On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong

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Metaphors for Violence

poetry word choice

Why do so many metaphors speak the language of violence?

That question occurred to Ocean Vuong as he was writing his “novel” that walks and talks like a memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Though many examples abound, Vuong chose just a few as shown in this excerpt:

“But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

“You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience is a target audience. ‘Good for you, man,’ a man once said to me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.'”

I have heard of metaphors for violence being essential in the language of sports, but here it creeps into creativity, the arts, everyday language itself. Do we even notice it, though? If not, then metaphor has assumed its place in our language, no longer looking like a comparison in glasses and wig, but acting like a thing unhidden itself.

On Earth We’re Briefly Violent, maybe? Even if it’s not with sticks and stones but with those legendary “words that will never hurt me.”

Vuong Song

poetry poetry books

This week I picked up Ocean Vuong’s new book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s listed as “a novel” on the cover, but you know how genre goes these days. I can say with some confidence that it is not straight-up poetry like Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but I’d peg it more memoir than novel. Call me traditional.

The conceit is a series of letters from a young Vietnamese man to his mother, who cannot read. Proceeding chronologically, it starts when the letter-writer is a young boy in the familiar (to me) city of Hartford. (And how neat to see Franklin Avenue appear on its pages!)

Novel, memoir, hybrid, there’s no denying this is prose. But it is poetic prose, so if you’re hankering for a book of poetry, you should have no problem diving into an ocean of this kind.

For example, here is a paragraph taken from p. 12 in the text:

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the firs snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

If you’re thinking these lovely lines of prose could easily be rearranged into a short stanza of poetry, you’re thinking like me. Whoever thinks of an eye as something god cares about, much less as his “loneliest creation,” is thinking in a novel way. No, wait. A poetic way.

And it’s almost aphoristic when Vuong writes “the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.” Antithetical wisdom, that.

Then the bit about the other eye, unaware of the first, “just as hungry, as empty.” Nice. And finally, in a concrete example of all this poetic abstraction, his mother opens the door to the first snowfall so his young and hungry eyes can fill their emptiness with wonder.

Two pages later, the end of this chapter features a one-line, one-word paragraph—the word “Look.”

We may be briefly gorgeous here on Earth, but our prose can be gorgeous much, much longer. But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself.