I was sitting there trying to figure out if I was crying
or not.
[LAUGHS]
I think I was.
I think that's what was happening to my face.
So I just want to-- before I introduce
Ocean who also made me cry right when I saw him,
I want to love on this person right here, Hannah Ensor.
Hannah makes this reading series happen.
And yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
And she's a damn good poet.
So if you're here tonight, the likelihood
is you actually don't need me to introduce Ocean Vuong to you.
In the last year or so, he's practically broken the poetry
sound barrier.
His work has been celebrated by everyone from every good poet's
friend or every poet's good friend I should say,
Ruth Lilly, to the New Yorker to Teen Vogue.
And so if you want to read Ocean's work in print,
you actually only have two options.
I'm actually not his marketing person.
But this is just true.
You can buy this book for like 20 bucks or less.
14.
That's a steal.
And this book came out in 2016 which was also
an amazing year, right?
You won the Whiting, also finalist for the Kate Tufts
Discovery Award and a New York Times top 10 book of 2016.
So a banner year.
Wise choice.
Choice number two, you can do what
I've been trying to do since February of 2015 which
is to raise enough money to get his chapbook, Burnings,
which was published in 2010 by sibling rivalry press.
And there's only four copies available on Amazon.
The first two are in used but good condition.
And you can get one of those for $1,200 or one for $1,600.
The other two are listed at use or acceptable condition
which includes cover where and/or interior markings.
The cheapest of those goes for $1,872.21.
Or the $2,015.68 version.
So my point here is this is incredible work if the market
has anything to say about it.
But here's the thing, I'm going to be collecting donations
afterwards.
So we can do like a little group thing.
We can buy this.
Do you have this?
Do y'all have this?
Oh, see, the Poetry Center has a $2,000 book right in there.
Right upstairs.
That's what I'm saying.
OK.
So there's that.
"Don't be afraid," Ocean Vuong says in the poem
"Someday I'll Love," Ocean Vuong.
The gunfire is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer and failing.
Later he says, loneliness is still
time spent with the world.
It's lines like these, and believe
me there are many of them, that make me want to just stand
here and quote him to you.
Because I want to feel the wonder of my mouth making
sense of the world like that.
But his work is more than reflection or explanation
or even ventilation.
His work is breathing.
Here on Earth words are as common as oxygen.
And it is indeed fun to move the air.
But it's the act of allowing one element
to diffuse across a boundary and exchange
and share the space with what may seem to be
waste that is respiration.
He says my footsteps on the sidewalk
were the smallest flights.
And this is what it means to come alive.
How magical it is to be filled and then
to be changed by the air.
How I wanted to be that sky to hold every flight
and fall at once and then later hear.
That's all I wanted to be.
Breathing, that's what he gives us and how truly fortunate
we are he's here.
Ocean Vuong.