From the Archives: Ocean Vuong (part 1)

"I walked into this cornfield and I thought, I need to change my life."

Mar 05, 2024

It’s a rainy New York Tuesday and I’m writing to you with a snack for your afternoon: a special transcript from our archive. Every once in a while, we receive requests from listeners to release our interviews in written form— a fantastic idea, but something we don’t have time to do for every episode. But now that we have this letter (newsletter? zine? I keep calling it the “digital publication arm” of Thresholds, which is true but sounds weird and corporate) as a container, we’re excited to begin releasing readable versions of our best-loved conversations. We’re starting with the interview that’s been most requested over the years: Ocean Vuong.

It’s no surprise to me that this conversation is a listener favorite: Ocean is an extraordinary expository thinker/talker in addition to being an extraordinary writer, and here he leaps (lightly!) from Arthur Rimbaud writing about ejaculating animals to the recipe for Boston Market cornbread to the toxic masculinity of literary modernism. We spoke by phone a few months into the pandemic about his experience growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, as a member of a working-class, immigrant family, and about one particular day in his later teens when he walked out of his fast-food job and into a cornfield, suddenly aware that he needed to get out of the life that seemed to be coming for him.

**This is part 1 of this interview. We’ll release part 2 here on the letter next Tuesday.**

LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL INTERVIEW

Thresholds x Ocean Vuong

Originally released August 12, 2020

Ocean Vuong’s poetry collections include Time is a Mother and Night Sky with Exit Wounds. His novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was a bestseller and won the American Book Award. Ocean himself was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2019. He is a professor of Modern Poetry and Poetics at NYU.

Ocean Vuong: Thresholds. Oh, man. They're so... they're so dramatic. And yeah, we pass over them every day. You know, we move through the rooms and we step over the threshold. My first poem in my first collection is called “Threshold.” And that poem is interesting because the speaker never passes over the threshold, but only sees beyond it. I think there's something fraught about vision that is also movement. We rarely think of vision as a trespass. But I think particularly as children, particularly as observers of the world, we we are always witnesses of things, often things we don't have any choice in, whether it's beauty or terrible things. And when we witness it, our gaze passes over the threshold. But also our experience, you know, we-- you're not the same after you see something, whether it's beautiful or not.

When you when you asked me about a moment of a threshold, I kept thinking about this one time when I was working at Boston Market. That was one of my first jobs, and I was having such a terrible day, as one does working in corporate fast food. We had a terrible boss, you know, he was this… You know, nothing wrong with evangelical Christians, I suppose, but this one was…! He would he would shut down the store and play recordings of televangelists. It was just the most bizarre— meanwhile, the chickens are roasting in the back. It was just… I left my shift.

It's rural Connecticut. So you walk across the street and there was this cornfield and a lot of the the employees would use it when they walk home. We all walked for some reason, because it was a shortcut to this main road. I walked into this cornfield. And it was so, so charged because we were selling and eating corn bread, in the Boston Market, which is half --I learned later-- just half cake, which is why it was so good. It was actually not not bread at all. It was cake.

I walked into this cornfield and I thought, I need to change my life. I don't know how, I need to just... Either I stay in this cornfield and just let it swallow me, or I just... I gotta find a way to get the hell out of out of all this. It was it was just weirdness in the sense that the corn hid you. You see the plants all over your head, and then you think: I can be at any place in time. I don't know if I belong to myself, you know, and I think that derangement of the senses, which what Rimbaud kept talking about, I didn't I didn't feel it with absinthe, but I felt it with corn. [laughs] And I think that was the moment when I said, I don't know how I'm going to figure it out, I didn't know what art was, I didn't know what poetry was, but I knew that I gotta find a way to hide from the life I was given and enter a different world, a different cornfield.

I didn't know what art was, I didn't know what poetry was, but I knew that I gotta find a way to hide from the life I was given and enter a different world, a different cornfield.

But it's just like New England, like working class New England life. It was the people who ran things, you know, the essential workers as we now understand it, this diverse group of immigrants who come to know the world through this very idiosyncratic nature of these broken New England mill towns. America as a dream, America as a promise felt so far away for all of us, of all races. You just watch your friends die from overdoses of suicide, or, they grow up and they're-- they were these legends in high school and then by the time they're twenty they ran out of options and they're joining the Marines and they're killed in Iraq. Everyone was asking the same questions, and none of us knew what to do with it. It just felt so quintessentially American to me, which is also antithetical to the American Dream, this golden land of opportunity.

Thresholds: What do you think it was about that day? I imagine that you had seen and walked through that cornfield many times before that day, and that you did it again many times afterwards.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I think about that. I think it was more about that week. You know, I had one of my friends, you know, his name was Crackhead Mike, and he had encephalopathy when he was born. And so they had to cut open his head right down the middle. And, you know, he was just very beautiful person. But he grew up in those towns, and you don't have a lot of hope and I think it was a day before when I was talking to him and he said, "I'm going to join the Marines. I'm going to do it." And another friend of mine was there and said, "How are you going to do it, Mike? You have, you know, you have a crack in your head. They're not going to let you through the examination." We didn't even know if that's true or not. He said "No, no, I already figured it out." He had black hair and he took out a Sharpie and he started coloring in the skin in the crack. He said, "I do this, I can make it through. And they don't they won't pay attention to my head." We just laughed.

I don't know why… It just felt like that little act of disguising yourself in order to be a part of a war machine. Of course, I didn't think of it that way back then, but it was just so devastatingly quintessential where I was coming from. And I just, I was angry at everything that that made it possible. I was angry at my job, at my boss, and I was just tired. I think exhaustion, exhaustion, you know... As a species, I think it's exhaustion and danger that creates creativity. How do I get out of here? How do I, how do I build this fish trap? You know, it's always the question. And I think that moment of of innovating beyond your condition begins with fatigue, exhaustion and discontent.

Thresholds: You've spoken before and written before about language as a portal, as a portal in and out of time, which reminded me of your description of the cornfield as this collapsing of time, of being able to be almost anyone in any time, as you're just looking up at the corn. I'm wondering if at that time when you were standing in the cornfield, you had already started to discover the possibility of language as being another kind of portal that you might step through or use.

Ocean Vuong: I mean, I was raised by women who had only language and they talked forever. I mean, all they did was talk. They talked while they worked. They talked while they bathed you. They talked while they cooked for you. They talked, you know, while sitting, while walking. And they talked while they were beating you up. I remember my mother, you know, beating my beating me up and saying how much I look like my father, and telling me her whole life story while she was whipping me. And so it was a strange world where language was the currency in which one measures time. How long is a story? You know, how long is a prayer? My grandmother would say stuff like that, "You go down, you you stir this pot until you chant, five prayers to Buddha" or whatever, so the voice became a measurement of time.

I was raised by women who had only language and they talked forever. I mean, all they did was talk. They talked while they worked. They talked while they bathed you. They talked while they cooked for you. They talked, you know, while sitting, while walking. And they talked while they were beating you up. I remember my mother, you know, beating my beating me up and saying how much I look like my father, and telling me her whole life story while she was whipping me.

So I was always charged with it. But also being a Vietnamese language speaker, it's a monosyllabic language that depends on stresses. Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma. It's all different words. Ma: "ghosts," Ma: "grave". Ma: "mother" Ma: "horse" ma: "but," like "but this and but that." And that's just one word: ma. So you have to really pay attention or you'll be in trouble if you're a Vietnamese kid. So I was always fine-tuned to it.

As a teenager, I would go to these punk bands. My friends were in punk bands, and I would go to these punk shows in, like, you know, backyards and basements and. And that's when they, introduced me to Patti Smith and Rimbaud. I came to writing through, Rimbaud, and I went to the community college, I said, "Where do I read more of this guy?" And they pointed me to the Dewey Decimal System, which of course is organized through continents. So I went, I read, you know, Lorca, Vallejo... You know, I was in Europe in Spanish and Latin America even long before I read Frost and Dickinson.

Thresholds: What was it about Rimbaud?

Ocean Vuong: It was the queerness. It was it was truly punk rock. You know, the first poem I read, it was about animals ejaculating. He has this beautiful poem about animals ejaculating in a field and, you know, the queer love. And there's this incredible poem that I teach often called “The Sleeper in the Valley.” It's a subversive little lyric about someone sleeping in the valley, but then you find out at the end that it's a dead soldier. And that's sort of a whimsical magical realism tied to the gravitas of a social political rupture. Rimbaud was writing in wartime, at the second attempt for Napoleon to move and expand west. He was also 17, you know, I think he was so young. And I was stunned that someone so young could write “The Drunken Boat.” “The Drunken Boat,” full of literary allusions to the sea by someone who's never seen the sea. So I think his imagination surpassed the impoverishment of his conditions. And in that way, in a class-based way, as well as sexuality, he really, really spoke to me.

Thresholds: I want to stay for a minute in the cornfield, and return to the language you used at the very beginning about vision. And the way that vision can be a way of crossing a threshold without having yet crossed it. I'm wondering if in that moment you felt like you when you are sitting there in the cornfield and you think “I have to change my life. I have to get out of here,” if you could even begin at that time to envision the next place. The place you wanted to go, was it was Rimbaud?

Ocean Vuong: No. It was… I mean, there was nothing. You have a sense that maybe you should go to college, you know, and I eventually went to community college for two years. So you get a sense that there's maybe you have to do something other people do. But also, there were so many examples of people who couldn't do it around me. And so I wish I walked into a cornfield and decided to be a poet, but it was much less glamorous and dramatic than that.

I think that's also the most devastating part of this surging desire to change your life, but without any material or tools to do so. That was, I think, true suffering to say “I know there should be more, but I have no idea.” You feel like an ant trapped in a jar. And that's what that's what it felt like for so long. You have this great moment of epiphany that in a movie or in a more traditional novel, that's a plot point, but in life, it's a quicksand. Oh, you have this incredible epiphany and you feel like you feel so powerful all the sudden, and then you realize, Oh, wait a minute, I'm having a great idea while standing in quicksand. Well, so much for the great idea.