Ocean Vuong Uses the Sentence as a Tool to Understand Deep Mystery

Episode Transcript
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OCEAN VUONG (00:00):
It is interesting because my friends were always upset with my books because they said, Ocean, you are so funny but your books are so sad, and they said it only gets worse when they photos of you in magazines they always pick the sad photos. Because I work with the photographer, we're laughing, cracking jokes, and then the feature comes out and it's like the sad refugee poet. You know? They want the sad, refugee poet, you know? God forbid the refugee laughs once in a while.

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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all what’s going on, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host and producer Alisa Rosenthal, bringing you the best of the best of the live festivals direct to your podcast feeds. As our live spring festival winds to a close for Chicagoland, make sure you check out our incredible backlog of podcast episodes for a gem that’s new to you. Some of my favorites include recent Tony Award performer Leslie Odom, Jr. on Hamilton, philosopher Agnes Callard on living a philosophical life, and podcasters Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on the concept of abundance. And make sure to check out a couple of my studio interviews - I had a great chat with the classic age sign painters behind Heavy Pages Press on how the ghost signs of Chicago help us travel back in time, and I sat down with the creative partners behind the Jewish Museum of Chicago to learn more about their goals to build a hub for Jewish artists and community members, so definitely check both of those out.
Today, beloved novelist, poet, and educator Ocean Vuong joins his friend and colleague Adrian Matejka, editor of Poetry magazine, for a hilarious, heartbreaking, and affirming conversation about the power of the sentence. Vuong is the award-winning author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother. A recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant" and the American Book Award, he used to work as a fast-food server, which inspired his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. I myself am a former educator, so how could I not go ahead and annotate the show notes - if there’s a name that’s dropped in the program and you’re curious to learn more, I’ve provided links to all those figures as well as Vuong’s works so check it out.
This is Ocean Vuong and Adrian Matejka, recorded live at the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival in May 2025.
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ADRIAN MATEJKA (00:08):
Welcome to Chicago Ocean.

Thank you so much, always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for doing this.

Oh, no. Hey, and welcome, everybody. It's so good to see all of you, at least the ones in the front row. I cannot wait to spend some time today talking about this gorgeous novel. Would you feel OK sharing a little bit of it before we get started?

Thank you so much for being here. It's always great to be back in Chicago and to speak to such a mighty writer as Adrian, who I've admired for so long, it's the deepest pleasure. Thank you for being a poet. Thank you for seeing my roots as a poet and thank you for doing just the the incredible things you're doing at the Poetry Foundation, giving flowers to so many of our elders. Recently Li-Young Lee and a really special one coming up in September. I'm so happy. I'm so happy when poets thrive, you know, it's a it's a rare thing, but we'll take it when we get it. Okay, well, this book takes place in 2009, mostly because I'm a very slow thinker. Takes me about 16 years to figure anything out. But it takes place in Connecticut, where I'm from, at a time when the opioid epidemic was hitting us pretty hard. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family started in Stanford, Connecticut. And so, it hit us before we knew what it was, before anybody knew what is was. And a lot of this book deals with the ghosts and the hauntings that come out of that adolescence. [Reading:] "The first person Hai saw O.D. was somebody's dad. He was 12 and had gone over to this girl, Jennifer Knoxley's house to do a project for history class. They were in the living room cutting construction paper when her father came in very quietly like a ghost was wheeling him in and sat down on the couch. After a while, his head tilted back and his mouth hung open, eyes rolled into their sockets. He looked like somebody had pressed pause at the peak of him laughing at the greatest joke he'd ever heard. This was the image imprinted on Hai's mind when he signed in at the New Hope Rehab Center. Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed unprecedented times he lived in. A time before iPhones were everywhere and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts, floating up from deep pits in the subconscious. A time when you still knocked on each other's doors and if you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to call them on a landline, listen to their mother's breathing for a while. Maybe the sound of her fixing a drink or shaving her legs. Then meet up somewhere, one of you waiting about, shifting your feet and looking at clouds or trees or municipal architecture. Cars passing, your dopamine levels higher for not having been depleted from blue light screens throughout the day. A time when the drug dealer on the corner would, out of boredom, start balancing on a chain-link fence, the boy in him unable to help it, pants sagging from the effort, revealing his plaid boxers you can spot from the back window of your school bus. But then, slowly, One or two or seven of your friends will find the pills and they will flood their young brains with artificial joy and you will join them, running through the woods by the power plant, laughing at the immense night, your head levitating a full foot over your shoulders and their eventual deaths will not yet be used by politicians to gain traction with the base. It did not have a name, the slaughter. And yet your loved ones were being slowly erased, even teachers and lunch ladies overdosing overnight, then cremated without ceremony, their faces soon existing only in memory. Those were the times, those who lived through it would say years later. Though it was never his drug of choice, he was barely 16 the first time he did heroin. One summer night at a skate park on the outskirts of town, he sat huddled among three other skater kids in the valley of a half-pipe, the candle flame still in the humid air as a spoon sizzled over it, Fugazi's 'Waiting Room' running on a loop from a stereo in someone's Jansport. The boys had removed their socks, turning their long bony feet in the light, searching for a good vein. They preferred the feet because it was easier to hide the scars. Plus, they could feel the speed of the hot, acidic rush literally surging through their legs to the tip of their heads, some of them tracing the drug's ascent with their fingers as if pointing to ruined cities on a map. But the sensation for Hai was more like drowning in his own blood, his neck craning to get above the tide. Soon there was laughter everywhere in the dark, hands slapping bearskin. But a half hour later, the only sound left was Fugazi playing over their gleaming shirtless chests, mouths gasping like shored fish as fireflies flittered over them in the greenish night. Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while. It was also, he quickly learned, a kingdom of boredom. All the cliches about it are true. You wait around until whatever poison that's ruining you empties into the world as time. Then you fill that emptiness with more time, talking, walking around the rec room, talking some more, painting watercolors of zoo animals, reading YA or science fiction, the only genres allowed. And after all that waiting, you stand by the barred windows and watch the golden arches from the McDonald's across the parking lot light up, which means it's time for the nurses to switch shifts for the night. And an alcoholic with Down syndrome named Jordan is next to you pointing out the window, shouting, 'It's chicken tender time, it's chicken tender time, hey guys, hey guys it's tender time.' The rooms are named after various genus of squash grown in New England. A laminated drawing of each type pasted on the doors. Hai shared the kabocha room with a sex addict named Marlon, who was strapped to the bed post with bungee cords to keep him from jerking off. He turned to Hai one night and said quizzically, 'Hey, man, I was wondering, how come I never see any Asians in rehab? I've been to like five of these joints and never seen one till now.' 'MSG,' I said. [Laughter] 'MSG,' I said, feeling crazy. 'What?' Marlon's eyes widened in the blue, wet dark. 'Yeah, it absorbs all the poison. Why you think the government hates this stuff? They don't want you knowing the truth, then all these places will be out of business. They make a big fuss about how it's bad for you, right? Any time the feds say something's bad for you eat as much of it as you can.' 'Holy shit,' Marlon said, and he sat up. 'It won't work for your stuff though. No, no, I get that. I get. But what about you? You couldn't absorb all your MSG or something?' 'I was adopted. Ate mostly waffles my whole life and now I'm fucked.' 'Damn, dude.' Marlon lay silent all night, this new knowledge burrowing through him, his straps clinking on the bedposts as he tossed about." [Applause]

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

You know, thank you really for being here in the city with us. We're grateful for you and grateful for your work.

It's always a special time with you in Chicago.

Oh, man. I have a million questions. I know the audience is going to have questions a little bit later, but one of the things that strikes me about this book is not only the gravity of the work that you're doing, whether it's about about addiction, or if it's about socioeconomic class and some things that we're gonna get into later. It's also really funny in places that, as we heard, and it reminded me very much of Richard Pryor. And so this is a weird thing for me to ask you to start out with. But did you ever listen to Richard Pryor? I don't know if people do that.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting you said that because I came of adulthood also at the rise of an inheritor of Pryor, Dave Chappelle. And I think for me, it is interesting because my friends were always upset with my books because they said, Ocean, you are so funny but your books are so sad, you know, [laughter] and they said it only gets worse when they photos of you in magazines they always pick the sad photos. Because I work with the photographer, we're laughing, cracking jokes, and then the feature comes out and it's like the sad refugee poet. You know? They want the sad, refugee poet, you know? God forbid the refugee laughs once in a while. But I think for my first book, I just, it was not, with "On Earth", it wasn't my history. It was my family's history. Some of it was my history, but I, it's important also that I don't tell anyone's story. I've never interviewed my family for my art. I respect people who do that, but to me, it's an ethical line. I'm inspired by their history, but I've ever asked, it didn't feel right for me to ever ask my family to narrate their pain so I can turn it into a product. And so I never did that. So I just kind of, I mean, we've had conversations, but I never turned, I never put that into my work. And that's true with this novel too. But I was dealing with kind of their history and I didn't want to put too much humor in that book because I knew that the majority, the economics of any writer in this country is that the major of one's audience would be white readers. Toni Morrison said this. I know as an editor at Kanoff, at Random House, she knew that most of her readers would be white, but she still said, I'm still writing though for young Black women. And so I knew that, and so I just didn't want non-Vietnamese readers to laugh at my elders. And it reminded me of what Dave Chappelle said during his crisis with 'The Chappelle Show.' He said there was a certain point where he looked out in the audience and they were most non-Black folks, and he didn't know if they were laughing with him or at him anymore, and that stuck with me. This was before I wrote any books. And so I, this book, it was more my history. You know, "On Earth" is essentially a document that masquerades as a novel. It's a son writing privately to a mother. And for this book I thought, well, what would Little Dog write as a debut if he had to have a public facing novel? And it would be this, you know, what part of his life would he narrate? Which part would he put away? And so. This is my second book, but it's his first, in a way. But that was, and it's also really hard. I didn't have the chops, to be honest, to deal with humor. And I think you earn it. You kind of realize, we talked about this backstage, about a lot of our elders and mentors, you know, committing themselves to multi-genre, hybrid work. A lot of people of color who never felt comfortable or invited or welcomed in any one space. And so we talk about Rigoberto Gonzalez who kept switching up the gears because there was never a place to land, right? And this is something hybrid, hybridization is often, we often think it's pure ingenuity, innovation and ambition, but sometimes like surviving as a writer of color, we realize sometimes it's about dodging. Right, because it's just about trying another place to have a foothold, and I was really fortunate to have mentors who never said no to, they never saw the genres. And Ben Lerner, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, these teachers never saw that genre as a fixed border. They were just tendencies that should be porous and at best even broken. So I felt really lucky to work in those forms.

I'm so glad you brought up Dave Chappelle before all of that too, because I think he was doing some of that work, trying to figure out form. And for those who don't know what we were talking about, Chappelle got a $40 million deal with Netflix and walked away from it, or from Comedy Central, excuse me, and walked from it for the very reason that Ocean was saying. I'm thinking of Claudia Rankine for a second, who I know is your colleague at NYU, and at one point somebody asked her about her writing, and she said, well, they're all poems because I'm a poet. And I think about that with this book and with your work through multi-genre and multi-intertextual kinds of exploration. It really is always poems too, right? And so maybe that's another one of your unique gifts, man. I mean, most poets kind of step to one side in their writing a novel. This is like a poem that also has characters and, you know, in the best way.

I wanted, you know, I think one of the most valuable things one could do is be disobedient as an artist, especially as an Asian American artist, because so much of Asian American history in this country is about serving something else, right? We iron someone else's clothes, we do someone else else's nails, we clean someone else suit, we open someone else's door, we wipe someone else's bum. And even when we think of the Asian American prodigy, it's often picking up a violin to play someone else's composition. And so I think it's important for me to kind of insist on being stubborn about not following these genre rules that were set up for me. And it was really, the first book was a tough go. You know because I just, I was really privileged in being in a very isolated poetry world where all my poetry friends, you know, looked at "On Earth" and they said, this is pretty normie stuff, right? [Laughter] Compared to my heroes like Djuna Barnes "Knightwood," Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictée," right, this is like conservative formally. But then I went into the novel world and like a lot of critics were like, what is this? This is, you know, he's painting. This is not even writing. He's painting, you know. And then I realized that there's a lot of dogma, right, in places that are not in poetry. And I think the great joy of poetry is that the borders are always malleable and there are never any rules. You know, and I wanted to be disobedient, because I got a lot of editors wrote to me when I was trying to sell and work on that first book and they said, I had like the kind of these backhanded compliment from one editor that I thankfully didn't work with, but they're like, you're really talented. Why don't you just write a straight novel? And I'm like, I don't know if you've noticed, there's nothing straight here. [Laughter] I am incapable, I can't even drive on our road. But I think I wanted to kind of honor the tradition that brought me into this creative world. Like to me, "On Earth" was a love poem to poetry and hybridization, but also it gestures to the origin of the novel. The first novel in our species is written by Lady Murasaki in the year 1011 called "The Tale of Genji." And that novel already had modernist dream sequences long before Joyce or Quixote, you know, and so what I love about the novel is that it actually is actually at its core really aligned with poetry as we know it today because the novel came so late, right, so it's a one of a it's it's a unique form that came around the rise of printing culture and so it's both a container and a genre at once, which the other forms can't really say, right? So the novel can hold the romance, the play, it can hold a lyric poem, the epic, it can the essay, historiography. So it is actually like a container made of water. It's inherently quite queer to me. The novel to me is essentially a bottom. [Laughter] I know the poetry girlies want, I know you want the lyric poem to be the bottom. But it is self-evidently not true, right? The novel can hold a poem. The poem can't hold a novel. The novel denies nobody. And she always makes room. And so to me, I guess that was what I was trying to do with "On Earth." I'm like, it's gonna make room for three POVs. We can have impressionistic work. We can make room. Everybody is invited. She's ready. She's ready. She's prepped. [Big audience applause and cheering] You know what I mean, Adrian?

I do! I'm trying to hold it together. I feel like, oh, it's very interesting Ocean, yes. My God, that's amazing. I love that as a metaphor for it. And all I was going to ask was about, oh hey, is there things poems can do that novels can't? And you answered all of that. Everything there. So I'm going to switch this up for a second. Oh man, I am really, it is always a joy to talk to you. We were talking backstage about our respective experiences in fast food, and so I'm really interested in talking about some of that publicly, because there were those of us who hustled fast food jobs. Sometimes they were the only thing available. If you lived in a small town, there wouldn't be many options. Sometimes they're the only things that you could get based on your geography or your, you know, there are so many different reasons why one might end up working at Subway. You know what I mean? The thing that's absent often, and this is what we talked about, is that these stories don't show up in public, because if you start working at McDonald's and you don't find a way out, you're not going to find a way to tell that story, right? Can you talk a little bit about that experience? Because it's central to the novel, right, that...

Yeah, it was really lovely to bond over that because what I wasn't prepared for in this sort of class mobility, because when you had the little dream of being a writer, you don't know about these class borders. You just think, I'm gonna be a writer like all my heroes. And then you enter these rooms and you realize, oh no one here, or the majority of folks who work in this industry haven't been as poor as we have. And then you're like, well, where are they? What happened to them? And they got wiped out economically. To sit and dream, sit in a room and dream and try is incredibly expensive, right? To like, to draft and then throw it away and then try again is an immense privilege. And one that a lot of our family that raise us couldn't even imagine. And so to me, I wanted to write a book wherein work became something you can't escape. Because often I was looking for these stories and a lot times either it's like deep poverty porn or the work becomes like a plot point to launch you to something else. And we really value change in our stories in this culture. And I think it comes from Aristotle's idea of catharsis. It's interesting because his theory was that catharses would like ameliorate public vexation so that you can, they won't overthrow the Republic. So it's interesting that story was almost like a way to drain the abscess, right? And you keep draining it, you can secure the state. And so I thought, but it worked really well with commerce too. You buy a washing machine, it promises to change your life. You buy car, it promises a change of life. So we want the same with stories. And I like those stories enough, but I looked at like the majority of human life, not even just in America, is actually static. You know, my stepdad worked at this company called Stanadyne. And for 25 years, he made a screw. It was a screw company. It was special screw that went into gas pumps. And I never saw him. He worked from 3 to 12 a.m. I only saw him on the weekends. And when that company closed, he made another screw for Colt, which is also manufactured in Connecticut, the Colt Magnum. And so, to me, that's a quintessential American life. Gas pumps and guns. And then I thought, well, does that mean, you know, in the larger context, you would say, many people would say oh, he's stuck, or he failed. But if you asked him, without batting an eye, he would say that he lived out his dream as a refugee. He got a job, he has insurance, he had a uniform with his Vietnamese name stitched on it every day, right? He was so proud, he would go home and iron that uniform. So it was very relative, you know, these things. And so I just didn't want to write a story wherein working people, I had to like make poverty porn so that they gained sympathy. I'm just, I wasn't interested in like proving their humanity to anybody, you know? And I think for me, it was about turning the fast food restaurant, into a sonnet, which is, that's what it is, right? The sonnet being the most innovative anglophonic form in the tradition is innovative because of its restrictions. It denies freedom. The volta on the 10th or 12th line, you know, the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and then you're asked to innovate inwards. And I thought, isn't that what it, isn't what a fast food restaurant is? Isn't that what dementia is, which it deals with? Isn't that what the shift is? You're stuck. You have to look at everybody and you have to find a way. Every person becomes a doorway because none of us are getting out. And then of course I thought, well, isn't that what America is? No matter how we vote left or right, our tax money will be funneled into corporations. It will be sent to make weapons that we don't condone, killing innocent children in other countries, in Gaza that we have never approved. So essentially being an American is being trapped in a free country. And so much of human species is actually about people who are stuck. You know, we love the stories about revolutions and people overthrowing things, but the majority of history is people stuck in coal mines, stuck in wars they never chose to fight in, stuck in marriages they never wanted to be in. And so I wanted to kind of subvert this idea that the story should always relieve the reader and free them with catharsis, and then that's the payoff, right? It's very phallic, right, it's like, we're gonna like, relieve the tension, and then you get something out of it. And so, I guess, one way of saying, I'm sorry, I keep going back to this. I guess I'm really interested in literary edging. Right? [Laughter] I'm just winging it here.

Oh, my God.

But you know, okay, but look, hear me out.

No, no, I'm with you. I'm trying to think about how I'm going to explain this to my mom later because she knows that I'm doing this with you. She's like, "Tell me all about it!" "Well, it's about literary edging, Mother." [Laughter]

But I was thinking like, okay, last, I was watching the fireworks, you know, last summer as one does in America. And to me, I, I I was, I in my little rural Massachusetts town, and we all, it's very wholesome, we go out, we look at the fireworks. And I looked at it, I said, gosh, this is exactly American narratology. Because it starts with a bang, and it ends with something close to a war simulation. Right, so there's almost no reprieve, and you can even hear, it's very interesting anthropologically, because as it starts, you can hear people's like, it starts in like a little peter, right? It's just pow, pow, and then people are like, "Come on already!" right? "Let's get to the war part!" right? And you almost feel like, we expect these kind of explosions. And Aristotle completely understood, like human psychology, he knew, right? Because he was answering to Plato, his teacher. Plato famously banished the poets. And he included, under the mantle of poets

That's so beautiful, and when you were describing the trappedness of the sonnet, there's such freedom inside of it, but no place to go, you know, inside of that small box, and what people have done then is created crowns of sonnets, right? So the only way that they can do it is to pass it on to something else, and I wonder if there's not a corollary in that in the ways that we talk about the staticness of American labor. It's not gonna be me, but maybe my child, or maybe someone else in my family might be able to not work at Wendy's. Maybe somebody else might, but it's not going to be me. This is where I'm going to sit, you know?

Gosh. Well, I think about when I would come home from college. It's really heartbreaking. You know, there's a lot of grief when you are the first to study because I imagine you can relate to this, you know, because when I went off to school and it was just a humble community college, I would bike there, but my grandmother and my mother and my aunts, I was raised by all women and they were like, Go, go, learn everything you can. Do anything you want, right? And then you start to read, and you read Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Glissant, Marx, and then you start to, but it takes so long. It takes 15, 20 years to really understand that what happened to you as the working poor was not by accident. It was a design. But, destruction is so much more efficient than repair. And we see this on the newsreel now with city blocks being destroyed in other countries, in Ukraine and Gaza. Within minutes, entire lives are decimated and it will take decades, if not more, to repair that. And it's similar, reparative learning takes so long. But you go off and you say, All right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go find out, I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna to tell you what happened to us. And then one day you come home after you have all these jewels of knowledge and you run back to the house like a little boy again. You're like, "Ma, Grandma, I found it. I know what happened us. I read all the books I studied the libraries. It's not by accident. You don't have to be ashamed. It's not your fault. All this was, they made it this way. They made it so you can't get out." And you come home, you realize nobody's there. They're all gone. They all died. It takes so long to repair that. And so there's a lot of grief coming back with all this, your arms are filled. You say, "I found it, I've found it Ma." And I think for me in my position is the only place I have from there is my classroom. You go back out, back to the school, and then if you do it right, if you're faithful, if you are true to the project, you'll have 20 or so young people there, and then you give it to them. And so it becomes suddenly communal. It starts familial, but it becomes communal. But I would come home, literally come home when I was in college, and I'd come home from New York, and my mother, it was very embarrassing at the time, but she would have relatives visit or friends from the salon. And she would do this thing where she'll grab my hands and she'll show off my hands. She said, "Look, look how soft my son's hands are. Come over here and touch his hands." I'll be, "Ma, stop, stop." And she's like, "No no no show her, touch his hands, you see that? Have you ever touched a hand that soft?" And then I started to look everybody's hands at the table were destroyed. From the factories, from the chemicals in the salon. And literature is about context and subtext. And the subtext there, what my mother was saying, is look what I prevented with my body. Look what I spared in my child. And I think that's why when people ask about like, oh, why do you move from one genre to another? Or sometimes people say, How can you be so vulnerable? It must be so hard. To me, it's not easy work, but it is an immense privilege. I feel like I am living for the past 15 years of my professional life in the whipped cream. The whipped cream is not what you expect, but when it comes, it is all extra. I've been living in the extra. And as hard as what I do, it's never as hard as what they've done. And so when I approach the page and people say, how do you get so vulnerable? it's a privilege to do this. It's a privilege to try and fail and try again. If my stepdad made a bad screw, that's coming out of his pay. They don't get second chances. My mother messes up somebody's nail, she has to stay and work an extra 40 minutes, no extra money on that. I get to try and try again. And not only that, but it's almost like you go to a restaurant, a fancy restaurant, you saving for months to try this prefixed menu. The waiter comes, takes your order, brings your first course, and then he says, "By the way, this has all been paid for by your family." Wouldn't you eat everything? Wouldn't you then lick the plate, clean it, right? And to me, the eating is the work. I have to go to the end of the sentence, the end the question to the very root because the price is already paid. I can't take it back. I can take the hours that they lost in those factories. I can't take the broken bodies, the cancer that riddled their bodies. It's whether I leave room or not, the price is paid. So to me, it's an immense privilege to do this work. Cause in many ways, we're not supposed to be here on paper. And which is why the publishing industry often looks at us or journalists look at us and say, Wow, your life is so interesting. It's a backhanded compliment, right? Especially for people of color, because basically saying you're, the story's already interesting as if there's no craft involved, right. As if you're just an anthropological bridge to walk over to see some sort of authentic truth. But we know that it takes so much. And they often say it's so, your life is so exotic. But I said, it's only exotic in the publishing industry. With my family, my life is boring. I sit in the library and read books. Talk to any taxi driver. Their lives are so much more extraordinary. Geopolitical rupture, migration, immense grief and violence is actually much more normal in our species than relative luxury or quietude in the suburbs. Who would want that? I'm not knocking on that. Everyone deserves to live a dignified life of peace. But the majority of our literary production and our human history, I mean, you start with the Gilgamesh. That's a war story. Iliad, the Odyssey, those are war stories. This is normal. Labor and loss is normal, it's just not always normal behind a podium. So when we get there, it looks new. But I always have to say, it's new to you, right? It's new you.

But it's been happening, that's so incredibly well said. Now I'm thinking about storytelling and I'm think about family and I'm thinking about the ways that family can support us whether they're actually there or not there and how that kind of feeds into the work that we do too. You talked about how we are built here, we are able to be here because of the labor of the people before us and you shouted out some of the the people who've done the work and our art as well. But I'm hoping just if we could like point this at the book because I think family is a big part of that. And family, whether it's bequeathed or chosen family, whether they're existing in that moment or in mythology, you know, family is really omnipresent in this text. And it's so it's beautifully rendered. So I hope maybe that you can talk a little bit about that, too.

Well, the nuclear family seems to be central in American mythos. And the, often the emphasis of that is found family. But I actually think, what I'm interested here is what I call circumstantial family. Family growing around the arbitrary cobbling of a workplace. And the central novel of the American tradition is "Moby-Dick," and that's a labor novel, right? A multiracial group of people, working on a ship to metaphorically and literally light the new world, right? It's a really fascinating book about labor. And the amount of time Melville spent depicting labor and diagramming the cost of labor on the body was really fascinating. So to me, I don't even think what I'm doing is even new or radical. That started the American, and Whitman, right. But even before that. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, both of whom writing as enslaved people. That too is an American tradition. There's nothing more radical than to me writing. You know, Wheatley had 17 white men who had to approve her work before it went to print as an enslaved woman. And so talk about like the immense privilege of doing what I do. Like to me, it's my family cost, but the lineage is already incredibly expensive. Like, what do I have to complain about? Miss Wheatley had to write this subversive radical poem that tries to talk about the vexation of being trapped, literally, bodily, somatically, without overtly saying so, right, in order to be published. And that is such an innovative position. You think of Harriet Jacobs, you know, slave narratives, right? She has this incredible moment where she lists all the horrible crimes and then at the end of it, she brilliantly says, "And what happens next, I cannot say, save only for the eyes of God." And I'm like, oh, that's craft, right, because if what you said was sayable and what you won't say is unsayable, the imagination, that's Keats, felt absence, right? And so to me that all of that is already inherent. And so the circumstantial family is a family that is cobbled together in the work shift and in the bonds that happen, the things that are said in a fast food restaurant. I think the people who designed it never expected, but you hear things, you know, like it didn't make it into this book, but I remember one day one of my coworkers, we're about to close and it was a particularly rough day, you know after the restaurant's a mess and then she gets this horrible call that her brother had overdose and is in the hospital and they're stabilizing him. This is right at the cusp of Narcan, and it's like. It was kind of a wild moment back in like 2007, 6, where depending on the ambulance, you might have Narcan, you might not. Because New England was the epicenter, so literally random ambulance crews will start to make their own Narcan and put it into aerolized sprays before it was FDA approved. So your life just depended on which ambulance came. And so sometimes you'll get Narcan, sometimes you won't. And so her brother was in the hospital and then we all finished the shift. And there was just like this unspoken moment where we knew we weren't gonna leave her. She's waiting for the call and we're all just, we clocked out, nobody's getting paid and we're just sitting there holding vigil. And then to this day, I just think about that. I just thought like, gosh, who? There was this kindness that is offered to each other and it doesn't benefit anybody. Who taught us that? Where does that come from? It's like when the elephants, they lose their loved ones and even the elephants they come back and they all touch and pick up the bones. Where does that come from, I'll never know. But I think for me the sentence is such a capacious tool to understand that deep mystery. And luckily that night he was finally stabilized, but it was such a harrowing moment. But, you know, the people who designed Boston Market where I worked, they didn't imagine that scene. It was human beings who worked through a shift with vastly different ideologies. I mean, we had political, religious, and all, things that were completely antithetical to each other. But I believe that kinetic kinship degrades ideologies. It's really hard to hate somebody when you work with them through a shift and you see them sweat. You see the sweat glisten on their chest and underneath the locket that they have with their grandmother's photo and Mother Mary on the other side. It's real hard to deny the humanity that comes through labor. And I think a lot of our country, we're losing that now, right? A lot of that is now automated, working from home. And it gave me a lot of hope as a young person realizing that no matter how vast the ideology, it will always degrade and fall apart when you're working with somebody towards a common goal, even as humble as just getting through a shift intact. [Applause]

That took me so many places. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, it makes me think about kinship and the way that that develops. And for those who have not worked at a place like Boston Market, or you know, you took a shot at Wendy's in the book, I felt a kind of way about that. I didn't realize that I had this Wendy's pride from 1987, but apparently I do, you know? But there's something about when you're in this space, the things that draw us to that space, to that minimum wage space, supersede other things, right? And I was thinking about the way that when you leave the fry area and you're outside, everybody smells like fries until you're removed from that and somebody has perfume on. And then you realize that, no, actually there's another smell in the world, right? We all smell like fry, when you're in that space. I think somehow, and this was coming from reading the book, somehow poverty works that way too. When you're broke and you're around other broke people, it doesn't feel the same as when you walk into a space where people have when you do not have, right? And there's something about that, building these kinds of connections with people that sometimes supersedes ideology as well.

And the immense amount of shame that comes from being poor. And I think there's a lot of parallels to being a poet. Both like economically but also culturally. My students come from all over the world and I'm really, really happy about that. They come from economic backgrounds. But as poets, I always see, by that time I get them - I teach in a graduate program. And they're already, you know, 22, 23 at the youngest, going up to maybe 28 for the most part. But they're already bent from shame because they have chosen poetry. Whatever they've gotten through in their 20-some-odd years, you can see it in their posture, the way they apologize for their work, the way the situate their work. They hedge it with maybe, they lower their ambitions, they make themselves small. And I think because poetry is so maligned in the culture and also artists in general, we always ask the artist to be grateful for what they have. Be humble. You know, perform humility. It's a kind of fake virtue, right? We always demand that of the artist. Be grateful for having a seat at the table. And as a Buddhist, as a person, I admire humility. It's beautiful thing, but the culture demands it to be performed of our artists. And there's a double standard. We never hear the people who make bombs say, I'm going to lower the blast radius this year, because I need to be humble. You never see people on Wall Street saying, gosh, we crushed it last quarter. Let's show some humility to our competitors and purposefully lower our profit. [Applause] And so, yeah, and I mean, anyone who's awake in this culture, you realize that there's a double standard. There's a kind of fetishization of increasing self-efficiency, self-optimization, maxing culture, YOLO culture, right? And to me, I'm interested, this book begins with the line, "The hardest thing in the world is to live only once." And to be that's the other option for YOLO, right, either like you see your life in the world as a hotel room, you trash it, wreck it. Get what you need, destroy the environment to fulfill yourself because you're only here once, or I was raised to always put things back the way they were and leave a tip on the counter. So another way to look at that is to leave the room with care, practice care, and the sentence is such a wonderful medium for that because, as Susan Sontag famously said, it's impossible to write a good sentence with luck. You can't accidentally write a good sentence. Whereas in other arts, you know, photography, right timing, painting, you can get that, you know but you have to put so much care, it's such a sensitive, fragile medium that you can't accidentally write book. I wish! But it's a form that requires so much concern, so much consideration. And I think on the best days, it's such a wonderful collaborator to help me think. And I started to, it started to change the way I thought about what a literary career was. After I wrote my first two books, my first two debuts, Night Sky, and I went to the novel. Every book, after every book, something changes in me. I wonder if it's like that with you, where you start to see the world differently. And I learned that, oh, the writing of the book, spending so much time obsessing, has sharpened my gaze. I can look at things more openly, carefully, and that suddenly became the telos, the goal, the prize. And I started to realize, oh the book is the byproduct. And it changed the way I thought of my career. And now, instead of like, because you're told to just make a body of work, make a large corpora, an oeuvre, and keep going, right? Endless growth, maxing. And I thought, oh, what if I can write in a way that I can end well? My goal is to find a way where I can end before I die. And I think for me, it's probably eight books. I want to write eight books if I'm very lucky. Because what happens is that, oh, hopefully by eight books, the goal is to see the world so lucidly, so openly, without total immediate binary judgment, and then not have to turn it into a product. Imagine to win, that the book is the laboratory. The practice, the gym from which the gaze could be achieved. That the book is the byproduct, right? And that it changed everything. And then it reminded me of this early interview on NPR I heard as a young poet, 22 years old, coming home from school. I heard the interview with my hero, Annie Dillard. And she was on NPR and the journalist was like, all right, you know, you're here, promoting a book or what's going on? She called for the interview and the goal was to announce her retirement. And it was such a beautiful thing because the journalist immediately said, in much more cordial ways, what is wrong with you? [Laughter] You know, are you ill, right? Are you okay? Or do you have Alzheimer's, right. And it a really interesting moment for me as a young writer who hasn't written a single book and I'm listening to my hero, Annie Dillard, talk about hybrid texts, the stuff that she's done. And she's like, no. I woke up one morning, went to my desk, and realized I did everything I set out to do. And it was such a fortunate thing for me as a young writer because I said... I want that feeling. Can I get, what will I have to do to come to my desk and say, Ocean, well done, you've done enough. To write with so much heart and sincerity and to look at what you've and say I did everything I set out to do. What an achievement. Forget about endless crowning and productivity. I wanted to know what that felt like. And if I'm very, very lucky, I can get it sooner than later. But that, listening to Annie Dillard say that, and firmly just shut the interview down and say, I'm here to tell you that, particularly as a woman, I did everything I wanted it to do as a writer. And I did it. And now I have my whole life to live with everything behind me. And there's more to my life than I'm being a writer. I was so lucky to hear that because it changed the course of what I wanted to do.

It's lovely, yeah. I'm greedy, you know, I feel like you've done these things in various ways, really have changed the way that I think about poems, changed the ways I think about prose and what's possible in it, it just. I would keep going on, but we want to make sure that we get questions from the audience. So the way that this is done is you could do it on your phone. Okay That was fast because they were doing it while we were talking, like there's always a front row kid who's gonna put in a question first. I think you actually answered the first one so. Ok. "The epigraph in one of your books is from Ágape, a poem by César Vallejo. How has his poetry influenced your writing?

Well, Vallejo is so interesting because he comes from that tradition of, you know, he's mostly written as an exile, but also the tradition that Latin American surrealism, you know, and which is actually magical realism, because I think it's interesting that Latin American poets subverting Breton's idea of surreal, surrealism and Césaire, the Caribbean poet's doing this too, because their treatise was they kind of took surrealism, Breton's French surrealism as this kind of, you know, of course, Breton's was a radical gesture, subverting reality. And when it came to Latin America dealing with wars, colonialism in the Caribbean, you know the idea that the major treatise was that colonialism is surreal. Right, "sur-réalité," on top of reality, right? Like the idea that people can come and dominate and plunder a land, destroy a people, enslave a people, you know, rob its resources, is unreal, right. And so the magical realism that came out of that to kind of be mimetic of the sort of the trauma but also the disbelief of immense suffering and plunder and also particularly mechanized plunder, right? You know, I read someone, I don't remember who said this but like World War I was the first war which in ruins could happen instantaneously, right. And you can say the same with colonialism where ruins, you didn't have to collaborate, you didn't to have to wait for time to make ruins. You could make it immediately. That is a surreal reality, right? And so the Vallejo, Lorca, those writers, Márquez, and then again, the Glissant, Fanon, Césaire, those writers working, Claude McKay, going up from Jamaica to Harlem, those writers reset the parameters of what is real and what is unreal to whom, right? And I think that was really, really radical for me as a writer and that brilliant quote from Ágape, you know, "Dear Lord, help me, I've died so little." It's such a, it's one of those moments where you don't need to translate it because you also can't and yet it makes absolute sense.

Yeah, that's, and glad that you mentioned Césaire, too, that "Notes from a Native Land," I think, is a book that does, it talks in some ways of what you're talking about. For those who are interested, it is a serious work.

Yeah, and the beauty of that, because I teach that book, and that's the beauty of that text "Notebook on the Return to the Native Land" is that that was not the beginning of a literary career. It's the beginning of a political one. Like, think about that, like a poet writing a radical hybrid text then becomes a head of state of Marnique. I mean, it's like it's it's almost like when we say things like, there is genocide, there is horror, there is war and poverty. What's poetry for? What are you gonna do, write your little poem? To me, I think that's such a Western privileged position that we are debating the utility and the validity of a medium that has rescued and saved people in the global South for centuries. And here we are in our relative safety, debating whether that's a functional tool. When it's not even in discussion, in fact, implemented, right, for hundreds of years. And so, to me, it's like all of it works alongside what we want for each other. We can fight for each others' dignity to live, and we can write the poems alongside. There's enough hours in a day for all of that to happen. But it's interesting that poetry has been so maligned in our culture. That we often pick on it, right? Because you never ask, is ballet gonna end genocide?

Right.

You never ask will Taylor Swift, right... And it's interesting because that has commercial validity. So the commercial validity, selling out Madison Square Garden has commercial validity, so it's untouchable that we don't have to question that because it brings so much profit. But the poet when the poet is relevant, right? We ask them to come out of the shadows and then we interrogate them. Now that the world's on fire, what will you do? We don't ask the same of sculpture, stamp collecting, right? And I don't think that we shouldn't ask the poet that, but I think we should ask everything that. What is the pact, how does your practice align with a historical political context, right? This is true of Whitman and Dickinson, right, Dickinson wrote those poems, those deep fixation during the Civil War when that country was literally falling apart, right? And so when she talks about the rifle speaking, right with the red eye, like it's not just random, right. And so to me, those are all intertwined in the project.

That's really wonderful. This actually ties into another question that you were asked, and I'll read the whole thing to you. "Thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much wisdom with us. I'm wondering if you could talk about the relationship between your teaching and artistic practices, and what ways are they interwoven or separate?"

Oh. Well, I can't write anything when I'm teaching. So that's very separate, you know. And I think you can concur. It's because the students, it's the honor of my life to be a teacher. I do think, you know, we talked about, I just talked about career, literary career. I don't think a literary career to me, as I said, is like a vocation. The books are occurrences. They're a phenomena, you know, which is also why I never have a multi-book contract. Every book I write is one contract. My family complains because you get more money, you know, but I'm not in the business of selling people ghosts, right? I haven't, I can't write I can't I can't have a contract for something I done. So I was trained as a poet. You know, you don't call up... Kevin Young of the New Yorker said, hey, Kevin, I got four lines. It's gonna be amazing sonnet. But if you can give me half the check for four lines, I promise you, it's a proposal, right? It's going to be a banger in like three months. [Laughter] You don't do that. You got to come correct, right. And so I think for me, I don't see writing as a vocation, as an identity. It's almost like a performance. The book is a performance, it's done, and now I'm just a teacher. Because teaching is what I can do until I die. And it is the greatest thing, I think, in my life, being a teacher, because you enter a room with 12, 15 people who have absolute hope, who have defied the shame that the culture instilled in them of being a poet. So they have survived that. They survived even their families' ridicule. They have traveled across the world, sacrificed, took out loans, moved across the country. To do what? Manage a handful of words and then break the line on the right margin after five or six words. To work in a medium that just breaks itself, fractures itself towards completion. Anybody else would call that psychotic. [Laughter] But for us, there they are, they believe in it so much. And I think in our, what's really beautiful about the classroom is that it's a very sincere and earnest space. And I value that immensely because we are a culture that often misreads cynicism as intelligence. So the cynic in our culture is often complacent. And those in power, the 1%, those who abuse, they want us complacent, so they love the cynic, right? The cynic allows them to do what they want, rob us with one hand and sell us a hope on the other hand. And my students have, they're all in. You, where else can you enter a room where every single individual has wagered it all with so little pay? You know, you go to nursing school, there's a kind of linear progress. Go to law school, there's a linear, you will slowly move up the ranks. Poetry school, there's no promises. So to me, to be useful to them, I mean, there are days where I'm like flattened and depressed with the world. And I show up to class and they bring me out because their ambitions, their desire to work this magic and their faith in it. The greatest cure of depression is to be a teacher. It's also the greatest inducer of it [laughter] as well, because you know because those office hours they're like confession booths like you know like these students go through it all right and you're at the you're at the the foothold of humanity with them and I think to me it's the the honor of my life to be of use to them. Annie Dillard said the best thing. She says, "If you hoard your knowledge, if you hoard your goods, if you put it in the safe and you lock it, you will open that safe one day and find only ashes." So to me, the work of teaching is to break open all the safes and just toss it by the handful to them. And to see them grow and to see them become committed to this work of language, language which costs nothing. There's so little economic barriers to it. To do that, I can do that forever and that I'm actually really proud of. I'm not necessarily proud of my books because to me the books are removed from me. I don't believe in the hype because it's all downriver. Awards and achievements are given to the past. You know, this is all calcified. It's stone, you know, it's down river. I don't have any attachment to it. People can put glitter on it, throw tomatoes at it. It's all okay. But, when I step into the classroom, I have to come prepared for them. And to me, that's how I measure, that's how I measure my self-worth, is whether I taught a good class or not. And sometimes, you miss something in a class and you stay up in your bed just, gosh, I should have said that better. Next week, I gotta rework that. That's what keeps me up at night.

Ocean Vuong, my God, brother.

But you know how it is, it's like that, like that.

I do. I do.

Yeah.

I feel like I was just in class, you know, and I might have gotten a C in it because it's just so in awe of the things you were saying. You know, God. We are out of time, but I want to say one thing before we go. I want to ask about this is something we talked about. I'm sorry, it's a non literary thing. I found out earlier that you play basketball. [Laughter]

Mm-hmm. I've broken some ankles in my day. [Laughter]

I just needed people to know that, because I know you can ball, I know that you can. And also as a Pacers fan, I'm feeling a kind of way today. And Ocean's a fan of the Knicks. So, that's what, Haliburton, he did the thing.

I was having a really tough time in my hotel last night. It was a bad night. I grew up in Hartford, and so we don't have a basketball team. But depending on how you move your antenna, you either get the Celtics or the Knicks. And my grandmother was schizophrenic. And she would not allow anyone to touch the antenna. And so she moved it only to the Knicks. And so I became a Knicks fan because of my grandmother. I was like a 10, 11-year-old kid watching Jeff Van Gundy in the end of that era. And it was really beautiful, I told you backstage, because she thought that a basketball team was a small business. And that the coach is the owner. And so she's like, wow, this man that owns this team is so stressed out, right? [Laughter] He's losing his hair. He has like horrible eye bags. He's so small. His team is so old, right. Patrick Ewing was icing his knees. And my grandma's like we need to, they're gonna run out of business soon. We need a roof for them. And I just I, it was so endearing to me to dri - they felt like, to me, they felt like poets. You know, like they were just out there. She had no idea of what a NBA franchise was. But because of my grandma, I'm a Knicks fan for life.

Yeah. I love that. Chicago, can we give OCEAN VUONG
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:50):
For more information on Ocean Vuong and Adrian Matejka, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org. Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the staff at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making sure they sound great. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ocean Vuong Uses the Sentence as a Tool to Understand Deep Mystery