Ocean Vuong is fundamentally a thinker, a man in his head. You sense that it’s how he protects himself
Photo: Gioncarlo Valentine for WSJ I just have that octave that doesn’t cut through anything,” says Ocean Vuong when I find him sitting perfectly upright in a booth at the back of the wood-paneled lobby of the Marlton Hotel near Washington Square. The poet, novelist, and certified MacArthur “genius” tends to shy away from anywhere too boisterous, and not only because he’s so soft-spoken.
At 33, Vuong is probably the most accomplished poet of his generation, a fact he is clearly still metabolizing along with the experience of literary celebrity that accompanies it. Briefly Gorgeous was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and longlisted for the National Book Award, was translated into 36 languages, and is being developed into a movie by A24. The specific reason he’s in the city right now is that he’s a visiting professor at NYU.
So he became an intellectual. “The only place I can control is the page,” he says. Literary theory is “good soil,” and his own books are the “flowers.” When he talks about returning to poetry, he brightens: “The fiction is very managerial based, and poetry is all about pleasure. I think that’s why it’s so queer to me. It’s all about the glitter. Glitter and no time where fiction is like a lot of time. A lot of time and space, very little glitter.
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