Ocean Vuong's 'Essay on Craft': a close reading

Series introduction: From time to time on this blog I review an individual poem by a celebrated contemporary poet that I believe is overrated and explain why. Call it a guilty pleasure.

  

This poem by the celebrated Ocean Vuong is an ars poetica that stands, I feel, for many poets writing in the same idiom, one which might be described as the dominant one today--especially at Poetry Magazine and its confreres. Vuong's artistic forbears are the confessionals and the surrealists, although my contention is that he and poets like him are very much their bastard offspring. 

At its best, confessionalism stood for genuine self-interrogation, analogous to the old and today seldom-practiced psychoanalytic talk therapy. Now, in an age of pills and arbitrarily rewritten DSMs, poets too lack such self-understanding and seldom try to achieve it; what they aim at instead is unfiltered self-expression, the expression of a self that is taken for granted as authentic but is actually constructed by ascriptive identities embraced with uncritical fervour by unpteen 'gay, bi, trans, latinx, bla(c)k...etc.' poets. For such writers the line between a poem and a social media post is often blurred. 

So much for Vuong et al's confesionalism. As for their surrealism, it is little more than a box of dusty Christmas ornaments taken out year after year, a type of moribund poetic diction intended to mark their work as 'inspired' and non-traditional. It might even be taken as a defensive maneuver: If I don't even try to make sense I cannot be accused of failing to do so. The imagery is surreal in the sense that it is illogical; images are not developed into conceits that develop the subject according to some immanent logic. There is no intellectual component to such imagery such that one image could be said to 'work' while another does not. Such images are not intended to repay close reading but to frustrate it with a hackneyed claim to vatic authenticity. 

On display in what follows is the use of surrealist imagery paired with some extremely trite content that it functions to thinly obscure. I contend that nonsense and cliche are frequently found together in contemporary poetry for this very reason.   

Essay on Craft

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing

flickering in black mud

was a word

stranded by its language.

Because no one else

was coming — & I ran

out of reasons.

So I gathered fistfuls

of  ash, dark as ink,

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

but came only close

as building a cage

around the heart. Shutters

over the eyes. Yes,

I gave it hands

despite knowing

that to stretch that clay slab

into five blades of light,

I would go

too far. Because I, too,

needed a place

to hold me. So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

 

In the imagery of the opening lines, 'ash' stands for loss and 'ink' for writing. Hardly original. But next, as though in compensation, comes the surrealism. Taking these 'fistfuls/ of ash, dark as ink', the poet

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

 A paradox is employed here to set off the ostentatious violence of a hard-to-picture image that has already dissolved into another abstract cliche: that dreams are a 'curse' because they lead to disappointment, pictured tritely as 'a cage around the heart

 

So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

 

Another obvious image--a cliche this time not hedged with self-conscious bizzareity: The mouth the poet speaks from is a 'wound', the idea being that authentic art comes from trauma and presents that trauma as immediately as possible, without trying to make sense of it. Art is the 'spontanous overflow of powerful feelings' as Wordsworth summarised (although in fairness to the great romantic, he also called it 'emotion recollected in tranquility', suggesting that perhaps some editing, some critical thought might be in order before one rushes to publication!). Such is the naive romantic poetic that would, in the extremely stylised and degenerate form represented by Vuong, continue hegemonic down to our own day.   

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

The imagery continues in the same vein: a kind of primal ritual is enacted, elemental substances worked into not a representation but a presentation of the 'human'. But what does Vuong actually say about his own (or, to be merely pendantic) his speaker's humanity? That it is 'messy' would seem to be about all--just another cliche: humanity, art emotions--these things are messy, irrational, beyond definition or criticism. The poem's message is an evasion, a refusal to think about what one is saying that results in failure to move beyond the culturally enshrined cliche. The line break 'god-/awful' even suggests, gauchely enough, that the primal scream is itself a god, as indeed it surely is--the false god of Vuong's brand cut-price romantic brand. Blood, marrow and butterflies, bird cages and 'blades of light' are the objective correlate for the formulaic sturm und drang of Vuong's sensitive soul, and the hive-soul of cultural products like him.