The Poetics of Violence REGINA KONG

Pain and the Poetics of Violence: Emily Dickinson and Ocean Vuong

Regina Kong

“IF I FEEL PHYSICALLY AS IF THE TOP OF MY HEAD WERE TAKEN OFF,” WROTE EMILY Dickinson, “I know that is poetry.” In this paper, I refer to the phenomenon of a poem’s violent, disruptive quality as poetic violence—the ruptures generated by language against the complexities of pain and human expression. Adapting Elaine Scarry’s views on the philological intricacies of pain, I examine the disruptive, violent quality of language in the comparison of two poems: Emily Dickinson’s 1863 “Poem 760” and Ocean Vuong’s 2015 “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” Despite their separation in time and space, by putting Dickinson in conversation with Vuong, I posit that these two voices intersect at a critical point.

In a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vuong noted Dickinson’s impact on his own understanding of poetic craft: “She worshipped at the altar of language. To me, her work was about radicalizing that worship, turning the act itself into a gift.” Dickinson continually challenged the conventions and capabilities of poetry, creating a distinctly elliptical language that made the intangible real without compromising its impossibility. Vuong—a queer, Vietnamese-American poet—has often been compared to Dickinson for his courageous use of language documenting American violence, in all its manifestations. Tracking the creative processes and pressures that lead to this poetics of violence, I will begin by establishing a theoretical framework linking pain to poetic creation with particular regard to the poems of Dickinson and Vuong, which resist reductive readings. Responding to the pain of personal crisis, Dickinson and Vuong generate a form of poetic violence that, in addition to functioning as a mode of agency, illustrates the complexities of translating pain into language, ultimately making the act of poetry an assertion of survival.

Dickinson and Vuong write within a longstanding tradition of pain as poetic creation. Deeming poetry an “instinct of human beings from childhood” (37), Aristotle in his foundational Poetics develops an inductive framework for examining poetry as mimesis—as representative of human actions rather than purely imitative. What makes the mimetic quality of poetry pleasurable, Aristotle explains, results from its derivation from inherently unpleasurable things: “A common occurrence indicates this: we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as the forms of the vilest animals and of corpses” (37). For Aristotle, the reproduced image of a thing “whose actual sight is painful,” and not the actual thing itself, generates a sense of pleasure. In detaching pain from its source, the representation of that pain becomes more accessible, thereby translating—and dislocating— the puncture of emotion. Poems, in this way, honor things too painful to bear in person. We may “enjoy” poetic representations of things otherwise unbearable because they allow us to comprehend the pain as well as the beauty, to access the inherent poetry of existence. So long as it results in the “most precise” image, the translation of pain into language—into poetry—is

an almost alchemical process. In transmuting the discomfort of the pain, the representation of that pain becomes pleasurable because it involves the cognitive act of understanding as well as experiencing an essentially human event.

Pain translated and transformed by poetry is not limited to Western traditions either. Ānandavardhana in the Dhvanyāloka excavates the soul of poetry from its origins in human subjectivity. Referencing a legend in the Ramayana in which the first poem arose from the grief of a bird over its slain mate, Ānandavardhana locates the affective core of a poem: “Then, like the spilling over of a jar filled with liquid, like the pouring forth of one’s emotion into a cry of lament, this [grief now transformed into the rasa of compassion] found its final form in a verse cast into fixed form of meter and into appropriate words, for cries of lament and the like are suggestive of a state of mind without the need of semantic convention” (Dhvanyāloka 1.5K). This passage, read in conjunction with Aristotle’s ideas on mimesis, indicates how the pain of the grief-stricken bird passes through the medium of poetic expression, changing shape. Transformed into compassion, this pain blurs the boundary between pain as the subject and pain as the object—as a state of being with and without agency. Whereas grief is the subject of pain, compassion is the object of what Ānandavardhana deems the ultimate aim of poetry, or the “soul” of a poem. To Ānandavardhana, the rasa of compassion relates to the moral system of poetry, where emotions and literary forms are closely intertwined. Rather than an end in itself, rasa implies the process of relishing and enjoying, and it is that experience that makes it most valuable. As a source of poetic creation, pain evolves from a state that is both experienced and felt into a generative force; a poem, in this sense, is also a mode of understanding. Because pain resides in the personal and the private, poetry is a vital tool to communicate the interiority of pain to others outside of it, endowing the poet with the artistic agency to give voice to his or her inner emotions and how those emotions can be shared.

If empathy is pain familiar, then the nature of poetry counteracts pain’s frequent resistance to articulation; the phenomenology of pain and its destructive nature enact a violence against language itself. In writing that “Pain—has an Element of Blank—” (line 1), Dickinson notes an essential paradox of pain: It is a sensation at once concrete and abstract. Dickinson makes no distinction in “Poem 760” between physical and psychic pain, suggesting that linguistic categorization is irrelevant, that pain demands not so much that it be articulated as acknowledged. The result is something so totalizing that it “cannot recollect/When it begun—or if there were/A time when it was not” (lines 2-4). The blankness of pain, however, challenges the capabilities of language. For how does a poet write about a pain so engulfing that it is “Blank”? Elaine Scarry posits that whatever “pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4). Scarry proceeds to imagine a language of pain, including a vocabulary surrounding suffering that both constructs and deconstructs the connection between pain and human sentience. It is this verbal and material tension surrounding the expression of pain that leads Scarry to conclude that the “only state that is anomalous as pain is the imagination” (162). Here Scarry contrasts pain as a state without objects—the totalizing force that Dickinson imagines in “Poem 760”—with the imagination as a state composed of objects only. Yet, as much as pain may lack an object,

it is possible to identify it as the object of the imagination. Pain becomes an intentional state through empathy. Once it is brought in relation to the “objectifying power of the imagination,” pain is transformed from a “wholly passive and helpless occurrence” into a “self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one” (Scarry 164). In building a relation between pain and imagining, Scarry addresses the inexpressibility of pain by advocating for imagination as a tool to frame pain through fiction. Imagination and poetic creation thus give form to pain and its function in the collective and individual experience.

Dickinson observes that “Pain—has an Element of Blank,” and Vuong, responding to legacies of historical and personal violence, writes about trauma in “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” to both abstract and represent that blankness. Written as an epistolary to a future self, Vuong begins with his name: “Ocean, don’t be afraid./The end of the road is so far ahead/it is already behind us” (lines 1-3). Vuong deals with the interiority of pain through his concretization of personal loss. Warping spatial boundaries, Vuong makes a metaphor out of an endless road, one that is both ahead and behind. The only way of conquering his fear, he implies, is to conceptualize it, “Like how the spine/won’t remember its wings” (lines 5-7). The enjambment in this phrase severs the images Vuong creates from the memories they evoke. The spine as a bodily pillar dissolves into its imaginary wings, juxtaposing embodiment with The poetic violence Vuong creates levity. With this duality, Vuong proposes is one ultimately composed of the possibility of impossibilities: Imagining conflict—between imagistic bones with wings helps us to understand renderings of pain, memory, and his own attempts to reconcile with the pain as a multi-dimensional, lived experience that challenges memory and its tenuous construction of reality. trauma of remembering his family’s Following these lines, Vuong war-torn history. returns back to the body as it is thrown onto pavement, a violence enacted against himself with the line “no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement” (line 8). He ruptures the language of the poem with the word “kiss.” Gleams of similarly dissonant tenderness throughout the poem counteract and contradict themselves in lines such as “The most beautiful part/of your body is wherever/your mother’s shadow falls” (lines 9-12). Here again, Vuong deftly puts opposing elements in conversation and in tension with each other, locating tenderness in acts of violence, beauty in the pain of his mother’s memory. The poetic violence Vuong creates is one ultimately composed of conflict—between imagistic renderings of pain, memory, and his attempts to reconcile with the trauma of remembering his family’s war-torn history: “Don’t be afraid, the gunfire/is only the sound of people/trying to live a little longer” (lines 26-28). Violence is equated with survival, and Vuong implies that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive—the act of struggle is also an act of endurance. Vuong suggests that poetry offers its own form of salvation by offering a way to denote the intangible value of suffering.

Pain additionally leads to the creation of a depersonalized poetic mode that facilitates

its movement into linguistic expression, displacing the self. While to “have great pain is to have certainty,” Scarry says, “to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (7). Not only does pain resist language—it creates tensions with perception. One’s own pain is certain; that of another is more tenuous a thing to believe. Throughout “Poem 760,” Dickinson never refers to herself in the first-person. Rather, her sense of self is embodied in the great capitalized “Pain” that becomes coterminous with her life. In “Its Infinite contain” (line 6), Dickinson turns the adjective of Infinite into a noun, cultivating a space for pain to live in beyond her own self. Capacious and godlike, Pain resides in infinitude, transcending Dickinson’s existence. Impersonality functions as a coping mechanism for Dickinson as the poem’s speaker, but it also removes “Poem 760” from Dickinson’s life story. Although only Dickinson could have written this poem, by invoking the grandeur of pain, she makes it ultimately not about herself. Poetry, in this sense, is essentially an act of self-destruction. Synthesizing T.S. Eliot’s notion of impersonality,1 along with Scarry’s theory of pain, leads to a reading of poetry as full of emotion—just not the poet’s personal emotion. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot concludes that poetry is “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (58). Dickinson’s Vuong imbues his own name with poem lacks a sense of self to convey new significance, for he becomes the the violence of pain against the self. Her protean sea for which he is named, pain—or more precisely, the pain she delivering a powerful oceanic writes of—is “enlightened” (line 7) on its own terms. It has no sense of attachment; address to a deeply fractured being. in the act of being made into language, it gains some inhuman degree of wisdom. In the impersonality of Dickinson’s poem, pain escapes from its original unsharability through the intensity of the artistic process.

Whereas Dickinsonian impersonality constructs a separate self for pain, Vuong’s impersonality in “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” destabilizes time as well. Writing outside a teleological framework, Vuong asserts poetry as an act of existential survival. The poem evades any single identity, for Vuong converses with multiple selves in the poem, real and imagined. For instance, there is “the house with childhood/whittled down to a single tripwire” (lines 12-13) that distills the violence of childhood into a scene of domesticity juxtaposed with “tripwire,” instruments of war, inflicted pain. Vuong’s language is as precise as it is incandescent, and his words seem to implode as they are read. “Don’t worry,” he continues telling his fictionalized self, “Just call it horizon/& you’ll never reach it” (lines 14-15). This devastating line asks what it means to escape teleological endpoints, where one’s aim is impossibly distant. Taking part in an

1 T.S. Eliot argues that the poet’s mind is a kind of catalytic chamber, a “receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 55).

exercise of linguistic acrobatics composed of backward and forward gazes, Vuong dramatically departs from temporality in the next lines: “Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not/a lifeboat” (lines 16-17). Just as Vuong brings the poem back to the present, he shatters the moment with the command to jump as he instructs his fictionalized self to vault into the lifeboat, gesturing to his family’s fraught journey from Vietnam to the United States as political refugees. With undercurrents of violence associated with the war and his past puncturing the poem, Vuong destabilizes workings of history and time, eroding his personal identity through the abstraction of these themes. Maneuvering between disparate spatial and temporal moments, Vuong generates a violence between poetic and personal identity. Just as Dickinson questions if “there was/A time” outside of pain (lines 3-4), Vuong transforms temporality into something that is embodied within language rather than experienced linearly, indistinguishable from the space around it.

Poetic imagination includes also the power of language to give voice to the intangible. Manipulating the language in “Poem 760,” Dickinson warps temporal boundaries and generates a poetic violence against theological implications. Time functions on a circular level in this poem, particularly in “Its Infinite realms contain/Its Past—enlightened to perceive/New Periods—of Pain” (lines 6-8). With the theological “Infinite” of Pain, Dickinson assumes a critical gaze, examining whether suffering has an inherently spiritual purpose. Poised against human mortality, Pain is likened to its own belief system, one engaged with the conception of infinitude as self-perpetuating violence. Whereas God is not explicitly addressed as a source of salvation against Pain, Dickinson writes Pain as its own world—as its everything. Pain generates its own suffering and, more poignantly, its own salvation because it is its own God. Helen Vendler notes that, in contrast to Dickinson’s other poems, here Dickinson struggles to find any “mitigating excuse” for the existence of pain, instead accepting it for what it is (316). Vendler adds that Dickinson substitutes the “normal” present tense (“contains”) for the “unmarked” present tense (“contain”) in the poem as a verb more suited to the temporal continuum created in this aesthetic space (317). Beginning and ending with the word “Pain,” Dickinson creates a selfgenerative space within the poem; bracketed within this infinitude of pain that “has no Future— but itself” (line 5), the “Past” undergoes an endless “enlightenment” in which it perceives new periods of pain without the hope of relief. Enlightenment subsequently takes on an ironic tone, for when Dickinson’s speaker becomes enlightened to the realities of her pain, she also returns to the impetus for that enlightenment in the first place.

Dickinson and Vuong both mine their pain for themes of absence and displacement, examining the beauty in dislocation. Folding past, present, and future into the spherical Infinite, Dickinson hinges her poem on the word “Blank.” As much as she imagines a spherical Infinite summoned by her pain, the “Blank” of pain—its ineffability and resistance to language—renders the poem a reminder of the imperfection of human perception. Pain generates understanding rooted in uncertainty. Throughout the poem the “Blank” refuses to be dissected, remaining as inscrutable and mysterious as when it appears in the opening line. By aligning the Infinite with blankness, Dickinson creates a disruption within the epistemology upon which her language rests, using this linguistic violence as a way of reimagining the aesthetic powers of pain as

poetic creation. In a similar vein, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is a poem whose gravity rests in personal crisis. Dead friends pass through Vuong’s speaker “like wind/through a wind chime” (lines 35-36). Like Dickinson’s “Blank,” the impenetrable “Ocean” of Vuong’s poem is what we remember. Vuong repeats his first name “Ocean” throughout his poem in multiple variations. From “Ocean,/are you listening?” (lines 8-9), he proceeds finally to “Ocean. Ocean,/ get up” (lines 28-29). The call seems to reverberate beyond the last line of the poem and points us back to the title, to the inevitable and incredible “Someday” Vuong promises himself. Vuong imbues his own name with new significance, for he becomes the protean sea for which he is named, delivering a powerful oceanic address to a deeply fractured being. Residing within and deepening these profound absences left by trauma and pain, Vuong attempts to uncover the beauty in the urgency of his own inability to understand it all. As in Dickinson’s “Poem 760,” however, there is something searing about this precariousness, a kind of poetic disturbance that compels, disrupts, and haunts the reader.

The resonances of pain and poetic violence allow the poems of Dickinson and Vuong to be viewed as redemptive acts of artistic creation. To convey the immensity of her truths, Dickinson famously advises in another poem that one must tell “all the truth but tell it slant.” The inexpressibility of pain makes it a rich subject for the kind of slant-truth with which poetry deals. Dickinson distorts the world of pain generated by its “Element of Blank” (line 1) by writing her way into the poem as a mode of reconciliation, an assertion of survival. Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is likewise a poem laced with a fraught awareness of its transitory beauty: Images like unnamed arms gesturing toward a departure (line 19), or a faint torch in the fading darkness (line 21) attempt to give shape and form to ineffable trauma. Reading these poems through the lens of the sublime in the Western tradition illuminates how certain poems transcend the human condition, deepening the mystery of the power of literary works.2 Great works transcend temporal boundaries, reverberating beyond the initial, immediate transaction between audience and language. Some critics have even defined the sublime within an aesthetic framework for distinguishing from the merely beautiful.3 At the heart of all literary criticism is the question of what makes a work of literature truly great. These ideas are embodied not only in the reading of Dickinson and Vuong’s poems, but also, notably, in their conception. Dissonance in the poetry actually brings us closer. The violence circumscribed by the language of these poems—against pain, the self, and the very confines of language itself—function as an affirmative act. Survival, in other words, is a creative force.

2 In the Greek fragment Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), Longinus puts forth his understanding of the aesthetic and philosophical framework in which one can imagine the literary sublime. Longinus claims that great works demonstrate a sense of timelessness, with consequences for both the individual as well as broader literary history: “For what is truly great bears repeated consideration; it is difficult, nay, impossible, to resist its effect; and the memory of it is stubborn and indelible” (179-181). 3 For instance, philosopher Edmund Burke locates the sublime in the liminal space between pain and beauty in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. According to Burke, pain, if artfully employed, can lead to a powerfully sublime work (34).

Deeming poetry “a gift one cannot quantify,” Vuong in his interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books emphasizes the necessity of understanding poetic creation as a radical offering to humanity. In a world fraught with political crises and perpetual injustices, poetry offers its own form of survival, one rooted in language and its disruptive power. Poetic salvation, as the great Wallace Stevens observed, arises from a “violence from within that protects us from the violence from without.” In other words, poetry addresses the exterior from the interior through the privilege of artistic freedom and expression, responding to the tremors of collective trauma and pain from the epicenter of the individual. In tumultuous times, it is the imagination that is equipped best to withstand the pressures of reality, and the poet, in concretizing and abstracting that reality, creates a vision as powerful as it is redemptive. //

Works Cited

Ānandavardhana, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, and Abhinavagupta. The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard University Press, 1990. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Edited by Stephen Halliwell, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print. Barylski, Alexandra. “Ocean Vuong: Poetry, Bodies, and Stillness. Alexandra Barylski Interviews Ocean Vuong.” Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books—A Review of Books in History, Religion & Culture, 21 Dec. 2018, marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/ocean-vuong-poetrybodies-and-stillness/. Burke, Edmund, and Adam Phillips. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press, 1990. Dickinson, Emily. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Edited by Helen Vendler, Harvard University Press, 2010. Dickinson, Emily. “Poem 760.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by R. W. Franklin, Belknap Press, 1999. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen, 1960. Longinus. Aristotle: the Poetics: Longinus: on the Sublime. Demetrius on Style. Edited by W. H. Fyfe, Harvard University Press, 1953. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1987. Stevens, Wallace, and W. A. Dwiggins. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Knopf, 1951. Vuong, Ocean. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” The New Yorker. April 27, 2016.