Ocean Vuong Is the Subject of a Profile at The Guardian

Ocean Vuong travels across the pond to read from his new novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, at the Southbank Centre on July 2. At The Guardian, Emma Brockes shares a profile of the poet with Guardian readers that begins with Vuong's undergraduate years in New York City before looking back to his childhood, then spans to present day. "While he was an undergraduate, Ocean Vuong formed the habit of writing at night," she begins. "During the day, he studied literature at Brooklyn College and worked in a cafe. At night, he stayed up writing poems." Picking up from there: 

It wasn’t just the sense of isolation that comes from being the only one awake, when “you look out of the window and it’s completely dark and you’re at sea in this little ship”. It was more that writing in the off-hours relaxed his knack for self-criticism. “You get the last word of the day,” he says. “The editor in your head – the nagging, insecure, worrisome social editor – starts to retire. When that editor falls asleep, I get to do what I want. The cat’s out to play.”

The poems that came out of those night-time efforts were published in 2016 as Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the success of which still amazes the author – the book won a Whiting award that year, and in 2017 scooped both the Forward prize and the TS Eliot prize. Vuong, who is 30, was not from a background from which writers traditionally emerge. As a two-year-old, he had been brought to the US from Vietnam as a refugee and settled with his family in the working-class town of Hartford, Connecticut. No one in his family spoke English. When his father left, his mother got work in a nail salon, menial work for little reward and a quality of life that Vuong had no particular expectation of exceeding. If Night Sky tackled the absent father as myth, then his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, reckons with the mother and grandmother who raised him and it is the influence of these women – courageous, difficult, devastated by the ripple effect of the Vietnam war – that forms the spine of the novel and asks the central question: after trauma, how do we love?

We are in Vuong’s open-plan living room in Northampton, Massachusetts, a leafy college town where he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Peter, his partner of 10 years, has taken the dog out. Vuong is slight, with a silver earring in one ear and the habit of pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up his nose. He speaks, as he writes, in poetic imagery, what he calls “the metaphor as autobiography of the gaze”. In the novel, the world seen through a speeding car window “surges by like sidewise gravity”. A bird on a windowsill appears not as a bucolic symbol but “a charred pear”. To Little Dog, the protagonist – so named by his family to protect him beneath a cloak of worthlessness – the world is an ugly place, in which beauty is made more so for the improbability of existing at all. “Freedom,” he says, “is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

Read more at The Guardian.