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I will say this about Ocean Vuong and metaphor gate. For the first time in my life I was called a f*gg*t while walking with a friend downtown. I do not say this for sympathy or kind words. Black trans women get treated worse every day with hardly any support or kindness. I'm good
I only share that experience because it happened concurrently with metaphor-gate. So here is a metaphor: logging on to Twitter to see poets treating another queer poet like a moron over an IG post was an eclipse over already-dark water.
I have made the mistake of thinking poets are better people than most. It is a mistake I learn from constantly when it seems the intellectualization of our insecurities, entitlement, and resentment overrule any acknowledgement that maybe we need to rethink why we write.
I write to express myself and to add some new thinking/energy that could fuse with the old and make a navigable path in a murky life. I do not write for anything else. I do not expect anything else. Poetry owes me nothing. I am tearfully grateful to have words.
So, though I disagree with Ocean's post, I think it is exhausting to see poets not extend a hand to Ocean and say "Let's have a conversation about metaphor. Are you open to it?" No. He is disrespected, infantilized, subtweeted, and used as a punching bag.
You cannot debate with someone who is not present. That's why it is called bullying, because people *know* he will not respond. They know he will not defend himself. So we all crack open our Princeton Encyclopedias of Poetry and prove just how smart we are. Who cares?
Here is the thing: the way folks referred to Ocean today like he was dead, invisible, not worth any form of engagement or respect, would have never happened to me and you know exactly why. If not, don't try to find out (that's partially why).
The thing about it is sometimes we develop our ideas in public, and that's not always the best move. I do it all the time. I know I am making mistakes as I go, but it's all freestyling, free thinking, seeing what sticks and what fails. Social media is a canvas for some of us.
I disagree with Ocean's post, but I can very easily write an essay about what I love and care about without diminishing a peer, someone who by nature of his queerness and ethnicity is already experiencing the world (thus language) differently than I can imagine.
So it makes sense that Ocean Vuong can be tossed around like he not our cousin, our peer, our equal. But maybe that is how some of us treat those close to us: begrudgingly, gracelessly.
Shoutout to AE Stallings for dropping a link to her essay and leaving it at that. I appreciated that generosity and cannot wait to read it.
Ocean is our kin. Talk shit about him in the DMs and texts, but respect him like a peer in public. If you can do it with the family members you can't stand, then you can extend that little to him. He minds his business. He don't bother anybody. Like wtf.
His ideas were not challenged, his personhood was. It's messed up to think that people handling critique is them acting like an adult when 1.) the critique is obviously underhanded and 2.) ***y'all don't do nobody else that way***. I wouldn't handle that well.
No one yet has been brave enough to say "I am sick of hearing Ocean's name, reading his poems, seeing him win shit, and reading his quotes everywhere." Because that, my friends, is called being mean. So you hide it behind posts about craft or fairness or whatever.
Now imagine me, verbally assaulted, looking for a place to feel connected to what I had hoped would be like-minded, caring poets, just to see a queer poet who posted something benign and inconsequential be treated like a poetry infidel. Bizarre.
Naw, you didn't call him a f*gg*t, but you also did not leave any room for him to be seen as a full person as you talked around him, over him, and through him, on a social media platform where your ideas fall just a flat and unnuanced as you claim his to be.
I know y'all get sick of me. I hear it: "Here come Phillip with his 2 cents." I'm sick of me, too. You have no idea. I'm sick of some of y'all as well. But all we have is us, and today I did not see a place to be seen because you did not see another. Over "metaphor."
