I have been a Buddhist long before I started writing poems and I think as far as perception is concerned, Buddhism has had a major impact. My meditation practice made observing objects “as they are” a lot easier and this has helped in the avoiding the younger writer’s tendency towards canned or cliched phrases like “rolling hills”, “deep blue eyes”, or “shattered heart”, for example. Practicing Zen made it natural for me to question whether those hills are really “rolling”, or that perhaps those blue eyes are not very deep at all, maybe they’re hollow or crystalline, perhaps they resemble a mine shaft studded with jewels, a sea of lilacs? What I am saying is that there’s a danger in falling into these easy and common descriptions and by stripping the object of its very name, we can begin to see it in a more clear and unique way. When we remove an object or idea from the relative nature of language, we can see how stunning it really is all by itself, naked and fully present; we can see, at last, that an elephant is big only when it’s next to something small.
Ocean Vuong | Ocean Vuong: The TNB Self-Interview | The Nervous Breakdown

Source: thenervousbreakdown.com

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  1. jslr posted this