Ocean Vuong

which is what poetry and novels do, right?

Because they're disruptions.

We don't pick up a novel to confirm what we know.

We pick it up to learn something new.

In a way, we're disrupting ourselves.

Yeah, yeah.

What my very rudimentary practice when I was a young poet, and I still do this, is write, just copy down your favorite poems and your favorite texts.

Because now you're in someone else's head.

So I would do that with Federico Garcia Lorca, Toni Morrison.

Mary Oliver, you know, and when I'm stuck and when my language is running my life and it's toxic, I can just take another poet and I would just open up the book, put it in my journal and just copy and feel, you know, that's the beautiful thing about language is that it's the most democratic tool we have because everyone can use it.

Yeah.

It's like secular prayer.

Right?

It's a form of prayer that you choose.

You get to curate.

a kind of bibliography or Bible for yourself, right?

And you don't have to be religious to do it.

And in fact, this is what the early monks did.

They would trace and replicate Psalms and the Bible by hand, right?

And so that was kind of a meditative practice.