Ocean Vuong

extracted from your personhood.

So the meme is one of the most brutal realities of our 21st century mode of communication because it transforms a human being with a historical life and a personality into a communication object, into a sign, which now serves somebody in a group chat.

So

By the time I get them, I teach a graduate program.

So they're 22, 23.

And we get the ones who have already committed themselves to art practice.

So we get the ones that are kind of professionalizing.

But without fail, every year at the first day of class, you can see by the body language in the room how deeply beaten down and afraid my students are for being a poet.

So I tell them that the classroom is a laboratory of failure.

This is a place to fail.

This is a place to be embarrassed.

And I'm not going to critique you for the first few weeks.

And we're not going to critique each other.

We are a culture obsessed with static truths.

We have a word for a bud and a word for rose.

Rosebud, rose.

But there are infinite moments in between.

There's a moment where the rose just starts to tear.

And if you've zoomed in enough, you don't even know what you're looking at.

It's still part of it, but we don't have a word for that.