Mood Lighting:
Ocean Vuong Sets Poetic Tone Through Specification of Color
By Sarah O’Brien
Writers can manipulate mood and tone of their poetry by specifying color, by alluding to color, or by merely mentioning the word “color.” Since people have been socialized to associate certain colors with broader feelings, they can experience an almost visceral reaction to colors in poetry. There is, of course, a fine line between lazily reaching for a color to set the tone of a piece of writing and crafting imagery that transports your reader, but here’s the thing: writers have been lazily and effectively reaching for colors throughout history. Take, for instance, poet William Carlos Williams’ iconic piece “The Red Wheelbarrow”: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” So much depends, in fact, on the use of color within this work. Williams, a doctor familiar with the importance of precision, pairs “red” and “white,” placing them right beside each other in one simple sweeping motion (Connaroe 147). This intentional pairing of color grants the poem its energy and allows people to connect to the piece, to say, ‘I’ve been there. I’ve felt that way.’ In American poet and fiction author Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, he explores emotional intimacy using evocative language, including crucial descriptions and specificities of color used to define the tone of his work.
In his piece, “Homewrecker,” Vuong illustrates a first love using language that draws its momentum from an introduction of the colors “white” and “red.” He writes, “& this is how we danced: our mothers’ / white dresses spilling from our feet, late August / turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved: / a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers / through my hair—my hair a wildfire” (Vuong 32). He implies a sense of innocence and purity through use of the qualifier “white” before dresses. Then, by introducing the color “dark red,” there is suddenly the implication of passion, a loss of innocence in late August. After the red comes into the poem, Vuong is able to say simply: “my hair a wildfire” without using specific colors, since the red is still sitting vividly in the reader’s mind. He continues the fire imagery: “In the museum of the heart / there are two headless people building a burning house. / There was always the shotgun above / the fireplace.” The energy created from the white darkening to red gives the poem the momentum needed to ignite in readers an emotional connection to “a burning house” that is not their own. This is not an easy feat, and yet by the time the reader reaches “the shotgun above / the fireplace,” they have already claimed that fireplace as their own and feel the impact of the image and its implications. Vuong writes later in the piece, “If not the attic, the car. If not / the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes.” Again, ever since the mention of “dark red,” there is no need to specify the color of either the car or clothes, as the reader is now all-in emotionally and can picture “his clothes,” and even an abstract image such as “the dream” for themselves. The most emotionally intense lines are its final ones: “Which is to say: / this is how we loved: a knife on a tongue turning / into a tongue.” The “dark red,” still close to the reader, now creates a shocking and bloody scene. It becomes clear that this love was a violent infatuation, of the physical and transformative variety. So much depends on just “dark red,” and Vuong is a painter who knows just how much white space to incorporate.
In “Of Thee I Sing,” Vuong presents an exasperation with the façade of the American Dream against a retelling of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which the tone is almost entirely carried on the backs of carefully-selected colors. Vuong begins, “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 / & pressed grey suit” (Vuong 33). Vuong has artfully set the stage for his poem with “black” and “grey,” allowing the colors to do his foreshadowing. His phrasing “They have faith” before “golden” casts an ominous shadow over an otherwise hopeful or beautiful color. Vuong then writes, “I’m not Jackie O yet / & 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?” (Vuong 33). The rainbow imagery is replaced at once with an image of “rust,” evoking a reddish hue that seeps beautifully into the next striking image including color: “Your hand letting go. You’re all over / the seat now, deepening / my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good / citizen, surrounded by Jesus / & ambulances.” Now, the red is everywhere; readers cannot avoid seeing it: on the seat, staining the “fuchsia dress,” and flashing from atop the ambulances. This all-encompassing color creates a great sense of urgency and desperation in this piece. Vuong brings the tragedy to a final image, again using color to evoke emotion: “The twisted faces. / My country. The blue sky. Black / limousine. My one white glove / glistening pink—with all / our American dreams.” There is a sharp contrast throughout “Of Thee I Sing” between the hopeful illusion of the American Dream and the dark reality of the nation’s past. This juxtaposition is echoed with Vuong’s phrasing “blue sky. Black / limousine. My one white glove / glistening pink,” in which the hopeful hues are interrupted by the capitalized reminder of a dark memory: “Black / limousine.” The readers are taken on an intensely emotional ride in Vuong’s limousine due nearly solely to his use of color throughout.
“Vuong is a painter who knows just how much white space to incorporate. ”
Unlike in “Of Thee I Sing,” Vuong sets an immediate emotional tone for his piece “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown):oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952” by selecting an existing visual artwork as a canvas on which to paint his words. In titling his poem after this particular Rothko piece, Vuong allows the many shades of blue to introduce a profound sense of sadness, loss, and despair. He starts with an arresting image in simplistic language; Vuong writes, “The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.” American readers, and many others as well, can instantly recognize this historical reference, especially given that the Rothko piece has already set the mood going into the poem. The next lines develop a relationship between two people: “& I said Yes because you asked me / to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god / only listens when we’re this close / to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you” (Vuong 49). With these lines, no colors are presented, and yet the “green” and “brown” referenced through Rothko appear to come through with the insinuation of the friends or lovers being close to the ground. Thus, the title is bringing color into this scene of some hope—god is presumably listening because the devil is definitely involved or to blame or, at the very least, close at hand.
Then, subtly, Vuong shifts the tone of “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown):oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952” again several lines later: “They say the sky is blue / but I know it’s black seen through too much distance.” Although “blue” is being used in a hopeful manner here, that it is prefaced with “They say” negates any potential optimism. This is drilled home by his phrase “black seen through too much distance”; the poem’s speaker is stating that perspective can be deceiving, and that only once you are up close and personal with tragedy do many see the cruelty in the world. This “black,” evoking somewhat of a black hole and swallowing any remaining hope, is reflected in the following lines: “There is so much / I need to tell you—but I only earned / one life. & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth / at the end.” The repetition of the word “nothing” is felt more strongly by readers due to the previous use of the color black; they feel suffocated by the words. The effect of this carried through to his final lines: “I stood waiting in the room / made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing / into four blurred walls. & you were there. / You were the window.” Again, these lines are devoid of color, which means that “black” is still the color dominating the emotional landscape of the piece. However, there is one last tonal shift with the phrase “& you were there. / You were the window.” Vuong directs his readers to a window at the end in order to let his readers breathe. This image returns the color and air to the “four blurred walls” while reverting once again to the earthy green and brown hues of hope in the metaphoric form of someone loved.
In Vuong’s piece, “Daily Bread,” the first line consists almost solely of color, and yet is emotionally-intense and somehow relatable, drawing the reader into the work. He writes, “Red is only black remembering” (Vuong 75). This opening line is jarring in its simplicity. Readers cling to the colors, lacking much else to go on, and yet are through this transported to memories of their own. Vuong follows his chosen colors with colorful imagery, describing, “Early dark & the baker wakes / to press what’s left of the year / into flour and water. Or rather, / he’s reshaping the curve of her pale calf / atmosphered by a landmine left over / from a war he can’t recall.” Here, rather than a particular color, Vuong has chosen to evoke color through the words “dark” and “pale.” These two opposite images create a wonderful tension within these lines, preparing the reader emotionally to encounter “atmosphered by a landmine.” This phrase matches the effect of dark paired with pale: there is an image of an atmosphere despite that it is serving as a verb in this context (“atmosphered”), and that ethereal transparency creates tension against the following physical, violent landmine and war imagery. As German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his Theory of Colours, “If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself; it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world, and becomes part of a whole” (Goethe 2). Due to Vuong’s initial description of “Early dark,” the reader experiences this “sense of privation” acutely, especially given the intimate scene of the baker making bread alone as he reminisces his past. The reader feels like an intruder on the baker’s private yearnings, and as Vuong goes on this nostalgic tone only becomes emphasized: “When heaviness / was not measured by weight / but distance. He’ll climb / the spiral staircase & call her name.” The act of calling out for someone who is not there instills a shift from wistfulness to desperation.
This tonal shift and increase in urgency at that “spiral staircase” moment in “Daily Bread” is echoed in the lighting and colors Vuong later presents. He writes, “Because in my hurry / to make her real, make her / here, I will forget to write / a bit of light into the room.” This forgotten light darkens the scene, and thus the tone, even further as Vuong then begins a litany of memories from this baker’s perspective. Later in the piece, he illustrates, “Marvin on the stereo / pleading brother brother & how / could i have known, that by pressing / this pen to paper, i was touching us / back from extinction? That we were more / than black ink on the bone / -white backs of angels facedown / in the blazing orchard.” This inclusion of soulful music leading into mention of “black ink” and “bone-white backs” allows for yet another change in the poem’s tone. There is a return from “extinction” and the use of “angels” evokes some hope, even though they are facedown and even in “the blazing orchard.” With that word “blazing,” Vuong has aroused shades of red and orange at the exact moment he wishes to create a tone of passion: “Ink poured / into the shape of a woman’s calf. A woman / I could go back & erase & erase / but I won’t.” Readers encounter the “calf” here, followed by “mouth” and “teeth” in the following lines, bringing them into the lustful memories of the baker; they can right away feel the fiery energy of this scene due to the “blazing” orchard and the colors that suggests. The sense of desperation is still expressed as well, and Vuong hammers that home by removing color by the poem’s end. He uses phrases such as “windowless room” and “cigarette smoke swirling / into the ghost of a boy” in these final lines, allowing the passion to fade into a melancholy inability to grasp flesh. There is darkness, and there is “smoke,” so the tone is very much in place to create an emotional impact for readers with the words “ghost of a boy.” Vuong is masterful at using language of color and lighting to hold readers’ hands through the ever-changing emotional landscape that his poems explore.
The aforementioned poems only brush the surface of the depths to which Vuong plays with color’s influence on tone and mood in his debut book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. On a final note, it should be appreciated that the overall title of his poetry collection stands out for its seeming lack of color. The “night sky” evokes a black hue, and while this might typically indicate the presence of stars or planets, the “exit wounds” refute this idea and replace any potential light with instead a bloody image. Vuong intentionally gives his book a black-and-red tonal introduction, hinting that there will be much darkness in store for readers. Yet, there is a strange sort of hope associated with notion of the bullet at least being out of the body, and, against the image of a “night sky,” the grotesque becomes lovely. Vuong thus forces readers to feel conflicted and emotionally entangled with his book before they even open it, simply in conjuring a collection of curated colors.
Works Cited
Connaroe, Joel. Six American Poets. Random House, 1991.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von., and Eastlake. Theory of Colours: Translated from the German with Notes, by C.L. Eastlake. John Murray. 1840.
Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copper Canyon Press. 2016.
Sarah O’Brien is the author of the poetry book Shapeshifter, as well as the Founder and EIC of Boston Accent Lit. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Sarah currently writes poems, makes art, and teaches preschool in Massachusetts, USA.