Vuong's found interview

Each interview has been separated by a line and each Q is hyperlinked: Q1 - Q2 are from The Guardian; Q3 - Q6 are from The Creative Independent; Q7 - Q10 are from the Connotation Press.

Q1. Time Is a Mother was written in the aftermath of your mother’s death. Did writing these poems help you to process her passing?

I don’t know if writing anything helps one process the mysterious and destabilizing sensation of losing a loved one, at least it hasn’t [been] so for me. But I do think there is some sort of satisfaction in building a linguistic architecture wherein others can experience that loss, amplified perhaps by their own, and the poem at least offers that capacity. Ultimately, the poem to me is not so much a site of resolve but perhaps of experience itself – but one enacted by the imagination. But I’m not sure even of that; I might still be too young in my grief to know where it ends.

Q2. You have said that this is the book of which you are proudest in terms of craft. Why?

It’s important for me to say that being proud is not so much a claim on quality or achievement in the work, or lack thereof, but of satisfying the artistic potential within oneself. With my other books, I’ve always felt that there was room left over in the glass, that I didn’t fill it to the brim when it was published, mostly because I didn’t have the courage to execute all my techniques, or that they weren’t truly refined (the use of humor, for example). With this book, I felt the water was finally spilling over the top, which is both a relief but also perhaps a reason to mourn. Is this it? Have I stopped growing? Have I caught up with myself? I don’t know – but if that’s the case, then I would be perfectly happy with that. I may be alone in thinking this, but I truly don’t believe that a writer should just keep writing as long as they’re alive. I see my career not by how much I can produce but by how the work can get me to where I can meaningfully stop and be satisfied with what I’ve done. I’m more interested in stopping well rather than endlessly creating.

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Q3. What’s your mood when you write?

When I’m lost in the work, I’m curious. I don’t know if curiosity is a balm, because it often gets me in trouble, but it gives me control. It becomes fuel, and it brings me out of myself and into the world, even if I’ve just been sitting at my desk and thinking about spirals, which is what I’ve been thinking about this morning. The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. I’ve been thinking about trauma—how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember.

Q4. You present, in some of your poems, that the future has already happened, and the past is happening still. Is writing a way to orient events among one another on that spiral?

The funny thing is, the biggest trouble I have with my writing is tense. In Vietnamese, we don’t have past participles, so everything is spoken in the present, and whether it’s past or present depends on the last word. Say you want to say, “I ate a bagel this morning for breakfast.” You would say, “I am eating bagel already.” Everything is present. The writing sometimes takes me out of time. I get to cater to the action, and the time resolves afterwards. Sometimes I write a poem and I don’t realize what tense I’m using, or I’m writing a passage, and I have to decide later. Editing becomes the place where the past and present start to connect. When I’m writing, the curiosity pulls me forward. The work gets done when my terror is outpaced by my sense of urgency to speak. When there are good days, I go a little faster than my terror, and there are bad days when my terror beats me, and I’m silent. That’s the negotiation.

Q5. What are you afraid of?

I’m afraid, “What if none of this matters?” Maybe this is the working-class roots of my family, where I feel like—I sit two days in a hotel, I get 10,000 words—what if it doesn’t matter? What if I could be doing something better with my hands for my community, my people? Maybe, in a queer body, that’s always a question: “How can we be of service to one another?” At least for myself. That’s how I think of art, is how we are service to one another.

Q6. You’ll be teaching in the MFA program at UMass—Amherst this year. What will your classes be like?

I learned, relative to our creative spaces, that, for some reason, the art of recognizing one another in our goals was not privileged. In workshops, we often privilege correction as progress. There’s this capitalistic anxiety to fix it. Even in the way we talk about writing: polish, cut, write, chop, tighten. I want it to be more about actual creation—looking at people making organic things with their imaginations. In my workshop, I privilege reading in the context of the writer, and in the first four or five weeks, we don’t critique at all. We just say what we see. “I see trees repeating. I see line breaks in the tercets. I think this poem is trying to…” We start to collaborate and build this structure of recognition for ourselves, so that, when the critiques do come, they’re always in service of the idiosyncratic person. There are no rules that could just be forced upon the work.

Q7. "Vuong compares writing a poem to pregnancy. For months he walks around with the poem inside him, nurturing it constantly without bringing it into the world, without putting anything on paper, until the right day comes and he is seized with 'a frenzy of creativity after months of idleness.' At that time, Vuong writes 10 to 25 drafts in the first sitting, which can last for hours, and within about three days, his poem is complete." I found this account of your creative process not only reassuring and forgiving, but was also struck by its departure from the conventionally touted Daily Writing Practice. Is this still how you typically compose poems and, if so, how is this approach more aligned with who you are than is a DWP? And do you think there's a cultural component for you in the Ocean Approach v. the DWP?

Yes, I do still compose this way. But it has been a long and arduous road toward this method of composition. It occurred to me that the writing process has, in fact, very little to do with actual writing, with “butt-on-chair-time,” if you will. Rather, it has everything to do with one's perception, how the writer absorbs her environment and how that information blossoms into poetry inside her, organically. For me, this process can take months; some poems have been “brewing” for years. I think I'm most comfortable when I know exactly what a poem is trying to do. Even before writing a single word, when I close my eyes I should see the minutest detail in a poem, down to the way the light falls through the empty room, the strand of hair on a boy's flushed cheek, the dust on the cabinet, etc. I feel that I must know a poem very intimately before thrusting it onto the page. Once I know a poem the way I know an extension of my body, the poem can finally exist as a physical product. The rest is a matter of grammar and line breaks. Of course, I didn’t always write this way. When I first started writing, I was very insecure with myself. Language and literacy haven’t come easy in my family. We come from a line of illiterate rice farmers from Vietnam and I am the first child to go to school past the sixth grade. When I decided to be a poet, I made it my intention to write every day. I would wake up at five in the morning and just write and write. I thought, like anything else in life, practice makes perfect. This, of course, is true. However, for me, the act of writing wasn’t necessarily practice—it was a distraction. Writing every day, especially a poem per day, which was what I was attempting, was too overwhelming, language became cheap, something I just “cranked out.” By slowing down the process, I was able to narrow the mind and filter the poem with more precision, and so had better command of the poem's voice and rhythm. With a slower process, there's more at stake, and I like the intensity that can bring to the composition.

Q8. The poems in your chapbook Burnings (2010 Sibling Rivalry Press) are lush, expansive, erotic, tender, musical, heartbreaking, and courageous. The body figures prominently, and not the romanticized body, but the diseased and broken and vulnerable body, the body of sex and decay, the body as vessel and ambassador of feeling and human frailty. At a time when it seems much visible American poetry favors the intellect and abstraction over emotional depth, it's been gratifying to discover your work. Do you have any thoughts about the place of poetry in our complicated and divided country and your particular place in it as a poet?

I am not sure where I am in the poetry world. Heck, sometimes I don't even know where I am in New York City! I tend not to see poetry in sub-genres, but rather as how individual poems affect me as an artist, a reader. An “intellectual” poem can invigorate me just as much as an emotional-narrative one. Likewise, I don't see myself making a choice between the two while writing, although I do realize I lean toward the lyrical voice. I'm still in my formative stages and have only been writing for four years—who knows, I might be writing my next poem backwards, I might not be writing at all! Nonetheless, whatever the trend may be, I think it's important for poets to look at experimenting with form and language as a vehicle toward translating ideas into poems and not so much for the sake of being “new” or “cutting-edge.” On the other hand, my first love was the lyric poem. And that's probably due to how I was raised: most Vietnamese would look at a sunset and say, “Oh, how sad.” Yet, like everyone else, we seek out that natural phenomenon because, for us, sadness can be a favorable experience, a space for contemplation and a promise of change; after all, one can’t be unhappy forever. A sunset is sad for a Vietnamese because something wonderful is fleeting. Likewise, the same sunset is “beautiful” for an American because of the optical brilliance observed in its colors. Both vantage points are correct, and I think the power of poetry is that it does not need to succumb to the limiting tendencies of singular words. It can be an embodiment of an entirely new definition for the infinite range of emotions we experience as human beings. I think the poet is most successful when she strives to find new meanings for “sad” or “beautiful” or any other word—all the words. I would even go as far as to say that dictionaries should replace their very definitions with poems, or at least refer to poems when adverbs and adjectives fail us, as they so often do.

Q9. Your poem "Getting it Wrong" is stunning in its integration of loss and beauty. In Japanese culture, these two things are inextricably intertwined, so your poem spoke immediately to me. Can you tell us a bit about your poem's genesis?

Almost all of my poems come from a lived life, whether my own or others. The scene here is derived from a trip I took to Venice when I was 18. I fell in love with my current partner and, within two weeks of knowing each other, we decided to run off to Europe together (I know—how naive!). This happened before I was a poet. Which is important because I realized that the moment I called myself a poet, I also started to see the world differently. I suddenly became more analytical, a constant hunter of meaning, of metaphor. I walked and moved through my environments more perspicaciously. When I was in Italy, I didn’t have this way of perceiving things—I took it all for granted, running here and there looking, but not really “seeing” everything. So this poem, along with a few others, is from this mental re-visitation of the past—to explore it again with the eye and ear of a poet, albeit through memory.

Q10. Although you are of mixed Asian descent, your poetry does not focus itself exclusively on this aspect of yourself, but ranges widely in the realms of the human heart and the physical world. Do you identify as an Asian-American poet? And whether you do or not, how do you perceive the state of (what is conventionally labeled) Asian-American poetry in 2012 and where, in your view, is it headed?

I have been told that my poems can be political. At first, I felt uneasy about this label—mostly because I dislike overtly “political” poems. However, as I started to grow and develop as a writer, I realized that to write as an Asian American is to be political. As a person of color, for me to even be writing, engaging in a creative discipline as historically white and high-brow as poetry, is very political. As such, I do identity as Asian American, even though I understand the anxiety many Asian-American writers have about losing themselves within a certain diasporic or cultural trope. But instead of trying to resist an Asian-American theme in order to better assimilate, I think a more powerful and challenging approach for any minority writer is to attempt to change the American literary canvas by adding one's own color to it. In this way, an Asian-American literary experience would soon be just as normal and integrated as any other American narrative without sacrificing its rich cultural idiosyncrasies. For me, regardless of what the label entails, I can't be anything else but Asian American—even if I were to consciously disregard my cultural roots, my narrative would still be Asian American. In this way, I think Asian-American poetry is heading towards an era of expansive landscapes and exciting new possibilities. There are more and more Asian Americans writing today than ever before, many who have had much success and have contributed a great wealth of quality work to the American canon. Mostly, I think it's important to not be afraid to tell the story that's already been told, because chances are you can always bring a fresh perspective to that narrative, can always make it better. Alas, my sights are aimed at writing the best poem I can possibly write, regardless of how “Asian” or “un-Asian” I am or ever will be.