Ocean Vuong, 34, is an American poet and novelist born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His 2016 debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the TS Eliot prize and Forward prize in 2017. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019 and is being adapted for the screen by A24. His second collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, out this week in paperback, was written after the passing of his mother and explores loss, memory, addiction and love. We communicated by email for this interview.
There are plenty of vivid scenes in this collection — from a car crash to stealing tips from a nail salon for a “hit”. What was your approach to storytelling in Time Is a Mother?
I’ve always believed, both in fiction and poetry, in Wallace Stevens’s ideal of imaginative writing coming from a “supreme fiction”. That is, that the poem is an opportunity to turn from memoiristic transcription of information towards a kind of ultimate artefact, charged and changed by the imagination. And it’s through this lens that I approach storytelling in my work. For example, I can’t drive – but the poem American Legend has a speaker driving his father to put down their dog, which becomes a kind of parable for American failure, the car crash the deliberate destruction of an iconic medium of mid-century autonomy and possibility, which liberates the relationship between father and son into a kind of “elsewhere,” or “no man’s land” of relation. What becomes of people, of the story, when its linear promise is elided, when we literally crash the car in hopes of finding another path? Writing from a memoiristic approach would be too limiting.
