Ocean Vuong Is Still Learning
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- Dyslexia runs in my family. Maybe it’s not so much an illness. But because we come from thousands of years of rice farmers who have never read, reading is just not in the genetic evolution of my specific family. We never had to. But we spoke the spoken word, the oral tradition. When I’m stuck at a poem, usually it’s on a phrase. And I would stop writing and lift that phrase, almost treat it like a haiku and then solve it. I’ll take it on a walk, I’ll repeat it over and over and try to solve the logic in the image. A lot of my writing is just solving it verbally. It’s faster. Why write a sentence over and over when you can say it hundreds of times within a few minutes. It’s just much more efficient. (View Highlight)
Ocean Vuong Is Still Learning
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- And I think there’s a lot of talk about language as a writer, but I do believe that to be a good writer you have to be interested in people, and being interested in people means having compassion for the human condition. And I think that’s one of the things that losing my mother really taught me and solidified for me. I can be really upset or having a bad day with somebody, a co-worker or a peer or something. And I look at them and I say, “Oh, you’re gonna lose your mother.”
- It’s also hard because, being a writer, everything is amplified. The selfhood is amplified. It’s literally replicated on the book, right? There’s “Ocean Vuong” on every copy. And I have to be vigilant of how that affects the ego. If you believe in your hype too much, you actually start to lose sight of people. And when you lose sight of people you lose your capacity for compassion and understanding and clarity and thinking and capaciousness in thought. So I have to be vigilant.
- I don’t think of it as correcting their work as they hand it in but as offering them tools to create the next version. It’s, like, what you’ve done is what you’ve done. It’s there, it’s “finished,” and you have it. We’re gonna build the blueprint for the next draft. And so I just go all in. It doesn’t really undo what they’ve done. You have what you have. Here’s the future—if you want it.
- Cause in the Vietnamese context—and it might be similar to Chinese—words are like spells. If you talk about death, death visits you, so you don’t talk about death at the dinner table. There’s a lot of taboo around speech and how it brings forth the darkness. And so, for my aunt, it was totally foreign to her, you know? That’s what I wanted to create. I wanted to create a foreign experience of something very familiar.
- I start every day with two empty hands. Writing something, even writing something well, teaches you really nothing about how to write the next thing. You’re always starting over.
- It’s a found poem: you take these pieces and put them together. I wanted to do something that only the poem could do. Only the poem could show us that. We hear these phrases all the time, we might even say some of these phrases, but they’re diluted in the larger context, and they come at us sporadically through the day, through the media, different voices say them. We don’t notice them. But then, when we take out all the other context and just stack them together, it becomes brutal in its truths.
- I don’t know if it’s good or “successful,” but I feel like I didn’t compromise anything
- When I’m stuck at a poem, usually it’s on a phrase. And I would stop writing and lift that phrase, almost treat it like a haiku and then solve it. I’ll take it on a walk, I’ll repeat it over and over and try to solve the logic in the image. A lot of my writing is just solving it verbally. It’s faster. Why write a sentence over and over when you can say it hundreds of times within a few minutes. It’s just much more efficient.
- Just go out there and play. As we grow older, we just cherish that. I don’t remember moments of reading as much as I remember moments of embodying the world and space. In a way, she really helped me think of that. And the poem negotiates, and earns, her position. I wanted to earn a shared experience with her, earn my agreement with her rather than just say, you know, you’re right or wrong
- Yeah. Because no one cares. And also, if you’re reading, it’s almost like kryptonite in that space. It’s, like, no one wants to go to a Popeyes to have anything to do with work. They go there to get Popeyes and go on their way. It’s very transient. When you are static in that space, you realize that you almost become invisible. The location absorbs you, which is a wonderful way to work
- A book of poems … thirty, thirty-five poems, right? That’s thirty, thirty-five ideas. A novel, maybe one or two ideas expanded through plot and time and character. But when it comes to poems, you can’t really repeat [the premise] over and over. You gotta find completely different angles. And then you gotta find different registers, tones, styles, modes, forms.
- Once I sit down to write, chances are it’s gonna be something I’m gonna publish. I’m not a diary keeper, I don’t really write for myself. This is my job. I treat it seriously. How can I turn this into something meaningful for others? And you don’t know that answer, but you gotta just raise the standard for yourself all the time, and hope that it translates. How can this be useful in the translation to the public? ’Cause that’s what writing is: communication. If I’m communicating to myself, I would just talk to myself. I do that a lot, too. I just iron out my ideas by talking them out. And so my diary is in the air, if you will.
- Every poet could probably tell you something different, but for me there’s two general modes. One is the poem of the premise, and the other is the poem of the line. The line is similar to a jazz riff. You have a good line and then you try to build on that. It’s much more playful, it’s much more exploratory. The poem “Almost Human” is like that. I started with this line: “I come from a people of sculptors whose masterpiece was rubble.” And I was, like, “Wow, how do I use that line?”A premise poem is like the “Sara” poem. I’m gonna retort and explore this statement. And I knew that I wanted to find common ground with her. That was my goal, similar to an essay or even a chapter in a novel. It’s, like, where are we gonna end up at the end of this chapter? Is there gonna be a divorce? How do we engineer that?
- To me, it’s abstracted toward grief. That’s why poems are so great, because they’re seeded in the mode of mythology. And so you can argue that these are myths of the experience of losing one’s mother
- You bring in other voices, like your cousin Sara’s, and braid them through your work. Is part of this courage you’re describing about giving part of the page away to others?The more I write, the more I realize that writing is predominantly a curatorial work and it’s about listening rather than making. “Poet” in Greek is a maker, but I think a maker at their best is a maker of space rather than a maker of objects. And so I think, for me, it’s about: How do I create space? That’s the harder work. And I think any architect will tell you that you’re sculpting space, you’re sculpting light. That’s much harder ’cause anyone can fill a page with themselves or their expressions, but how do you collaborate with the material world, with the cultural world?