Viet Thanh Nguyen Interviews Ocean Vuong at LARB

Read a transcript from Nguyen and Vuong's live conversation at the Los Angeles Public Library, which took place as part of its ALOUD series in March and is now online at LARB. It begins with a reference to one of Nguyen's favorite poems by Vuong, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong." Let's pick up from there: 

VIET THANH NGUYEN: “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is one of my favorite poems of yours, and I thought, I could never write a poem like that because I could never actually put my own name into my work. Yet it seems to me that this poem typifies so much of your writing, because it seems very courageous to confront yourself directly like this, but also it contains so much of your own voice, with trademark stylistic, futuristic, beautiful images. Was it a hard poem for you to write?

OCEAN VUONG: It was hard but necessary. I think, as a writer, when you approach that feeling, when you cross this threshold where risk is inevitable, where everything you’ve lived through demands you move into that precarious space, it embodies its own momentum. So I don’t know if it was hard. Terrifying, yes, but I’m not sure if I’m courageous in that sense, only that my sense of urgency outpaces my terror. That’s how I get the work done, with the knowledge that so many people — queer, brown people — before me didn’t get a chance to speak, or whose actual bodies were erased because of speaking. So when I approach the poem, I feel like there’s this burning desire to get it through, to speak, and I think sometimes that desire surpasses the terror. I always feel like I’m writing to the terrified versions of myself, and I figured, if I’m going to do it, why don’t I just really do it here in this poem, really go in.

Learn more at LARB.