On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (i)

From poet Ocean Vuong and Penguin Press

I need a book, she said. Have you got one? I went down to the basement to look around and fetched up this poet’s novel. I had bought one in solidarity.

The author Ocean Vuong is a poet of my climate, Connecticut. He is in fact of the poet Wallace Stevens’ very climate, Hartford of the river valley with its English settlers, emperors of risk management, insurance snow men and the rest of you can go to hell.

The woman in the photographs gave birth to me rather in New Haven, the harbor city of the south, among the Neapolitan immigrants of the most Italian Congressional district of the United States of America.

The poet Stevens sang, on the one hand, as from the cut flowers waiting fresh daily in the vestibule of his Hartford home for him to arrange first thing after work,

“Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.”

and on the other, as about my ordinary New Haven where he underwrote against accident all the buildings on our green, “The imperfect is our paradise.”

So I had bought one copy of the younger poet’s novel for the sake of our Wallace. Then a lifelong friend who sits on the board of my corporation read the book, impassioned, and sent me another.

You have met him, I thanked her. He came to my reading from my doctoral thesis at our friends’ apartment in the city.

This was all in the final years of ten this century when anything to do with promoting books and authors of Viet Nam still made me want to kill myself. So I haven’t read either copy yet.

I spotted one and fetched it up for mom. She graduated in the first class from the first liberal arts college for Jews here, a diversity admission since she was a preacher’s kid from the whitest small towns of the USA.

The director John Waters of Baltimore has observed that we of those towns are most beautiful people in the world for a few years. My mother, a crypto-Jew by her orphan war bride mother, has shone longer.

Mitteleuropean polymath refugee faculty lifted her up. She won a fellowship in English to Chicago, our most egghead graduate school. Instead she went to work teaching to support the family, first at a suburban day school.

She retired after 30 years in the New Haven Public Schools, starting in the blackest and poorest elementary school, then as an itinerant reading specialist to the parochial schools, and finally in English as a Second Language to the immigrant children of Yale’s graduate school neighborhood.

Her students memorized many poems. Ocean Vuong and I are not only both Connecticut Yankees but he too has a remarkable mother. He has written more about that than I have. We shall see what my mom has to say about his book.