Ocean Vuong

I'm curious, do you...

Ocean Vuong? Are you an Ocean Vuong fan? One of my...

I personally...

I love Ocean Vuong.

I think Ocean Vuong is both a... literary genius.

I'm gonna give him genius credit.

I think he is just poetically delightful.

He's probably a little bit younger than these guys.

This is not the normal episode you would expect, but it is a recording done at Harvard University with Brother Phap Hu...

Nga, who is a core member of the community and a spiritual sister to Phap Hu and also the great author Ocean Vuong.

And it's a conversation about what it means to be Vietnamese in this moment, not how to replicate what existed in Vietnam many years ago, but what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be Vietnamese in this current world.

It's a very deep conversation and also it's not just about Vietnam or being Vietnamese.

I've heard a few of your previous episodes.

The one with Ocean Vuong, the writer.

Very

cool.

Immense.

Yeah.

Every time Ocean Vuong opens their mouth, I'm just like...

Yeah.

Thank fuck.

And also, when I read that article, I thought straight away of what Ocean Vuong talked about, maybe a year ago now, about how in his MFA workshops, he sees people, his students, like frozen for fear of not wanting to be seen to be cringe.

And then, for example, someone in this week's newsletter already commented, I have voted for cringe as someone who is professionally cringe.

I know this person is a teacher.

I work with people inside the Travel Writer Accelerator who say, "I've had this experience 10 years ago, and it will not leave me alone, and I wanna write about it." So over those years, you've been thinking about experiences, you've been refining them, and your memory snags on some of those experiences that are really meaningful for you, and we don't want to dismiss that that is part of the work, too.

There's a fabulous poet and novelist called Ocean Vuong, and he says that 80% of writing is looking and thinking.

So if you're someone like me who feels like, "Oh, my gosh, I've been so full of procrastination today, and I haven't achieved anything because I've only written a paragraph," just remember 80% of writing is looking and thinking.

Now, the third thing I do, I will pick up a nonfiction book that I love that has rich descriptions in it, like a few months ago, I finished a book called After Dark, and let me grab it.

Oprah's

doing the sphere? She's doing the sphere, and Ocean Vuong is performing at the sphere with Oprah.

What? You're right.

You're right.

An interview with like Mel Robbins.

Anything you would imagine her doing at the Sphere.

And one of those things is Ocean Vuong.

My question is

I can take a visit to my bookshelf, or the library, or the enormous treasure trove of poems on the internet, finding lines that I put together to form a new whole, something I get to call my own.

Today's poem is a cento composed from lines from poets Justin Philip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Sam Saxe, Ari Banias, C. Bane, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall.

And I admire this poem because although it was made from scraps of language, it makes wholeness its business.

To me, this poem is about the power of community and the necessity of friendship for our collective survival, collective freedom, and collective joy.

And every time ...

And I learned this from Ocean, um, Ocean Vuong, and I asked him, like, like, "How do you check yourself when, um, when you know you're teaching well or not?" And he said, "Well, whenever I ask a student if, if they've understood what I taught and they say no, I don't get angry at them.

I always check back and say, 'Oh, how did I explain it? How did I share it?'" And I go back to the drawing board and I said, "Oh, that methodology didn't work.

Maybe it's this new generation.