“Writing something, even writing something well, teaches you really nothing about how to write the next thing. You’re always starting over.” An interview with the poet Ocean Vuong.
,” which borrowed from his own life growing up queer and surrounded by despair and addiction. That same year, he received a MacArthur “genius” grant. Two months after news of the MacArthur Fellowship was made official, his mother, who had inspired so much of his work, died from cancer.
I learned that I can’t write and teach. I can only go a hundred and ten per cent. That’s my only register. And so I give all to the students, and then I have nothing left for my work. It’s important to keep them separated. That’s really interesting. I find myself sometimes stressing out about writing student feedback in a way that I don’t feel stress when writing professionally. And I think maybe it does come out of some insecurity about my authority. And I’ve sometimes wondered if everyone carries that with them, or whether it does have to do withI 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.
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. I used to do that also in the food court in the New World Mall, in Flushing.
,” when she questions the point of writing at all. She asks, “What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert?” 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.
I was trying to explain this to my aunt, this lexicon of American violence, and she was utterly horrified. She’s, like, “Why would they use those words?” ’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.
I just didn’t have the courage. Writing a book of poems is a wonderful education for a young writer because it forces you to keep finding new registers. It also forces you to find more premises. 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.
Was there a point at which you realized that you now possess the courage or curatorial vision to do this? I don’t know what it was like for folks in the forties and fifties or the sixties, but every young person I speak to has a friend that was lost too young. I think grief is actually something so foundational to this generation. I was, like, Why am I a veteran at this at thirty? I started looking at this body of work, and there’s already social, collective, personal, and communal grief embedded into it.
You mentioned that your brother moved in with you after your mother’s passing. Did you gain any new insights into your mother’s experience or the act of parenting in the course of taking him in?
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