Getting Close to the Terror with Ocean Vuong
In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen and co-host Sharon Salzberg sit down with Buddhist poet Ocean Vuong to discuss his new collection, Time Is a Mother.
May 7, 2022
Writing through Loss
Writing through Loss
Writing is a way of grieving for Ocean Vuong, the 33-year-old poet, best-selling author, and Buddhist practitioner.
After losing his mother to breast cancer in 2019 and then being forced into pandemic lockdown, he realized, as he says, that he is “always grieving.” Vuong describes his poetry as a form of death meditation, a contemplation of loss reminiscent of the Buddhist rituals he grew up with.
“It’s a place where death doesn’t even have to be mentioned in order to be felt, which is something that I’m really interested in as an artist: how do I have a felt-absence effect in the work?” he says. “Sometimes you can feel that death and dying haunt the work without it having to be named.”
On the latest episode of our Life As It Is podcast, Vuong joins Sharon Salzberg and Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, for an intimate conversation on loss, creativity, and his latest collection of poetry, Time Is A Mother.
