Poetry Centered
Linger in the space between a poem being spoken and being heard.
Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.
Poetry Centered
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis: Refugee Poetics
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis curates poems that illuminate characteristics of refugee poetics. He introduces Mai Der Vang on the displacement of the self (“Dear Exile”), Monica Sok on the contradictions inherent in being a refugee in the nation that caused the initial wound (“Americans Dancing in the Heart of Darkness”), and Ocean Vuong on the desire for belonging that can never be fulfilled (“Of Thee I Sing”). Davis closes with an untitled poem from his novel-in-progress, expressing defiance against loss of agency.
Watch the full recordings of Vang, Sok, and Vuong reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Mai Der Vang (August 11, 2022)
Monica Sok (February 13, 2020)
Ocean Vuong (April 6, 2017)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
This is Poetry Centered, where you'll hear three live recordings of poets chosen and woven together by a guest host. This show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and from Voca, our online collection of recorded poetry readings. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, here to welcome you. We're trying something a little new with the openings of these last few episodes. Our goal is always to keep it snappy so that you get to the guest host and their selections as soon as possible. However, we really want everyone to feel welcome here, regardless of what you know about the poetry scene. So rather than just listing titles of books or awards, we're aiming to give you a little bit more context about what each host's writing is like, and we're aiming to do that in just a sentence or two. Here's Aria Pahari, the other half of the Poetry Center team to introduce today's host.
ARIA PAHARI:I first met Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis when I was an undergraduate summer intern for the Asian-American literary review, a journal co-edited by Lawrence and his partner, Mimi Khúc. This spirit of Asian-American literary community fuels Lawrence's work as a writer, curator, and arts administrator. In GHOST ÓI, his debut novel, forthcoming in spring 2027, a spirit medium communes with ghosts, whose voices comprise of writing by Viet diasporic writers and artists, including Ocean Vuong, whose voice you'll hear in this episode. Please enjoy this episode of Voca selections by Lawrence, who brings recordings by my Mai Der Vang, Monica Sok, and Ocean Vuong to life through the ever-pertinent lens of refugee poetics.[SOFT TUNE]
LAWRENCE-MINH BÙI DAVIS:Hello, this is Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis. I'm grateful to be here, grateful to the Poetry Center, grateful to be in audio community with listeners. I'm recording in my very unkempt home on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway Nation, also known as Prince George's County, Maryland. My specific neighborhood was founded in the 1930s, University Park, as in University of Maryland right down the street. Historically, this neighborhood was a sundown town, meaning if you're non-white, be out by sundown. It's not a sundown town anymore. Many BIPOC families like mine have come to live here, more or less blissfully unaware of its past. But maybe it's not not a sundown town anymore entirely either. Our neighborhood email listserv is most active anytime folks of color are not immediately recognized as residents happen to pass through and get accused of casing homes. And no one knows the particular native histories of the lands beneath our homes. So as you listen to this recording, and thank you for listening, you might feel native grounds and waters shaped by deep time histories of Piscataway stewardship beneath us. And at the same time, you might sense the pollution of white supremacy, not so much around us, pressing down and in as already permeating the air we're breathing. You'd think it would choke us, but it's the other way. Many of us can't imagine breathing without it, which is a workable, gloomy segue into the theme of this podcast. The great Bertolt Brecht once theorized, the best way to understand a refugee is as [GERMAN]-- forgive my bad German-- a messenger of ill tidings. Refugees come with bad tidings. And nobody would say don't kill the messenger if people didn't kill messengers. The theme of this podcast, tying together three poem recordings I've selected from the vocal archives, is refugee poetics. The first recording I'd like to share is Mai Der Vang reading the poem Dear Exile at the Poetry Center on August 11, 2022. I realize I published an earlier version of this poem back in 2015 for a special issue of the Asian-American literary review I edited titled "REVN, Recollecting the Vietnam War," devoted to writing and art making about the long tail legacies of the war for Southeast Asian diasporic communities. It took me a minute to remember where I'd seen the poem before. Also, Dear Exile later appeared in Mai Der's first beautiful book, published in 2017, Afterland. I had a chance to work closely with Mai Der a few years later at the 2019 Asian-American Literature Festival, a three-day summer festival in Washington, DC, for which I happen to be the humble director with a not-so-humble note about that festival. It's been either one or one of two literary festivals in this country that pays authors speaker fees and travel and lodging, every single participating author, not just headliners and not just offering authors a chance to sell books, but fair pay as a fundamental, inexorable baseline of the literary arts. That's one or one of two, which is a reality, I think, that should fill our mouths with ashes. Mai Der was part of a refugee poet session at the festival, along with poets from varied refugee diasporas, so Ocean Vuong, Ilya Kaminsky, Kaveh Akbar, and Carolina Abid. And I know that group had prior, I think, and has since spent time thinking about trying to create a refugee poets retreat, a Cave Canem or a Canto Mundo or a Kundiman for refugees. I remember that day at the reading, there was standing room only. It was packed out the door and down the hall. And the way the life of an arts administrator or director is, you can forget the poem sometimes and remember only the anxiety over-exceeding max occupancy limits, and that was one of those days. Six years later now, fall 2025 as I'm recording this, Mai Der has a new book out, Primordial. She's our most prominent and prolific Hmong American poet. She is, I'd say, a critical poetic archeologist of the hidden dimensions of the tolls of war, chemical and environmental and psychic. So April of this year, 2025, was the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the official end of the Vietnam War, sometimes also known as the American War in Vietnam or the War of American Aggression, an end which began a mass refugee exodus from the region that would extend over the next 20 years and produce a sprawling Southeast Asian Diaspora across the globe, including Hmong peoples, Lao, Cambodian, or Khmer, Vietnamese, Hoa or Chinese Vietnamese, Lumion, Montagnard, among others. The big anniversary earlier this year, on April 30, was a global commemoration of the end of the war or a conglomeration of many kinds and forms of commemoration, different across different spaces, of war and post-war and exodus and refugee resettlement histories, I think. As necessary as those commemorations have been, refugee poetics gives us something that can't be found in our histories and in our popular commemorations. Dear Exile opens as a seeming poet letter to a refugee, dear refugee, dear person in exile. To be in exile is to be an exile. Displacement from one's homeland is fundamentally a displacement of the self. So to address someone, maybe your parent, as dear exile is to start by acknowledging that truth, before they're a parent or anything else, they're in exile. But as the poem letter unfolds, we find the inverse is even truer. The refugee condition, the exilate experience, is one that has to be understood in terms of parenting, families, fraught intergenerational inheritance, how exile renders parents and children, how it shapes descendants. The poet's speaker, it becomes clear, is not addressing a parent, not addressing a person who is in exile, but addressing exile itself as a condition and narrating back to it what it's done to the speaker's parents and, thereby, to the speaker as well. When my parents left, you knew it was for good, the poem reads. And at that point the you is exiled, but maybe it may be a general you. Old river calling to my mother. Ridgeline vista closed into the locket of their gaze, her parents gaze transposed now to the speaker's gaze, because what a refugee parent has lost, what they've sacrificed by leaving a country, transposes in memory and basic sense of self to what a child and other descendants on down the chain owe. The poet child has to pay a debt to their parents. They may not even realize consciously as a debt. Pay it through witness, through devotion, through delivering a poem just like this. And the question becomes, dear condition of exile, through a parent, then a child, then a poem, how do you change a reader? That is a central by way of refugee poetics. So here is Mai Der Vang delivering a reading of Dear Exile.[LIGHT MUSIC]
MAI DER VANG:This is a poem for my parents, who are Hmong refugees from Laos. Dear exile, never step back. Never a last scent of plumeria. When my parents left, you knew it was for good. It's a herd of horses never to reclaim their steps. You became a moth hanging down from the sun, old river calling to my mother, kept spilling out of her lungs, ridgeline vista closed into the locket of their gaze. It's the Siberian crane, forbidden to fly back after winter. You marbled my father's face, floated him as stone over the sea, further every minute, emptying his child years to the land. You crawled back in your balm. It's when the banyan must leave and relearn to Cathedral its roots.[SOFT TUNE]
LAWRENCE-MINH BÙI DAVIS:The second poem I've selected is Americans Dancing in the Heart Of Darkness by Monica Sok, recorded on February 13, 2020 at the Poetry Center. Monica is also a poet of the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora, specifically of the Khmer diaspora. Heart of Darkness is a club, a dance club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the poem, we learn. In real life, too, says Tripadvisor, it's also allusion to the famous Joseph Conrad, with a C, novella by the same name, Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, an ironic allusion. Per Google, there's a heart of darkness brewery in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Ironic in both of these cases because the great rotten, racist godfather of all American-made Vietnam War movies, Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, set its director, Francis Ford Coppola, based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Both novella and film feature a white dude in inhospitable foreign lands, traveling down a river surrounded by threatening non-white savages. Set in Africa in the case of Heart of Darkness, as I believe Chinua Achebe has written about before. And then in the case of Apocalypse Now, set in Vietnam, leading, I think, into Cambodia. So both novella and film are powered by the same rough colonial ethos, which is, to give a quick and dirty paraphrase, troubled white dudes of whatever imperial affiliation can helpfully find in non-white savages a reflection of their own inner savagery, what they believe they've overcome and consigned to a distant Anglo past. Nope. And once faced with this brutal truth of themselves, they can properly reckon, as is the quintessential white bro responsibility with the quandary of civilizational progress, which, of course, absents all humanity from the people of the lands being represented only as a very limited kind of racist foil for white external and internal journey of discovery. So bringing all that context to mind to Monica's poem, what does it mean to look at Cambodia and to look at yourself as a person of the Khmer diaspora coming back to Cambodia once you know of this Heart of Darkness history? The poem's speaker says, the Americans hate me, and I hate them, meaning fellow exchange students traveling abroad in Cambodia, in Phnom Penh. And that feeling, I hate Americans, is one that has to be said. The refugees can't ever express-- you can't hate the host. You can't hate Americans as a refugee because you've begged to be an American, because as a stateless person adrift, you've been granted asylum. You've been resettled and rehomed by America and American generosity, so you have to be grateful, sometimes known as compulsory gratitude for what wonder scholar Mimi Thi Nguyen calls the gift of freedom. It's a gratitude that is a passive acceptance of victimhood, and it's a showy gratitude that functions as nation-bolstering propaganda. America is a place that gives refugees new homes. Transgressing this rule and hating Americans-- being ungratefully hateful is only possible, we see here, far outside of the US, in a return visit to Cambodia and in the speaker's thoughts in a poem. We never get the sense they're communicated directly to fellow student American travelers. And maybe I'm American, too, the speaker goes on to reflect. It's the dark truth for a refugee resettled in the US to have to carry hating Americans as your would-be saviors, and Americans hating you as something like an unreformable savage, and you hating yourself as savage and savior at once as refugee hyphen American, Khmer-American, Cambodian-American. A refugee's psychic inheritance is not the product of just the simple, singular choice of that refugee or their parent or their grandparent leaving. It's the product of war, shifting national borders of centuries of colonialism. And those forced to flee are often fleeing to the very country that authored their displacement. Resettlement is often a humanitarian Band-Aid a colonial power lovingly places over the gaping wound it itself inflicted. So I met Monica through a refugee poetry program, this one in 2018 at the Asian Arts Initiative. And I invited Monica to read as part of it, and I think this was a little bit before her book came out. And she also wanted to run a session, a community workshop with Southeast Asian refugee community, including-- I think, predominantly Lao and Vietnamese, but some Kumai and some Hmong folks on memory work. The necessary and deeply painful dredging up of what official state histories have suppressed, meaning also what communal memories and family memory and personal memory have often had to suppress, too, out of self-preservation. So I have this question of, can we think of this poem as a kind of memory work? Here is Monica Sok reading Americans Dancing in the heart of Darkness.[MUSIC PLAYING]
MONICA SOK:I wrote this book when I was also doing research in Siem Reap. And every time I go to the home of my ancestors, I always feel like my relationship to the place changes, and I know that I have changed as well. The first time I went there as an adult was in 2010, and I was there for the water festival. And I didn't go out at night when the fireworks were happening. I just ordered room service. But then the next morning, I found out that there was a human stampede that happened on the bridge to Diamond Island. So this is a poem about that experience, Americans Dancing in the Heart of Darkness. It's the water festival. The city is a crowd. My skin full of sun, like so many country people who have come to Phnom Penh. The Americans hate me, and I hate them, but they're the only students with me, and maybe I'm American, too. When I return to my windowless room at the Golden Gate Hotel, I order fresh young coconut, a club sandwich, and French fries. A woman with a bruised face and a silver tray walks up seven floors, knocks on my door. The exchange students order room service, too, and the same woman walks the flights of stairs nine more times. Fireworks crackle, and I think, I'll be back to the same festival with my family. In the morning, 30 missed calls. There has been a human stampede on the bridge to Kopek, 347 reported dead, 755 injured. Shoes litter the river. The exchange program advises us to stay away from diamond island. The prime minister's remarks, this is the worst thing to happen since the Khmer Rouge. The Americans agree. I grow quiet in my windowless room. I step outside for air. The city, a crowd disappearing. The crowd evacuated to the provinces. Cambodia, a perpetual stampede. School canceled at the university, a funerary ceremony instead. Do the Americans understand the program director when she tells us her neighbor's son has died? Most likely not. Later that evening, they still don't understand. But I go with them anyway to the Heart of Darkness, the nightclub, empty, but open. We dance with Khmer boys. Strobe lights pull us on the floor, this way, that. Our feet grope the shiny black tiles reflecting the bar where old expats sit with Khmer women making money. Yeah, yeah, it isn't expensive to get here or get back. We took a tuk-tuk, and we danced. They laugh. Meanwhile, my mother calls me. My father calls me. My auntie calls me from Prabang. My uncle down the street from the hotel, my uncle in Kandal, my cousin's uncle in Siem Reap.[SOFT MUSIC]
LAWRENCE-MINH BÙI DAVIS:The third poem I've chosen is by a relatively obscure poet named Ocean Vuong. Poem is Of Thee I sing, recorded at the Poetry Center on April 6, 2017. The 2018 program I mentioned earlier with Monica in Philly at the Asian Arts Initiative was titled A One-Day Center for Refugee Poetics. And that center was Ocean's invention. In a sense, it was our together. We dreamed it up together. I remember talking to him a year or two before, and he wanted to someday found a center for refugee poetics. He was a young professor at UMass Amherst, and no resources, he was told. Someday, maybe. But right now, as a junior professor, the idea of founding a center was something to reach for in years to come. I was a young curator at the world's largest museum and research complex at the time, and I had access to some resources. And I asked Ocean, how about now, but not in the shape you imagined? Not quite. I didn't have those kinds of resources. It'd be like a dream version of that physical on-campus center with an illusory institutionality, real and not real, real for a day, but realer in a way than a brick and mortar space beholden to university. There was no space devoted to refugee poetry anywhere in the world then, nor is there one now, as far as I know. So we'd create one that wasn't permanent, but like refugee experience itself and the art making of refugees that had to be ephemeral, transient, mobile, unkillable in that sense, maybe a little tricksy. We did it in 2018 in Philly, and we were supposed to host another in 2020, but the pandemic wiped it out. And I like to think of that phantom expression of the center that never happened as just as real, and maybe in a sense, a truer expression of what it is to make refugee poetry. Of Thee I Sing has been written about quite a bit, I think, by critics and scholars, so it's not a deep cut poem of oceans, per se. It summons up JFK's infamous assassination and, indirectly, the related war history. I'm most interested in the poem for this podcast as expressly a refugee poem. I think the mention of good citizen is the first maybe clue into that or gets at that, the enduring refugee desire to belong somewhere, to become a citizen, as definitionally, a non-citizen. But digging past that, there's more powerful stuff. Look, for a queer Viet refugee boy, I could love, I could be this most beautiful white boy raised up to the presidency, this quintessentially American boy. It's like a song of aspirational whiteness, one that, yes, JFK's spectacle of history reminds us is impossible. It's a death wish, not for the refugee poet speaker alone but, of course, JFK himself, pointing to whiteness as an ideal, an always-moving horizon everyone has to chase. This is recognizably James Baldwin's framing from Price of the Ticket. As Baldwin outlined it, the price of the Black ticket is to have to want to be white when you can never be white. So the Viet refugee ticket, maybe in the imaginary of Ocean's poem, might be similar to have to desire whiteness, to have to want to be white when you know can never have it, never be it, and the doomedness of that venture. As Baldwin also tells us, the price of the White ticket is to have to want to be White when you can never be White. No one can get there. It's that ever-moving horizon. These are the terms of the White supremacy we embrace over and over again, the contract we can't quit. No direct evocation of Baldwin here, though I know Ocean reveres him. I like to trace this indebtedness of refugee poetics to queer Black thought. Neither is just a body of work by a population about a population, nor just a poetic engagement with a racialized condition, but instead also a way of seeing through to truths of how our world operates that we are otherwise trained not to see. That's pretty dismal. Here's a fun story, I think, to counteract it a little. My mom knows Ocean. She's met Ocean's mom. She's met Ocean and heard him read several times. My mom, a lifelong scientist, retired scientist, and who has very little interest in poetry or literature other than in terms of her strange son, but appreciates ocean's work. One day a few years ago, my mom told me out of the blue she saw him, the poet, the Vietnamese one, on PBS News or NPR. I said, Ocean? She said, yes, he was talking about his new book. And my wife, Mimi, was there, and she said, yeah, Ocean's gotten really big, but it can be hard for him sometimes. And my mom said, because he is the lesbian? But she pronounces it "lesbeen." I think Ocean would be OK with me sharing this. We told Ocean later that my mom refers to him as lesbian, and he loved it. He said, I think all my life, I've aspired to be a lesbian. So here's to our better aspirations. And here's Ocean Vuong reading his poem, Of Thee I Sing.[CALM TUNE]
OCEAN VUONG:A lot of this book attempts to navigate history rewritten as mythologies, similar to how homer wrote The Iliad 400 years after the Trojan War. But it looks at more contemporary moments. And this poem looks at a moment, an infamous moment, that occurred in 1963 in this country. Of Thee I sing. We made it, baby. We're riding in the back of the black limousine. They have lined the road to shout our names. They have faith in your golden hair and pressed gray suit. They have a good citizen in me. I love my country. I pretend nothing is wrong. I pretend not to see the man and his blonde daughter diving for cover, that you're not saying my name and it's not coming out like a slaughterhouse. I'm not Jackie O yet. And there isn't a hole in your head. A brief rainbow through a mist of rust. I love my country, but who am I kidding? I'm holding your still hot thoughts in, darling. My sweet, sweet Jack. I'm reaching across the trunk for a shard of your memory, the one where we kiss and the nation glitters. You're slumped back, your hand letting go. You're all over the seat now, deepening my fuchsia dress. But I'm a good citizen, surrounded by Jesus and ambulances. I love this country. The twisted faces. My country. The blue sky. Black limousine. My one white glove, glistening pink with all our American dreams.[SOFT TUNE]
LAWRENCE-MINH BÙI DAVIS:Now, a short poem of my own peers in my debut novel in progress, titled GHOST ÓI. The poem's untitled and without a clear author. The narrator of my book stumbles across it written on the front window of an abandoned, maybe Capital One bank in ruined post-Katrina New Orleans. And she never finds out who wrote it, our narrator, and the reader never learns. Well, I wrote it, and here it is. Diaspora, die as poor a as you can. Thinking of it visually, it's diaspora, then in the next line, as it appears on the window, die, space, as, space, poor, space, a, and then the next line, in parentheses, a hyphen, and then an S, so finishing the as, space, you, space, can. And that's it, the whole poem. As, scrawled on the window in chalk paint or something. But the narrator then goes on to imagine what the rest of the poem might be, and here it is. Diaspora, not a noun, but an imperative with a splash of invective, leave and go die as poor as you can. Or leaving, go die as poor as you can, then. To which refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs everywhere have always responded, watch me live and get rich. But our ghosts know better. Everyone dies penniless. Why this poem? In my novel, GHOST ÓI, for the narrator and the reader, it's meant to be a kind of, oof. The poem opens with the kind of psychologies of leaving and exile. The 50th anniversary of the end of the war is focused so much on what survival and moving on have had to look like across the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora. We get to refugee entrepreneurism as a kind of existential defiance, defiance of getting kicked the fuck out or having to run away, the loss of country. It's like a defiance of death, a defiance of the loss of agency. it's like, no. That's the-- no, no, the refugee entrepreneur yelling it inside in their head over and over. And we see, in the entrepreneurial turn, this wondrous, unbelievably ingenious and resourceful ability to navigate new systems and see through and around laws and social codes to hidden potentialities. It's because refugees know, better than anyone, the rules are temporary. They're artificial. They seem universal and immutable, but they're liable to change anything. A whole country can change in an instant. The rules should be regarded accordingly as suggested guidelines that are more like preferences written in the sand maybe at high tide. You can get rich that way if you look around. But in the poem, our ghosts want a word, too. Our ghosts, not as symbols of the past and not as revenants of painful histories that refuse to disappear, but ghosts as our unsettled dead, their spirits, comprising a whole ghost world beyond or inside the living one we know and accept as real. What's more of an ill tiding than that, seemingly? But it's not really a bad message brought by a refugee. It's just another way of knowing and being that exist in various forms all over our living world, this kind of ghost practice, ghost spirit belief, and across histories that are our inheritances, too, and lastingly incompatible with certain kinds of social conditioning, colonial conditioning. The longer our departures run as refugee exiles and the more we push outward and away from homelands that no longer exist, the more we might need to return to a deep interior and an openness to ghost worlds, where at last, money is an agency. Getting rich isn't really meaningful defiance or revenge or rewriting history or conjuring up a lost homeland. Only then can we begin to accept we have to find new ways backwards and forwards. Thank you for listening.[SOFT TUNE]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:You've been listening to Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, and this is Poetry Centered. Lawrence, thank you so much for outlining refugee poetics for us and for sharing your deep expertise. Listeners, thanks so much for joining us to enjoy recordings from the Voca archive, but also to learn about the many poetries that are happening today. We're always grateful to go on this journey with you. We have one more new episode coming up for you in this set. Join us again two weeks from today for an episode with Prageeta Sharma. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
ARIA PAHARI:Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library of more than 135,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and Buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive, online at voca.arizona.edu.