Ocean Vuong Discusses Queerness & Innovation

After Ocean Vuong's recent round table discussion at Yale, Alexandra Barylski sat down with the poet to talk about race, class, queerness, and his commitment to meditation in an otherwise very active time. Barylski explains, "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.'" Let's pick up with their discussion, starting there: 

AB: You are a Vietnamese-American poet and a queer poet, but I want to begin by framing you as a religious poet. 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. How do you navigate this poetic life filled with publicity and success alongside your poetic life that is integrated with your Buddhist spiritual life?

OV: In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition monks or yogis would often go on retreat, isolating themselves in caves or hamlets for months at a time. These retreats were not respites, but rather consisted of intensive mediation and introspection, all in the service of an eventual return back to society. In this sense, the retreat becomes the journey of inner questioning and exploration. In the end the monk returns to his community bearing the fruits of his discoveries. The isolation was always about an eventual rejoining and collaboration with the community at large. 

For me, as a Buddhist, that tradition of “isolation as work” rings true, and that correlates with the poem being my eventual correspondence with the rest of the world—that is, in the rare chance the poem is strong enough to achieve itself. I wrote most of Night Sky alone in an overheated apartment in New York in my pajamas with no promise that anyone would care. For the monks, there was a community, a sangha, that sent them off and then received them with open arms, regardless of their efforts. For the poet there is no such promise, there is no one waiting for us.

Read on at Marginalia, a channel of Los Angeles Review of Books.