to do that work because thereās very little support for it because itās so ephemeral and malleable and abstract, whereas science and truth and the real and the literal is how adults traffic. Itās the currency of the real that we value in the West. Empirical knowledge is something that is a testament to make anything happen. And itās hard. I think this is why a lot of artists get snuffed out throughout adulthood. They get snuffed out when they start to commercialize, when they start to talk to presses or galleries or museums, who can only see āthe numbers,ā which is such a sinister way of thinking about it, but that is the world that we live in. And so for me, itās all about this balance. I put on a different hat when I go in to talk to the commercial side of things, and I understand and respect that thatās what we have to do because the material limitations that we currently live in dictate that I need the book to speak to people, just like I have a library, and behind every library is a marketing team and a publicity department. And so until I can beam my poems into othersā heads, and vice versa, this is what we have to work with. But a lot of creativity gets snuffed out along the way. I actually think that adulthood, or growing up, if we take it into our own hands, is actually the perfect medium to preserve this because weāre stronger, we have more experience, and weāre better at protecting our sense of wonder, whereas when weāre children, it gets knocked out so quickly. Sometimes itās strong enough to last through childhood, but we donāt have the tools to defend it and to protect it and to preserve it, and so by the time we grow older, we get very cold and bitter. But I think on the other hand, if we make it our adulthood work to revitalize that fire of wonder, we realize we have a lot of skills as adults to really keep that: meditation skills, mindfulness, we can read more. We have so much more capacity to defend this. I donāt see it as innocence, but I see it as wonder. And itās not about age. You can keep that wonder for as long as you live. Itās about the social pressure to snuff it out in order to be āproductive.ā We can easily undo that, and in fact, as adults, I think weāre better suited to undo that. James Shaheen: You often say that you write to the terrified versions of yourself. Can you say a little bit about how fear factors in your work and what you mean by that? Ocean Vuong: I often tell my students, āYou should scare yourself, but you shouldnāt be scared of yourself.ā Often people also ask me, āHow can you be so vulnerable in your work? How do you do that? What does it take? And doesnāt it destroy you?ā Sometimes I guiltily say, āNot at all,ā because this is what I chose to do. And I think this is informed by Buddhism, which is that the world is dark, and it could very well get darker. If youāre going to be an artist, you have to look at it. Itās what we signed up for, to look long and hard at what is the most difficult part of samsara, of the human condition, and to make meaning out of it, to make something out of it, so that it could be shared and understood. Thereās this idea of questing towards phenomena, which is so important to Buddhists. To me, this is right there with the task of the artist, and so I donāt see it as a burden or a difficulty. To me, to get close to the terror is to get close to the human, and thatās the job. Thatās the job description. James Shaheen: You begin this latest collection, Time Is a Mother, with a line from the Peruvian poet CĆ©sar Vallejo, who writes, āForgive me, Lord: Iāve died so little.ā Can you share a little bit about that epigraph and the relationship you see between poetry and death? Ocean Vuong: I love Vallejo. To me, it has that quintessential plea to a higher being, which is poetryās classical condition. Before Homer began the Iliad, he pleaded to the muses: āHelp me do this. I canāt do it myself.ā I love that. In Buddhism, I think that same plea occurs, but itās more horizontal. Itās less vertical, and itās more horizontal. Itās a plea to the world: āHelp me do this, world.ā The books, the people we know, our teachers, present and gone. Thatās actually the spiritual crisis of the artist is to say that Iām not there. And I think what he means by that is I know so little. To die so little, to suffer so little is, to know so little, and that pain is also a vehicle of knowledge. It may very well be knowledge itself. And so I think that is actually the seat of a lot of my work, and I wrote that to remind myself that. Weāre never there. If the destination is clear in sight, then thereās no point of going, no point of navigating the world. And so everything begins with this cry but also this admittance that weāre still so far from the knowledge that we need. Sharon Salzberg: Youāve mentioned that you live across the street from a cemetery, and youāve been practicing death meditation since the age of 15. Iām wondering if your relationship to this practice has changed over the years and how it might have influenced your writing. Ocean Vuong: It influenced my writing, and it influenced my life. You do death meditation, and itās hard to really be mad at anybody after because you get close to this condition that as mammals, we are so terrified of. I think thatās such a beautiful thing. You see an ant and you slap the table next to it, and it scurries in absolute frantic energy trying to preserve its life. I think thatās such a beautiful fact that weāre all in this to stay longer, and then the fact that we have to leave reminds us that there is that final door. When we think about passing through that final door, itās hard to have these petty thoughts about who does the dishes or who takes out the garbage or something a colleague said in a committee meeting or what have you. It all fades away. And so itās a really powerful tool to center ourselves back to what matters, back to that Noahās Ark. To me, those two philosophies go hand in hand, those two meditations. The death meditation takes us back to the seat, the workshop of the Ark. Itās like now that the silly pettiness is out of me, for now, I can get to work and I can build something valuable and useful to myself and others. Ever since I was 15, that has been my North Star. But I would say that despite how much death meditation Iāve done, it never prepared me for the death of my mother. I thought that I was some sort of expert, particularly among my family. There were about eight of us there, and I was kind of leading the way. I was able to read the signs of death, and I could tell my aunts and uncles whatās happening. And when my mother took her last breath, all of a sudden, I realized I was just kneeling next to her bed wailing, screaming into her sheets. And I realized that thereās nothing that you can do to prepare you for the ultimate truth. Thereās still, in retrospect, a beauty in that, in watching death occur, because it is the ultimate truth. Honesty, for example, is truth that requires a medium. Honesty is the vehicle of truth. But death needs no vehicle. It is itself. And Iāve never seen something so truthful before and so devastating at the same time. James Shaheen: I want to ask you about the poem, āAmazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker.ā It feels like a death meditation itself. I wonder if you could talk about that poem and the ways that our losses are archived and remembered. Ocean Vuong: I really love that poem because I couldnāt have written it as a younger poet. Iāve been doing this now for almost 15 years, and it was only now that I could write a poem like that. Itās essentially a poem that I made up. Itās not actually anybodyās Amazon history, but itās a found poem. Thereās no syntax. There are no literary techniques. As a younger poet, I would be very insecure about writing a poem without my techniques. It required me to be quite mature and confident in language that the words themselves have their own narrative and that what youāre really doing is just arranging. That sequencing and pattern making is a huge part of being an artist. If I was wrote this 10 years ago, I would I would be too ashamed of this: āOh, God, I have to do more here.ā But the profound effect of that poem is that the artifacts of living, the detritus, the debris of living is actually actualized in the object. And again, this is what the Japanese haiku poets already understood, contemporaneously to Shakespeare, who wrote in the English fashion of rhetoric. āShall I compare thee to a summerās dayā is all about rhetoric and then proving the argument. So the Western sonnet is very similar to an essay, whereas the Eastern haiku is about presenting ideas and objects as they are. And so, to me, Iām very proud of that poem because it was using my more global literary theory approach and an Eastern philosophy to say that these objects are enough. There doesnāt have to be a linguistic rhetoric that happens, that is performed, and itās also meditation of time. Throughout these months, whatās purchased, whatās not purchased? You can map an entire life that way, by the residue of living? James Shaheen: Did you take these lines from an actual history and put them together, arrange them, and select particular lines or not? Ocean Vuong: No, I totally created this narrative to the utmost verisimilitude that I could. But I searched these things on Amazon, and it was really fun to see how things are presented linguistically on an Amazon page. James Shaheen: It was very beautiful, but also very believable. Ocean Vuong: Thatās why I start with truth and then end with art. I think the best art makes life more real. Itās actually a cycle. You start with a sense of truth, and then you see that thereās only reportage. The artist must make something of the material, so the truth is the material, and then you orchestrate the architecture, just like you described in that poem, through invention and imagination. And then through that cycle, you read the poem, or you have written the poem, and then youāre released back into the world, and the world somehow feels truer, more real, more felt. Thatās the magic of art is that it magnifies life. Itās not really a departure from lifeāit just makes life more felt and true. Sharon Salzberg: Weāre living through a time of so much personal and collective loss, and I find it really interesting that in dominant US culture thereās such a premium on being in control, so the inevitable truths of life, getting sick, getting old, or dying, almost feel like youāve lost control and itās a personal humiliation. As you were describing your motherās death and your response, I thought that there are so many people in this time who have fallen to their knees weeping and wailing. Some people feel they canāt disclose that even, that that needs to be hidden in some way, and what a tragedy that isāthat this is the very thing that should bring us closer together, the dukkha in life and the suffering and vulnerability we all have. I also thought of the role of creation or making something like poetry in oneās grief process because thereās also such a thing as legacy. Itās the way a personās life lives past the body. Working with, for example, survivors of gun violence, many of whom have been parents whoāve lost a child, their great wish is that the childās life not been negated, that it be expressed in some way, that one realizes that this was a being, they had impact on their family, they had influence in their community, they were examples of something. And I find that itself very beautiful and healing in that process. Iām just wondering about the book and the poetry in your own process of grief. Ocean Vuong: The common narrative around writing is that it should be cathartic. I donāt feel that way. I think itās a conduit of energy, and the grief is also an energy. And so itās never been cathartic for me, but there is a satisfaction in building something that could then be shared. I think for me, a book is like a town square. You fashion it the way you dreamed it, but the best part of it is that people get to inhabit it and engage with it and feel however they want to feel and bring their own griefs and joys to it. Ultimately, the poet is an architect. You build a space, a linguistic space, and whatever folks bring to it is valid. Thatās really important to me. But I donāt think Iām any more free of the feelings through it. I know more. You might realize, āAh, I can express this feeling this way,ā so you feel perhaps more grounded. But youāre not washed of any of the grief or the feelings. James Shaheen: Ocean, Iām hoping you can read a couple of poems for us from the collection. Could you read āAlmost Humanā? Ocean Vuong: āAlmost Human.ā Itās been a long time since my body. Unbearable, I put it down on the earth the way my old man rolled dice. Itās been a long time since time. But I had weight back there. Had substance & sinew, damage you could see by looking between your hands & hearing blood. It was called reading, they told me, too late. But too late. I red. I made a killing in language & was surrounded by ghosts. I used my arsenal of defunct verbs & broke into a library of second chances, the E.R. Where they bandaged my head, even as the black words kept seeping through, like this. Back there, I couldnāt get the boys to look at me even in my best jean jacket. It was 2006 or 1865 or .327. What a time to be alive! they said, this time louder, more assault rifles. Did I tell you? I come from a people of sculptors whose masterpiece was rubble. We tried. Indecent, tongue-tied, bowl-cut & diabetic, I had a feeling. The floorboards creaked as I wept motionless by the rehab window. If words, as they claimed, had no weight in our world, why did we keep sinking, DoctorāI mean Lordāwhy did the water swallow our almost human hands as we sang? Like this. James Shaheen: Wow. Ocean Vuong, itās been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Oceanās new book, Time Is a Mother, available wherever books are sold. Thank you so much, Ocean. Ocean Vuong: Thank you so much, both of you, for having me. It was a pleasure. Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. James Shaheen: Youāve been listening to Life As It Is with Ocean Vuong. Weād love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. Life As It Is and Tricycle Talks are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. Iām James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!
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