'to remember is to be a poet': Creative Independent Interviews Ocean Vuong

Creative Independent's Amy Rose Spiegel speaks with Ocean Vuong about his writing practice. "Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable," Vuong says. "I thought, 'Well if the Greek root for 'poet' is 'creator,' then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet." I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember." From there:

You present, in some of your poems, that the future has already happened, and the past is happening still. Is writing a way to orient events among one another on that spiral?

The funny thing is, the biggest trouble I have with my writing is tense. In Vietnamese, we don’t have past participles, so everything is spoken in the present, and whether it’s past or present depends on the last word. Say you want to say, “I ate a bagel this morning for breakfast.” You would say, “I am eating bagel already.” Everything is present. The writing sometimes takes me out of time. I get to cater to the action, and the time resolves afterwards.

Sometimes I write a poem and I don’t realize what tense I’m using, or I’m writing a passage, and I have to decide later. Editing becomes the place where the past and present start to connect. When I’m writing, the curiosity pulls me forward. The work gets done when my terror is outpaced by my sense of urgency to speak. When there are good days, I go a little faster than my terror, and there are bad days when my terror beats me, and I’m silent. That’s the negotiation.

What are you afraid of?

I’m afraid, “What if none of this matters?” Maybe this is the working-class roots of my family, where I feel like—I sit two days in a hotel, I get 10,000 words—what if it doesn’t matter? What if I could be doing something better with my hands for my community, my people? Maybe, in a queer body, that’s always a question: “How can we be of service to one another?” At least for myself. That’s how I think of art, is how we are service to one another.

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