Ocean Vuong

Or jail, right?

Those were the things that was available and what was happening around me.

And so...

I never, no one ever said you can be a professor.

In fact, I didn't even know poets were something you could become.

I thought it was like preordained by the government.

I thought like the president signs like a list, you get it in the mail and say, you get to be a poet.

Then they give you a cabin in Vermont.

You go there, you scribble away.

Then you send your piles of paper to Barnes and Noble.

And they go out in the back, they make a book, and they wheel out a cart of books.

How else would it happen?

And so the idea that one could be a poet is a complete journey of failure, of objection, of shame.

And so I'm 37.

Half of my life have been in nowhere land.

Absolute loss, absolute objection.

And I would never have told you that I was going to be a professor or write books.

To me, I am miraculously in the whipped cream of my life.

And I've been in it for 20 years.

I've been able to do what I love.