Ocean Vuong

And to me, so much of life actually exists in this liminal, monstrous moment.

undefinable space in between the two definitions of rosebud and rose.

And so I tell them, I said, you are now in the space between the rosebud and the rose.

That's what these 14 weeks are.

We don't have a word for that.

Sorry.

Doesn't matter though.

So normalizing the idea of failure as a necessary procedure of growing as a human being and not using judgment as a punishing tool of progress.

What a lot of students want from the classroom is a factory.

They've been taught that.

I'm going to go to NYU.

I'm going to feed my weak poems into the NYU factory and a professor and my peers are going to

to fix everything, right?

It's all about this false idea that if I just keep working, a Finnish brand new, you know, T-model Ford poem will come out at the end of it.

And it's so completely false.

Fantasy.

So,

It's introducing to them the larger reality that all of this will come through error and errancy.

But in fact, error and errancy is part of being alive.

And not only that, but part of innovation.