A&E
Hamilton faculty and students fill Events Barn for Vuong’s poetry reading
By Liz Lvov ’17
November 10, 2016
Tags a+e
Ocean Vuong came to Hamilton College on a shockingly warm day in November when we all got an extra hour of sleep and believed in our own progress, and in democracy in general. Daylight Savings quickly turned the bright day soft and vaguely purple, and it was in this stillness that Vuong entered the DMC living room for a preliminary craft talk (Vuong once compared the dusk to a strip of honey between two shadows, draining). Vuong talked for a long time, in a gentle and insistent murmur, and when people started asking questions, they couldn’t help but moderate their voices to match the volume of his near-whisper. What a lovely cadence to imitate! It is soft and sudden. The man who came with Vuong sat in the back of the room, wearing a leather jacket, eyes intent on Vuong’s face.
The pen I borrowed from Annie Berman ’18 (a friend) quickly stopped working, rendering that alleged palest ink utterly useless, so I started to type what Vuong was saying on my phone. I was vaguely embarrassed about it, and resolved to type down only the most beautiful phrases and the prettiest words, and by virtue of who Vuong is I ended up transcribing the entire craft talk in hastily misspelled words that formed a tiny poem of their own. As he spoke to us, Vuong made the world very big and very cozy. He told us that social speech is the tip of the iceberg, and that we all posses massive wells of one another. He told us that the task of poetry is to find the DNA of yourself and to press it upon the paper. Sex in a blizzard? “Oh my god yes I’m here for that!” He has worked at Panera Bread, as a form of survival and as a form of counter art, and working there again is always Plan B.
When asked about what his dream is, he answered simply, “My dream is to be a good son.” Vuong knows a poem when it takes his head off. Vuong told us that if you ask “why” long enough, everything becomes political. Vuong said, “Underneath all roads is a field and in that field you can go wherever you want and you’re not lost and even if you are lost you’re not wrong.”
Someone asked about what to do if you feel that you are somehow stuck in the process of writing, unable to articulate what you want to or what you need to. Vuong responded with secondhand advice: he said that a friend of his told him something along the lines of, if you’re stuck, imagine yourself lying in a field at night with a friend telling them a story. “That’s what happens when you’re reading,” Ocean said to us. “You say it to one person.”
It wasn’t just one person who showed up to the reading that night; it was a large group of people and Vuong read out loud to every single one of us. His poetry sparks with electricity and vitality and fractured stars and the shapes of hands. It is full of pain and strength and nudity and revelations and the color green and the color red. It hums with a gorgeous lyricism that takes you very quietly by the throat. In the familiar space of the Barn, his words were strange and surreal, perfect, imperfect, interesting.
Vuong’s voice was so urgent and so lovely, and now it is abundantly clear that his voice was both the calm before the storm and the storm itself.
Donald Trump is the next president of the United States. We have to listen with bated breath to the soft spoken poets who speak our truth and our revolution in such incendiary and inevitable ways.