#OCEAN VUONG FULL#

You’ve mentioned in several interviews that you are Buddhist though not a monk, but I believe the craft of poetry does require a kind of monasticism in that it asks the poet to cultivate a serious interior life that nudges the soul toward continual transformations. For Ocean Vuong, “queerness begins with permission to change … it invites innovation it is larger than sexuality and gender it is action.” For him, this action begins in stillness so that “silence becomes an architecture under the agency of intent.”ĪB: You are a Vietnamese-American poet and a queer poet, but I want to begin by framing you as a religious poet. We both read and began discussing The End of Eddy, written by his friend Édouard Louis , and we talked at length about how beautifully Louis renders coming to terms with his queerness within the confines of class and his exertion to leave a working-poor town and an expected identity.

He knows from experience that a lasting affinity forms over the shared anxiety of the quantifiable, the counting and calculating of life’s needs from crumpled tips, and that this fear can often bind people together more than a shared shade of skin. He related stories from his visit to Pennsylvania coal-mining towns, and he spoke with deep affection for people who knit struggling communities together. After nearly two hours of discussion at the roundtable, we went to lunch at Heirloom, a restaurant in downtown New Haven.ĭuring our time together, we continued talking about history, race, queerness, and class.

#OCEAN VUONG FULL#

The room was full before the discussion began and although chairs were added for those coming in late, for some it was standing room only. We met at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for his roundtable discussion with poet Rickey Laurentiis, an event co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature and the Yale Race & Innovative Poetics Working Group. He lives in western Massachusetts and teaches at UMass Amherst’s MFA for Poets & Writers program. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and he immigrated to the US at the age of two as a refugee. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Vuong received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and honors from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets. Eliot Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and finalist for the T.S. We are sharing it with you to celebrate the release of Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection, Time is A Mother. This interview was originally published on January 5, 2018, and it was one of our most read pieces of the year.

Alexandra Barylski interviews Ocean Vuong

Ocean vuong