This episode is presented by Mercury. When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I’ve got team members in four different countries. Things like taxes, currency exchange, expenses — I was dreading it. But here’s the crazy thing: four years in, banking has been maybe the easiest part. I honestly can’t remember running into a single problem! And that’s because I’ve been using Mercury.
I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so well designed. It’s easy to get started and easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user’s access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what: if anything goes wrong, their support line is super responsive (and actually thoughtful), which is really rare these days. I genuinely can’t imagine trying to run my business without Mercury.
Ocean Vuong is a poet, novelist, and professor at NYU.
This is the anti writing with AI conversation. It's about breaking free from technology and convention in order to see the world fresh again, and then make beautiful art about what you see.
Some highlights:
1) "We're out here to write sentences the species has never encountered, and it's possible in this lifetime."
2) "Eighty percent of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax."
3) "When you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through syntax. For every single person, it's different."
The full conversation is below. Enjoy.
Transcript
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:40 Writing metaphors
00:04:52 The problem with writing workshops
00:13:02 How AI homogenized the sentence
00:23:32 Why did writing get so rigid?
00:28:04 Rescue the cliche!
00:32:06 Seeing vs. recognizing
00:34:37 80% of writing isn’t writing
00:41:31 What makes sentences memorable
00:50:31 Poetry as a testing ground for writers
01:02:30 Synchronic vs diachronic reading
1:09:03 Daringness and disobedience
1:14:27 The limits of language
David (01:27):
Talking about awe, mystery, and wonder. I feel like that’s so infused not just in the way that you write, but in the way that you see.
Ocean (01:48 – 01:48):
Yeah.
David (01:48 – 01:51):
And that has to be some sort of muscle or something that you’re cultivating.
Ocean (01:51 – 04:54):
Yeah. I like to think metaphor is a great example of that, because many of my students say, how do you write a good metaphor? I say, it’s really about observation. It’s about looking at the world. Sometimes a strong metaphor takes years to come to, and the rest is arrangement and syntax. You’ll get that. You’ll find a way. You’ll draft your way through that.
Metaphor from the Greek, it’s a carryover. You have your tenor and your vehicle. Let’s take a line from Isaac Babel, one of my favorite short story writers. Babel writing in the early 1920s during the Soviet-Polish War, in Red Calvary.
You can describe a sunset in a mimetic way, which is often what the newspapers want. The newspaper style. A red evening sunset along the hills. Fine, it’s a useful descriptive, but it’s mimetic. It’s mimicking the world. This is from Aristotle’s idea of mimesis and poiesis.
The metaphor is a disruption of that. It’s asking the viewer to bring themselves into that scene. Babel opens the Red Calvary by describing a sunset as the low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded.
When I read that, I was like, that’s a sentence the species never had yet. A red evening sunset, the species has that. He opened the door, walked into the room, and sat down. The species has that. But we have not had a sunset described like a beheading. You wouldn’t need to know that Babel was a war correspondent at the time. That context is embedded in the image.
That image is so incredible because it does something no other art can do. Film can’t replicate that sentiment. You can take a time-lapse shot of a sunset, but it would not be indicative of the connotations of a beheading. The second clause, that simile, also changes and alters the rate of the sunset, and the speed of it. You can see the speed go and move.
Babel has not just given us a mimetic scene that the newspapers want. You’ll never see, you know, New York City, February 26, 2026, Trump descends Air Force One as the sun sets across Manhattan as if beheaded CNN. You never read that, because it’s silly. It’s all about information. It’s about efficacy. You want an invisible style. That was really important for the newspaper, but it’s done incredible damage to a young writer’s imagination, because the sentence has now been so timid.
David (04:54 – 05:21):
So in your class, the way that you begin is not with criticism, but just allowing people to read and experience each other’s work. I was hearing you talk about it and you’re like, what you get from that is that you get really, really, really specific feedback that is geared to the individual, geared to the person. I want to hear about why you do that and what that means about sort of your relationship with the rules of writing, if you know what I mean.
Ocean (05:22 – 09:00):
I think the idea is building recognition in what’s happening in the work. We sometimes think the workshop is a place where correction is progress. Unfortunately, we bring a lot of the culture into our creative practice, and the culture often says you feed something into a machine or process and it should be better.
Of course, every writer who’s done it for about a year will tell you that some workshops actually destroy the work. You get too much feedback, it’s all over the place, and sometimes you can draft beyond the pinnacle of the work. So, why does that happen?
That’s one question I’m always interested in. Why is it that sometimes you get draft one and it’s just completely there? You’re like, “Oh, my goodness, poetry gods, writing gods, thank you.” That happens once every blue moon if you’re even lucky. Sometimes you think you’re writing this poem or you’re writing this story, this novel, and then you get to the seventh, twentieth, twenty-eighth draft, and you’re like, “Oh, my goodness, it’s not this at all. It’s this other thing.” Why didn’t I see this earlier? Why did I have to spend so much time?
I think that moment is actually a moment of recognition. My goal is, how do we get that work to be present in the room rather than just constantly correcting lines? One of the greatest dangers of being of a culture that fetishizes productivity is that you might have too much work. We all had that friend who writes a poem a day for a whole year or writes a novel a month. I know those folks. Sometimes it’s much harder to go back into a pile of rubble to salvage the work than starting completely anew.
When you center recognition and you say, “Well, what is it? What are the tendencies here?” because when you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through syntax. For every single person, it’s different. If I said, “Write a poem. Write an obad,” which is a traditional poem that you write the morning after when you’re leaving. The obad is like the glorious morning or the melancholic, depending how it went. If I said, “Write an obad,” every single student would have a different poem.
We’re naming the tendencies. We’re seeing the patterns. “Oh, you’re a poet that’s interested in trees. You’re a poet that’s interested in verbs enjambed. You’re enjambing on your verbs, or your prepositions are on the left margin. You seem to like to launch into the next line.” So, recognizing patterns means you recognizing yourself.
Imagine sending a first draft and everyone pulls it apart with their dogmas. When you’re approaching the work anew, you often have dogmas that you picked up years ago. You hear things like, “Oh, a poem shouldn’t be like this. A novel shouldn’t be like that.” The problem with those rules is that anytime you ask them why, after two or three whys, the whole argument usually falls apart.
Suspending that and building out the recognition to yourself, like, “Who am I as a writer? Why did I write this?” Sometimes the consciousness, the subconscious brings out this work and we only half know it.
David (09:00 – 09:01):
Half know it.
Ocean (09:01 – 11:22):
You only half know it. Sometimes the line comes out and it’s thrilling, but you don’t really intellectualize it yet. We’ve all had that moment. I’m sure you have as well. I’m like, “Wow, what is that?”
Early on in my career, I would censor myself a lot when that happened. I said, “Gosh, if I don’t know it, then I’m not in control. Then that means I’m not really a writer.” So, I would censor myself and say, “Ah, let me pull back. Let me not. Let me put that on the back burner until I understand what I just wrote.”
The more I did it, the more I realized I don’t want to judge what comes through. You’re like, “Whoa, what? Where did that come from? What does that even mean?” But there’s something in me that says, “This is new.” So, I’ll keep digging.
It reminds me of a Japanese botanist who was tasked to find medicinal plants in the rainforests. He had the record in his university, in his community, for finding the most medicinal plants. Naturally, people come to him and they say, “Well, why? What’s your trick? What’s the secret? How did you do this landmark work?”
It’s in a book called The Method of Hope. He says, “Well, I don’t go into the rainforest looking for what looks like medicine. I simply look for anything that’s new to me, and I hope that it’s medicine. Sometimes, often it’s not. Sometimes it’s poison.” As we know, in pharmaceuticals, some poisons could be redesigned as medicine. He says, “I’m just looking for anything new. I’m not looking for what came before me. I’m not looking for what looks like the other medicine, the other plant, the other species. Anything that’s new, I put in my bag.”
I think that when we suspend critique, the students are more willing to just let the novelty of themselves come into the room. So, we’re just putting things in the center. When we look at a poem or a short story, I notice this. I see this pattern. You switch from past tense to present tense in this fifth paragraph. That’s interesting. Why is that? Let’s just put it in.
By the third or fourth week, when we know the tendencies of the writer, we can gear everything towards them. It happens so naturally and seamlessly. It’s like relationships.
David (11:22 – 11:23):
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of.
Ocean (11:23 – 11:55):
You would never walk up to a stranger and say, “I have some fashion advice for you.” Do that in New York, and you might end up in Bellevue.
Just being close to someone and gearing it to them and getting to know and building that recognition, not only good for the community in a workshop environment, but for yourself. How do you get to that moment faster? Do you really need thirty drafts to get to the moment where you realize, “Oh, it wasn’t about this at all. It’s about this other thing here.”
David (11:56 – 12:11):
Okay, so we’re talking about how do you get your writing done? If you’re thinking about work and how you can be more productive there, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool, and it’s different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They’re feature bloat.
Ocean (12:12 – 12:13):
Basecamp says, “No, no, no, no, no.”
David (12:13 – 12:37):
We’re going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters: getting the work done. For us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we’re doing with How I Write, when episodes are being recorded, where we’re recording them, and the publishing day. All those things are in one place for our entire team to look at.
I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried, on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing and manifestation.
Ocean (12:38 – 12:39):
He cares about great copy.
David (12:39 – 13:01):
He cares about telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software.
So if you’re thinking about work and asking how you can be more productive or make your team more cohesive, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode.
Ocean (13:02 – 13:02):
Yeah.
David (13:02 – 13:25):
The big word that comes to me is novelty, surprise, pursuing it. How do you feel like you are pursuing novelty and freshness? And how do you feel like there’s more of a pursuit of quality that’s more structured and refined and less open to stretching the boundaries?
Ocean (13:26 – 15:23):
It’s always about stretching the boundaries because the boundaries are arbitrary. If you look at what’s historically good writing, it is historically variable. What we consider strong writing.
First of all, if you look at Chaucer, what is literature? We’re getting into a really fundamental question. What is literature? Well, literature is a relatively new fabrication. The literature department, the English department, came about at the end of the 19th century. Prior to that, if you asked Chaucer, what is literature? He would say, anything written. If you asked Shakespeare, what is literature? He probably couldn’t give you an answer.
He might say literature is a blueprint for life. The poem was something used like a text message. It was part of courtship. We formulated literature when we formulated institutions. It came as an organizing principle, as a way to gather literary work, organize it, and study it.
It’s important to go back. Is the Iliad a poem or a story? If you look at the Bantam Classics from the ‘50s and ‘60s, they actually abandoned Homer’s original line breaks to just read it as a novel. It’s an interesting publication decision. They had to make it cheap, but then they made executive decisions like, “We don’t care for the poem part. We just want the story part.”
I think it’s important to realize that everything has been hybrid and we put these qualities on it. Even the novel was not considered a serious literary endeavor until the late 19th century. Before that, it was considered feminine.
David (15:23 – 15:25):
It was considered women’s work, like Jane Austen.
Ocean (15:25 – 16:58):
Yeah, it was for entertainment. Serious thinkers only read the classics, poetry, and nonfiction.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War when a critic, DeForest, I believe his name was, in 1868, first credited the term “Great American Novel.” After the American Civil War, it was a serious moment of moral crisis in the country. DeForest wrote an op-ed basically saying, “What book will bring us together will make a testament?”
For the first time in American letters, the novel was seen as a serious moral endeavor, and then everything changed. It was no longer women’s entertainment. It became a vehicle of national reckoning.
It also coincided with the rise of the newspaper. The newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War because newspaper reporting was completely reckless. You had journalists who would talk about troop deployments. Meanwhile, the soldiers, particularly in Union camps, would read newspapers. Anyone could go out and say, “I think Lee’s over there across the hills,” which was a headache for those early Union generals because there was no standardization. Exclamation marks were everywhere. It was kind of vibes. It was beautiful, but for information delivery, it was crazy.
David (16:58 – 17:00):
It was fake news on steroids.
Ocean (17:00 – 18:36):
It was fake news on steroids. The style was really wild, naturalistic, and at times whimsical.
After the Civil War, alongside DeForest’s call for the Great American Novel, newspapers sobered up and said, “We need to have a standard practice.” The English sentence started to become tamed. It became efficient. It went for clarity. It had to have enough brevity to keep room for advertising.
You went from the Victorian sentence of Matthew Arnold, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, which is more like a root system, just feeling. It began with oratory. Oratory was a way to win arguments in the 19th century. You have Frederick Douglass and Thoreau giving sermons and speeches, and you have an audience that was still relatively illiterate. The subordinate clause, the long-winded clause delaying the independent clause, kept your audience hooked. What is he really saying? We gotta keep paying attention. So you had language that looks similar to legal speech, a lot of subordinate clauses.
It was momentous. It was perfect for oratory, and naturally, people wrote the same way they spoke.
David (18:36 – 18:49):
Obviously, this was later, but is this like Churchill: “We shall fight on beaches, we shall fight in the fields, we shall never surrender at the end?” Anaphora. It’s like saying the same thing over and over.
Ocean (18:49 – 18:50):
Yes.
David (18:50 – 18:54):
You’re sort of delaying the punchline at the end. We shall never surrender.
Ocean (18:55 – 19:49):
Yep. That comes from the Bible. Whitman picked up the King James Bible and employed anaphora, which is perfect for politicians because you can build momentum. “We will heal the working class. We will heal the racial divide.” It’s perfect for politicians because you can build momentum with the base and have an emotional pull. It’s performative. It’s a spectacle of power, and yet you never explain how you’re going to do it. It’s all the dopamine without the explanation.
The Victorian sentence worked this way, but it was very rich and metaphoric. So when we turn to the turn of the 20th century, the rise of the great American novel, the national novel, because other countries started to think about, “What’s our novel?”, it also coincided with standardization for a commercial, efficient sentence.
David (19:49 – 19:53):
Right. It’s probably not a coincidence that Hemingway was a newspaper guy.
Ocean (19:53 – 20:02):
So were Stephen Crane and Jack London. Right. Orwell. These are the hallmarks of the 20th-century sentence, which we now consider good writing.
David (20:02 – 20:03):
Sure.
Ocean (20:03 – 20:17):
That’s my bone to pick with that. There are wonderful ways to write, but the culture in the 20th century has settled on mostly one way. They’ve allowed one way to prevail.
David (20:17 – 20:19):
I’m guessing you don’t write with Grammarly.
Ocean (20:21 – 20:36):
Well, it’s interesting because there’s a lot of talk about AI. AI is predictable. Its onset is predictable because long before AI, we have always been homogenizing the sentence.
David (20:36 – 20:45):
I have a friend who did an experiment. He said, “I’m going to take this bit from Shakespeare, and I’m going to put it in Microsoft Word.”
Ocean (20:45 – 20:45):
Yeah.
David (20:45 – 20:49):
And what does it give you? It gives you red and green squiggly lines.
Ocean (20:49 – 20:49):
Yeah.
David (20:49 – 20:59):
He goes, “This software program is telling me not to write like Shakespeare. It is saying, ‘Do not do that.’ It’s giving me auto suggestions. What is going on?”
Ocean (20:59 – 21:00):
Yeah.
David (21:00 – 21:26):
Even in something like Microsoft Word, which seems so innocuous, maybe 600 million people write with it, maybe more, maybe more than a billion people have used Microsoft Word. Just with the spell-check suggestions, it’s imposing a certain kind of form that is the very antithesis of the person who people say might be the greatest playwright in the English language.
Ocean (21:26 – 23:32):
Yep. 100%. AI didn’t have to be what it is today. We could have built it to have doubt, to be exploratory, to have spiritual questions. But instead, we build it according to the corporate model: scaling efficacy, standardization, homogenization, total consumption, colonization of ideas and material. We think that’s just naturally good. That’s just what is.
It’s interesting that the corporate model is kind of like a de facto model of progress, and we never built it. It’s interesting that Claude hired philosophers to advise it. The liberal arts are coming back with this kind of technological advance.
To go back to the sentence, I think the Victorian sentence was incredibly beautiful. In the newspaper world, it was a mess. Unfortunately, poetry, I think writing was actually on its way to painting. Rimbaud’s Season in Hell is a hybrid text of prose poetry. There was a turn, a fork between poetry followed painting, and prose followed the newspaper.
If you look at any literary review, you open any book review, they often prioritize the newspaper sentence, which is the invisible presence of the author. We have to say we don’t like this work because the author wouldn’t get out of their own way, or it’s pretentious because there are too many metaphors. We’re asking the sentence to behave more like a butler.
This comes from the newspaper model. There are plenty of works written beautifully from that. But I’m advocating for a more Victorian style to come back and have more freedom to strange the world.
David (23:32 – 24:07):
The word that came to mind for me was right angles. A lot of writing right now has right angles. It’s sort of coarse and harsh, and it’s very refined. It’s almost like it’s been written with a ruler.
It’d be interesting to look at a study of paintings of how many right angles showed up in paintings. If you look at Impressionism, there are no right angles. If you look at Kandinsky, there are some right angles because it’s more abstract. But then you get to Post-World War II, Pen Drill is all right angles. It’s sort of like the right-angleization of culture and of writing.
Ocean (24:07 – 24:35):
That’s right. That’s really great. Technology had to do with that industrialization. Around 1920, after World War I, we became a species that can produce right angles almost perfectly. But then scientifically, we now know that straight lines don’t exist in nature, even in that frame if you narrow it down to a molecular level.
David (24:35 – 24:36):
Sure, sure, sure.
Ocean (24:36 – 26:24):
It’s not real; it’s an illusion.
I think the trouble for a young writer, a novice writer, to innovate according to their terms, everything from draft one to the publication process will hinder that for the novice writer right now in the 21st century. It begins with this illusion. If you’re a young writer, you’re often told something very familiar: here are the models you should look at—the innovative, daring masters: Wolf, Melville, Baldwin, Juna Barnes, Anne Carson. And you’re teaching them that in the syllabus.
Then the naive, hopeful novelist/writer does that. They read the books, they create a matrix of their own that’s weird and interesting. The dichotomy is that the publishing world, and it begins with pedagogy too, is actually very cynical. When they do the homework, they make that interesting work based on these one-of-a-kind writers, the Shakespeares. They deliver it to the professor, and they say, “Who do you think you are, Melville?” Then you bring it to the publisher, and it’s like, “Oh, this doesn’t look like anything we publish. We need a comp. This doesn’t look like it.”
You’re like, “Wasn’t that the whole point?” So while we build up this fantasy of innovation, publishing, because of commercial fear, is actually very conservative.
David (26:25 – 26:31):
Oh, 100%. I’m trying to make something in Hollywood right now, and it’s a documentary-style thing.
Ocean (26:31 – 26:32):
Hollywood’s even worse.
David (26:32 – 27:52):
Hollywood’s even worse. When you think of how movies have changed, the one word that comes to mind is the sequel. We just have sequel after sequel.
Basically, what you have is the stated preference: we’re innovative, we’re trying to push the boundaries. Hollywood used to be the leader of culture, but now it lags culture. It used to be that Hollywood would take risks, invest in things, and what they made was the head of the snake. Now Hollywood is sort of the final checkpoint that you go through to say you’ve made it. You have to make it on Instagram, Twitter, in your books, whatever. Then you get Hollywood at the end.
Basically, what they said to me was, “You’re doing a documentary series. There are only three kinds of unscripted series that work: true crime, music, and sports. Anything outside of that, we’re just not interested.” I understand it from a business perspective. If you’re trying to get your ROI, there are certain risks that, if you’re trying to have a structured risk profile, you’re not willing to take. But when it comes to creative culture and pushing the boundaries, taking risks, and stretching the imagination, it just doesn’t happen.
Ocean (27:53 – 28:05):
Isn’t it galling? It’s so stunning. I feel like my job is to preserve that sense of awe for the student so they can keep that original matrix.
David (28:05 – 28:11):
Does the word enchantment come to mind? It feels like we live in a bit of a disenchanted world.
Ocean (28:11 – 28:13):
Yeah, an estrangement.
David (28:13 – 28:15):
So estrangement.
Ocean (28:15 – 29:45):
Babel was writing at the same time as Victor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist. His central idea is really important. One of my heroes. So much of my thinking comes from Shklovsky’s foundation. He says there is no such thing as cliche. The biggest taboo in any writing workshop or any writer-editor commons is, “This is cliche.”
The problem with cliche is that we often see something like, “Don’t write about the rose. It’s a cliche flower. Don’t write about grandmothers. God forbid you write about a grandmother in a kitchen.” So a student would say, “Okay, I won’t touch it, I won’t touch it.” But then if you keep doing that, you’re not going to touch anything. You’ll end up with a narrow scope of this neutral, fearful, timid thematic work that actually denies yourself the subject of the world.
He’s like, “Grandmas do exist in kitchens, though. Are they just now exiled from all literary work out of this sphere?” But that does happen in the classroom.
Shklovsky says it’s not the grandmother; it’s the idea of the grandmother in the kitchen. So now you have to estrange it. It’s up to you to rescue the grandmother in the kitchen into a different mode of thinking by estranging that mode, similar to how Babel rescued the sunset by making it strange through displacement.
David (29:45 – 29:50):
Is that like making it feel fresh again by displacement?
Ocean (29:50 – 30:16):
Like, for example, take a flower. Say you have a rose, you put it in a bridesmaid’s hair. That’s familiar, cliche. You take the same rose and put it in Mike Tyson’s ear. Now you’re somewhere else. So it’s not the rose’s fault. Instead of saying, “I will not write about a rose,” it’s about, “You need to reconsider the rose.” Take a look at Shklovsky. He says it best here.
David (30:16 – 30:22):
You read my mind. I was literally a second away from saying, “Pick up one of your books. I feel like this is a perfect time.”
Ocean (30:22 – 32:06):
Okay, look at this. He comes up with this idea of estrangement, and he quotes Tolstoy in one of Tolstoy’s diaries.
Tolstoy says, “I was dusting in the room, having come full circle. I approached the sofa and could not remember if I had dusted it off or not. I couldn’t because these movements are routine and not conscious. And I felt I never could remember it. So if I had cleaned the sofa but forgotten it, that is as if I was really unconscious. It is as if it never happened at all. If the whole of life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been.”
Then Shklovsky comments, “Automization eats up things: clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war.” Incredible line.
Shklovsky continues, “What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing and not merely recognizing things. The device of art is the estrangement of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is its own end in art and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing.”
Babel sees this because they’re contemporaries. They’re working in St. Petersburg at the same time. And he’s like, “Oh, I can’t just name it, I have to re-see it.”
David (32:06 – 32:54):
At the Met, there’s this room with George Washington crossing the Delaware, the famous painting. To the left is an Albert Bierstadt painting of the Matterhorn. It’s this beautiful sunset painting with pink and orange hues. I always think of that painting when I see a mountain.
Whenever I’m in nature, I want to see it as Bierstadt saw it, seeing versus recognizing. So often I think, “Oh, it’s a mountain.” But Bierstadt was really looking at it. It’s the same with Monet and the water lilies, and Van Gogh with the way he painted flowers. You look at Van Gogh, and you see he wasn’t just seeing the object, but the energy inside of it. It allows us to see the world fresh again.
Ocean (32:54 – 34:37):
I agree 100%. Even someone like Hemingway, with that laconic style—and I’m not arguing for maximalist sentences, but for idiosyncrasy and strangeness—early Hemingway was very strange. You don’t see that style anymore. If you did early Hemingway now, with three or four-word sentences, an editor would say, “This is too conspicuous. It’s too felt.” So even that is now cut off.
You have this newspaper sentence that is invisible, inoffensive, and mimetic. “He walked into the room and sat down. The sunset glows through the evening.” Fine, but that’s a mimetic sentence. Poesis for Aristotle is the moment of process. It’s the moment in between what’s known.
You have a rose, then you have the bud. Those are two mimetic moments because they have names; they’re nominal. The rose is a thing, the bud is a thing. However, there are infinite moments between the bud and the rose. When the rose tears open on its way to the final rose, when the bud bursts, all of that is still part of life. That’s poesis.
Heidegger calls this the threshold moment: What is the moment when the rose becomes a rose? Where is the threshold? That’s where so much poetry and wonder, enchantment and estrangement comes in. But we’re taught to ignore that because it has no definition.
David (34:37 – 34:42):
Have you done any video editing in Adobe Premiere or anything like that?
Ocean (34:42 – 34:43):
No.
David (34:43 – 35:29):
Basically, you look at a timeline zoomed out. Then you zoom in, and Premiere shows you the individual frames. It’s like that famous horse painting that showed the galloping and how all four legs get off the ground. That was debated for years. Through photography, we were able to slow down time and freeze frames.
What I’m hearing from you is that enhancing your perception means looking and observing to see how deliberate change can be, like in the blossoming of a rose.
Ocean (35:29 – 35:40):
It’s about perception. It’s about slowing down. Eighty percent of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax.
David (35:40 – 35:43):
What is looking and thinking? How does that manifest itself?
Ocean (35:43 – 37:57):
Taking a walk. Richard Siken has a metaphor describing stars: “The stars out there tonight, little boats rode out too far.” What’s stunning is that the tenor is stars, the vehicle is boats, and the correspondence is so thrilling because he’s taken something that is a monolithic example of storytelling and culture: stars. We look to stars to navigate. They are the foundation of our storytelling dreams, like Orion’s Belt.
He’s reduced it to something almost like a Munch painting—loneliness, loss, being too late. The modifier “rode out too far” is stunning too. You don’t need to know it’s in the book Crush, about queer loss and desire in the ‘90s, in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. You don’t need to know that, but it’s embedded in the subject position of Richard Siken, who was a social worker while writing these books, looking out and feeling that sense of loss and sadness, upending this monolithic symbol and giving us an alternative.
Again, that sentence: I checked. Our species never had that yet.
My teacher, Ben Lerner, I hope he doesn’t mind me saying this, told me when I was an undergrad: “This is fine, but I’m going to show you what we’re after here.” He turned around, typed on his computer, and said, “You see that line you wrote? It’s a decent line. Come here. 300,000 people beat you to it.”
David (37:57 – 38:00):
Oof. That’s a punch in the face.
Ocean (38:02 – 38:40):
Sorry, Ben, but that was such an incredible moment of education. He raised the bar right there. He said, “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered, and it’s possible in this lifetime.”
One’s education is also filled with awe in the wrong way, where the canonical is often given to us with too much awe. We are asked to be too awestruck by the canonical.
David (38:40 – 38:45):
Yes. Like, everything in a museum is going to be great. Everything in a library is the best thing ever written.
Ocean (38:45 – 41:30):
You feel like that achievement is beyond your lifetime, so it’s incongruent. We worship the past, but when a student starts to do that, we condemn them. We work with cynicism and fear.
Ben did the opposite as a teacher. Up until that point, a lot of teachers said to me, “No, who do you think you are? This is pretentious. You’re just a kid. What are you doing?”
I’m like, “Well, I did what you told me to do. I read the greats, and I’m trying to do what they did.”
But Ben was like, “Go higher. You have something in you. You’re able to say something for the first time.”
Sometimes you do need sentences like, “He walked into the room and sat down.” You need that scaffolding to get you to the great poesis moments.
The question is, are you satisfied with what the dictionary has given you? Are you satisfied calling it a “red sunset,” or do you call it a “low red sun rolling over the hills as if beheaded?” Is it stars, or is it boats rowed out too far?
Moments like this are where the human being steps in and creates something closer to a thumbprint. You and I each have one thumbprint that no one else has.
What I’m interested in writing is not so much how to hook somebody, but how to stay with a reader. All our workshops, all of our writing seminars are built about capturing and possession, keeping a reader’s eyeballs.
I’m actually more interested in being haunted. There’s a poem by Robert Browning, “Meeting at Night,” that I can’t for the life of me remember, but I read it 20 years ago as a high school student, and to this day, I still think about that poem every other day.
It’s about a lover meeting a lover at night, describing the boats moving through the eddies, crossing little farms, knocking on a window, hearing the match exhaust itself, lighting up, and then the gas of the lover recognizing each other through the window pane. It has no pronouns.
As a little gay boy in Hartford, Connecticut, I thought it was about two boys meeting each other secretly. Who knows what Robert Browning meant, right? But the power of that is that that poem is downloaded into me.
I think syntax, although I said 80% of writing is perception, that 20% is everything because that is like the spike protein. It is like the downloading mechanism. How we resonate with work or how work stains us is dependent on the syntactic clause as it’s built.
David (41:31 – 42:36):
One of the things that keeps coming back is cliche and these things that you read or you watch, you listen to, that really stick with you and really live with you.
I think of Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon’s this punk kid, all about reading books, “I know everything.”
Then there’s that great park bench scene where Robin Williams sits him down and starts talking to him. You could say, “Hey, what you read in a book is just an abstraction of reality. You actually need to experience the real thing.”
That’s a good sentence, and there’s a good point there, but halfway through it, he says, “If I ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, known someone who could level you with their eyes, who could rescue you from the depths of hell, feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you.”
You’re like, “Whoa.” That just added power to this thing where ten seconds ago, it was just sort of recognition, and now I’m really seeing it.
Ocean (42:36 – 43:33):
It takes daring to write that, what you just said. It takes a kind of daringness to break out of that kind of mimetic mode.
Look at the examples, like the second line, the Babel line, Barrett’s poem, that scene. If a student usually writes that, someone would come along and say, “This is pretentious. This is self-absorbed.”
But I thought, why not? Would you want Cormac McCarthy to be any less self-absorbed in Suttree? Do you want Toni Morrison to be less self-absorbed, less indulgent in their maneuvers?
The first artistic practice that I encountered was skate culture, DIY punk shows, and what’s called And 1 mixtapes, which is street ball, like the early 2000s.
David (43:33 – 43:35):
And 1, like the basketball brand.
Ocean (43:35 – 43:50):
Yeah. And 1 mixtapes.
What’s interesting about And 1 was that it was never about winning the game. It was about the beauty of deception, crossing people, doing tricks. It was performance. It was like Harlem Globetrotters.
David (43:50 – 43:54):
That’s right. It was kind of a street ball type thing. It wasn’t NBA.
Ocean (43:54 – 44:34):
Yeah. You would go and they would play games, but no one kept score. Even if they did, it wasn’t about that. It was about a communal celebration of the beauty of the body with deception.
Writing is very similar because we’re working with a linear art. Anytime you’re working with a linear art in film, the sentence is a linear technology. It starts, it ends, and it picks up again. Some cultures go up and down, left and right.
When you’re working with a linear art, at the most fundamental mode, you’re either satisfying or denying a reader’s expectations through pattern. That’s it. There are many ways to go about it.
David (44:34 – 44:34):
Reminds me of music.
Ocean (44:35 – 45:15):
Yes, absolutely.
You talk to any DJ, when do you drop the beat? When they want to, or when you deny it?
That’s what I call literary edging. It is that: do you satisfy expectation or deny it?
It’s similar in a film. “Oh, he’s going to do it. He’s going to do that.” Then everything leads up to that moment, and then it doesn’t happen. Then delight happens, surprise, estrangement. Now you’re not just looking at the scene, you’re looking at what’s behind you, thinking, “Wait, this director has thought ahead of me. Now I need to pay more close attention.”
David (45:15 – 45:17):
They know what I want better than I do.
Ocean (45:17 – 46:58):
There’s an exhilaration embedded into that linearity, and mixtapes were very similar to skate videos. I would take videos of my friends doing skate parts to send to the local skate shop for them to get sponsored. Sponsorship just meant free boards and T-shirts. It was a very humble endeavor, but to me, that performance and self-indulgence was so powerful and so celebrated.
So I was really surprised when I went into the literary world, which has this upper-middle-class decorum where you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to perform a kind of self-erasure of that crystalline newspaper sentence, which a student who wants to write with estrangement will adopt. Again, you don’t have to, though. Incredible work has been done without it.
Gertrude Stein is interesting because she inspired Hemingway’s sentence. He went to Paris and saw what she was doing. She was not inspired by the newspaper, but by medical writing. She was a medical student, and the medical community was also at the same time trying to standardize their practice, right? So they used no-nonsense, short, memetic, informative sentences. Stein used that to write “Three Lives.”
Didion and Capote, that kind of nonfiction fiction, blended everything. It was also viable. It’s not the fault of these writers. They need to get paid, and they need to get paid by Vogue, Marie Claire, and Time magazine. So that style started to infect prose writing.
Before AI, we were already homogenizing the sentence.
David (46:58 – 47:56):
Look at architecture. You used to have all of these regional styles. You’d go to Sudan, China, Japan, England, and France, and see all these different styles, different kinds of stone, different shapes of roofs, different brickwork.
Now you look at downtowns, no matter where you are, and you can close your eyes and imagine a new skyscraper that was built 10 years ago in Tokyo, Seoul, London, Santiago, Chile, or New York City. What do you think of? Glass, right angles, skyscraper. It’s the same everywhere. The same thing is happening in architecture as is happening in writing, where you get this global standardization and homogenization. It’s this copy-and-paste thing, and there’s an entire systemized apparatus working to basically create a kind of claustrophobia in terms of what we make.
Ocean (47:56 – 49:06):
The factory is upon us. Even when we say, “I’m not on Wall Street; I’m not in corporate America,” our country is so embedded with commercialization that it happens even without us knowing. Even the word “workshop” is a metaphor of production. It’s a workshop. Let me clean up this sentence, tighten this line, polish it.
We have this fantasy that we are producing something, an efficacy related to progress and goodness. Quality. If it’s efficient, it’s quality, and that’s the fantasy of the assembly line.
The editor also knows that it’s easier to edit if everyone sounds like each other. News magazines have house styles. The New Yorker and The New York Times all have one. It’s important for them because they’re newspapers. You don’t want a really stylistic presence when you’re reading about a flood in Chile. You don’t want an authorial presence or an impressionistic take on a mass shooting.
David (49:06 – 49:16):
Even with the New Yorker, insofar as there is a literary style, you pick up the New Yorker for that literary style. But all the writers who write for the New Yorker have to conform to that.
Ocean (49:16 – 50:31):
Yes. That’s the trade-off from experience. I work and they’re lovely. The New Yorker published me out of the slush pile. I sent it in, and I thought there’s no way they’re reading it, but to their credit, they’re really out there looking at the culture. That’s a long legacy from William Maxwell all the way back to the founders.
I wrote a piece for them and thought, “Wow, this doesn’t feel like me,” but it’s still my ideas. It was really informative to see how they were cutting for efficacy, because this was early on in 2018. I was writing for them, and I learned a lot working with the editor. It’s like, “Oh, this is what clarity can look like.” So it was important to learn, but it did feel like a house style, which is also a brand. They have readers who expect that. You don’t want a diverse cast of voices because it feels like you’re not reading the product. It’s hard to keep that, too. There’s an army of copy editors and style editors that keep that intact.
David (50:31 – 50:48):
Do you feel like poetry is a kind of experimental testing ground for you? We’re talking about pushing the boundaries. Then you have a poem like “Notebook Fragments,” which is a unique form and style. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go experiment in poetry, and then I can bring that into the novel later on.”
Ocean (50:49 – 51:31):
100%. It’s not a coincidence that, particularly in the 19th century, there was no ontological, vocational distinction between poet and novelist. Melville and Whitman wrote both. Dickinson wrote incredible letters. She saw that as similar to some of her styles. The prosody of her letters, particularly the master letters, is the same as some of her poems. Thomas Hardy saw himself primarily as a poet, even though we canonically receive him as a novelist. James Baldwin wrote poems quite seriously. Poetry is a wonderful laboratory for the sentence.
David (51:31 – 51:33):
Great word, that’s so good.
Ocean (51:33 – 54:52):
You don’t have to tend to anything else but language itself. You don’t have to do plot. You don’t have to have a character. And when that obligation is foregone, you then get to focus on transforming the sentence into a kind of elsewhere estrangement.
One of the most daring moments, because my thinking is that in fiction and nonfiction, the sentence in the 20th and 21st century is quite timid. Oftentimes it’s not even the author’s fault; the editor would then kind of force them to it. If you want to get published, go through this process. So it’s a homogenization process. But there’s two places where that doesn’t happen, and it’s poetry and nature writing.
So in nature writing, mimesis would collapse everything because we already know. We already see it. So if you’re just describing a meadow, you say, “Oh, there’s a sunny meadow.” Well, we’ve seen photos of that. We can see it ourselves. Why am I reading someone else telling me what I’ve already seen?
So the power of nature writing, and why it is closest to poetry and poiesis and estrangement, is that, at the foundation, it’s really bringing the subjective view of the writer onto nature, into a kind of synthesis. So when we’re reading really strong nature writing, we’re reading Robert McFarlane, seeing it through the filter of Robert McFarlane, through that sentence. And that’s the delight: “Oh, I never saw a meadow that way.”
One of my favorites, J. A. Baker, does the same thing. Just look at this sentence. He’s describing mud all day.
“The low clouds lay above the marshes, and thin rain drifted in from the sea.” That’s a memetic sentence. You can see that anywhere. “Clean, then mud was deep in the lanes and along the sea wall. Thick ochre mud, like paint, oozing, gluttonous mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh like fungus, octopus mud that clutched and clung and squelched and sucked, stuck, slippery mud, smooth, treacherous as oil mud, stagnant mud, evil mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes. Mud to the bone. On the east coast in winter, above or below the tideline, man walks in water or in mud. There is no dry land. Mud is another element. One comes to love it. To be like a waiting bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide.”
We’re not talking about mud anymore. We’re not talking about trees. So Baker’s interiority has leached because he’s allowed it. The dam has broken, the dam of mimesis has broken, and he’s allowed that interiority to come out. And I will never look at mud the same.
David (54:52 – 54:52):
Right?
Ocean (54:52 – 55:20):
Mud, evil, where no fear can hide. What are we talking about? And of course, we don’t need to know that Baker was chronically ill while writing this book. So a moment like that... If he just kept on the mimetic mode and just said, “Thick ochre mud, oozing, gluttonous mud, octopus mud...”
David (55:21 – 55:26):
So many different kinds of mud. It’s like when you look at a crayon, it has different colors of mud.
Ocean (55:27 – 55:29):
Doesn’t it make you want to laugh? The delight.
David (55:30 – 55:31):
Delight, yeah.
Ocean (55:31 – 55:33):
Of watching an artist discover.
David (55:33 – 56:06):
It’s fun. It’s like the crayons. Crayola has all the different colors of blue. There’s sky blue, marine blue.
What do they do beyond just make you smile? And it’s the smile, yet childlike. And it just opens you up to the majesty, the wonder, the subtlety, the grandeur of this world and fun. It’s like you have it inside of you, but once you get away from the fun, you stop seeing it.
Ocean (56:06 – 57:45):
Right. And sometimes the novel and the nonfiction article has an assignment. The plot is an assignment. The investigative work is an assignment. So it takes over these sort of tangential explorations.
So when nature writing doesn’t have that plotted assignment, you can do something very close to poetry. When you take the assignment out, you get language. But I’m convinced that you can bring this into anything with an assignment.
I think you should write, “I wouldn’t be so mad if CNN wrote, ‘The President ascended Air Force One as the sun set as if beheaded.’” That might be truer to the ethos of where we’re at.
Look at its only friend. You said crayons. Look at what Shklovsky says later on. In one description, for instance, Tolstoy does not say “birch,” but, “a big curly headed tree with a luminously white trunk and branches.” He writes again later. Tolstoy writes in his diary, “Anderson’s fairy tale about the clothes.”
The goal of literature is to make people understand things so that they believe the child. Crazy, right? But there’s so much there because he’s basically saying somewhere along the way we have lost faith in children, in the childlike way, because of language. Definition is the enemy of imagination. The paradox is that we work with material that is defined.
David (57:45 – 57:56):
Well, it’s funny because whenever I use a dictionary, I use a specific one, which is Webster’s 1913 dictionary. It rocks.
Ocean (57:56 – 57:56):
Yeah.
David (57:57 – 58:11):
And one of the things you realize is a really good definition can expand your sense of what a word can be. They have beautiful etymologies and these lush, vivid descriptions. Like, take a word like solitude.
Ocean (58:11 – 58:12):
Yeah.
David (58:12 – 58:48):
Now if you look up solitude on Google, it’ll be like a kind of loneliness. It’s not what solitude is. Solitude is the sense of melancholy, this sort of internal reflection, maybe a little bit of like a hint of sadness or whatever it is.
Yeah, I think so much of modern definition does restrict, but sometimes it can really expand. And I think that’s what’s going on with that mud. It’s the muddy of the mud of this, the mud of that, the mud of this, the mud of that. And all of a sudden by describing mud, you’ve just exploded the sense of possibility in mud.
Ocean (58:48 – 58:51):
Yeah. And that’s why the OED is so important for every writer.
David (58:51 – 58:52):
What’s OED?
Ocean (58:52 – 59:08):
The Oxford English Dictionary. It’s English of etymologies. So you have one definition that said, “Oh, it comes from the French, which means X, Y, Z, which was taken from the Latin, which meant that.” So you’re like, “Oh wow, it’s almost like a family tree of definition.”
David (59:08 – 59:23):
One of my favorite ones is the word “passion.” You hear it and think it means energy, fire, intensity, and excitement. But the word “passion” comes from suffering, like the Passion of the Christ.
Ocean (59:23 – 59:23):
Of the Christ.
David (59:24 – 59:43):
It’s about being almost crucified by the thing you’re giving yourself to. When you think of what you’re passionate about, it doesn’t need to be what you’re excited about. It’s what you’re willing to suffer for. Same word, completely different meanings once you follow the etymology.
Ocean (59:44 – 60:16):
And you can’t unsee it. So I think of poetry as a laboratory. Anything could be a laboratory if you trust that you can return to the assignment. So how do you take that laboratory of poetry or nature writing into a novel? Give yourself permission to have an experimental moment, knowing that you can return. Cormac McCarthy does this really well. He allows wild tangents in metaphor.
David (60:16 – 60:16):
Cormac.
Ocean (60:16 – 62:31):
Yes, Cormac. He comes back and says, “I know I’m going to keep telling the story.”
It’s hard for a young writer to write that way now because editors would call it out. I was lucky because I started as a poet. My editor just passed this week. I was fortunate because I was trying to sell the novel, and I met eleven editors. They all wanted it, but they all had caveats. They were like, “Okay, but this is a very baroque style. Our readers—”
I keep thinking about this one editor who said, “What about the reader in the Midwest?”
I thought, how elitist! What about them? They have a nervous system. They’ve probably read everything you and I have read. What do you mean we have to dumb it down for people in a large part of the country?
It was a wonderful education because I saw how cynical it is. You have that kid playing with crayons, and that’s equivalent to the crayons in writing when they become a writer. Then you get to that final boss who’s saying, “What about people in the Midwest?”
I’m like, have you been there? Why are we talking about them as if they’re remedial?
I was lucky enough to go with someone who saw what I was coming after. Of course, she’s edited Pynchon, Mary Oliver, Ann Godoff. I was lucky, too. There’s a historical background of how I was able to write on my terms.
This is where we get into a phenomenon that the theorist Yuri Lotman calls. He says that all literary works are read on the matrix of two temporal lines: a synchronic reading and a diachronic reading.
David (62:31 – 62:33):
Synchronic and diachronic.
Ocean (62:34 – 62:36):
And it brings us to this phenomenon.
David (62:36 – 62:37):
What do those words mean?
Ocean (62:37 – 63:30):
A synchronic reading is reading in time, in a contemporary space. A diachronic reading is reading a work through time.
For example, let’s use Shakespeare. We don’t have access to a synchronic reading of Shakespeare anymore because Shakespeare’s plays were written for the stage. So a synchronic experience of Shakespeare would have to be going to the Globe Theater, buying a ticket, and then experiencing it that way. That’s watching it unfold. Not as literature as we know it. Literature as we know it didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time.
Lotman says that when we read Shakespeare, we’re reading it diachronically because we’re reading not only just the text, but we’re reading everything written about Shakespeare: the reification, the cultural shift, all the essays, all the thinking, and the canonization. That’s why we tolerate the archaic language, the “thy’s” and the “thou’s.” If you and I wrote “thy” and “thou” earnestly in our next books...
David (63:30 – 63:31):
People would be like, what are you doing?
Ocean (63:31 – 64:42):
Exactly! It’s obnoxious.
When a reader picks up Shakespeare, there’s a diachronic suspension. They understand that there’s a diachronic layering. Whereas you and I would read each other synchronically.
This is really interesting when you think about the publishing industry. A very common thing with mimetic writing, that kind of clean style we’re talking about, is that you read a book that a big magazine tells you at the end of the year is one of the most important books to read. If you’re intellectual and on top of your game, this is what you should do.
Then you read the book and you think, “This is a lovely book, but I feel like I read this before. Didn’t I read this last year? Didn’t the same magazine tell me to read a book similar to this? Didn’t I read a book written in this style when I was in high school five years ago? Why am I reading the same book?”
David (64:42 – 64:44):
So it’s a different book, but it’s the same book.
Ocean (64:44 – 66:39):
It’s the same book. It’s no wonder that readers have this fatigue and mistrust, and that readership is going down. They’re like, “I’m being pumped into the system of false valuation.”
What’s happened is that publishing works synchronically, in seasons. A book is published in the spring season, a fall season, and then it’s collected within the year. That’s a synchronic existence. At the end of the year, you have a similar amount of books.
All these young writers are coming through, and they’re edited. All of their idiosyncrasies, all of their estrangement, all their wonder and enchantment are edited out. They all have the same thing. They feel good, like they’re making progress. Their editor loves it, their agent loves it, and they even get it published. The reviewers love it too. If it’s not offensive, then we just say, “Great, cool.”
Now there are 30 or 40 of them that look like that at the end of the year. Because of the rule of scarcity, only a few of those 30 get picked. They all sound similar because they went through that homogenization process. Not always, sometimes something brilliant comes through.
One or two get picked as the chosen one. Then everyone else is like, “What happened? I was praised all the way up until this point, until the reader comes in.”
The reader does not have a synchronic relationship with time. They have a diachronic relationship. The reader was reading Melville last week, Shakespeare, Baldwin, Annie Dillard. Then they picked up this book at the bookstore. They don’t have that synchronic view. That’s a hallucination. Life doesn’t exist on this sort of catalog. We read books all over the place.
David (66:39 – 66:49):
This reminds me of Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes you’ll see major divergence between the audience score and the critic score.
Ocean (66:49 – 66:49):
Right.
David (66:49 – 66:53):
The critics will rate it, like, 96.
Ocean (66:53 – 66:54):
Yeah.
David (66:54 – 66:55):
And the audience will be like, “No, it’s a 31.”
Ocean (66:55 – 66:56):
Right.
David (66:56 – 67:01):
Or you’ll see the audience rate it as, like, 94, and the critics are, like, 27.
Ocean (67:01 – 67:01):
Yeah.
David (67:01 – 67:13):
I love looking at those movies. Why was there such divergence between the system, the machine, and how they see versus just the people?
Ocean (67:13 – 67:15):
The critic was at Sundance.
David (67:15 – 67:15):
Exactly.
Ocean (67:15 – 67:16):
They were swayed by that.
David (67:17 – 67:21):
They’re trained. They grew up going to bright film school. They go to the Hollywood parties.
Ocean (67:22 – 69:02):
It doesn’t mean that they have better taste. It just means that their taste is manufactured in the synchronic system. Sometimes a critic is just a person, but they have an editor and a brand they’re trying to uphold.
They also have a pattern. They say, “Oh, I praised too many films in March, so I got to be a little tougher now.” They might say they don’t do that, but we all have that kind of subconscious work.
It’s trapped in a synchronic cycle. Lotman brilliantly brings up this idea that literature exists mostly diachronically. The synchronic cycle is only a year. Once the book is published, then the publishing industry moves to the next year.
The next crop goes in, and you’re forgotten. There’s a moment of dismay for that writer who was pushed into the box so young. They wrote in the box, stayed in the box, and published in the box. The critic was like, “All right, it’s in the box. It’s recognizable. It’s fine. Obligatory clap.”
Now it’s out, and the moment of truth is when it lands with the reader. The reader is like, “I read this last year. I swear to God, I read this. What am I? I paid $32. That’s my family’s meal or daycare fees. What am I doing?”
That’s when the moment of truth happens. It’s often too late for a young writer who was forced to conform through the decades. They don’t realize that moment of reckoning until the book is published and the reader says no to it.
David (69:03 – 69:33):
The theme throughout all this is perception, reenchanting the world, and breaking from the invisible chains that are imposed around us. One of the most interesting ideas there is that it’s through benevolence.
If I come to you and say, “Ocean, I’m one of your students, and I want to write and live my life differently. In order to achieve that, what do you tell me?”
Ocean (69:35 – 70:00):
What we often talk about in writing school is writing techniques, metaphors, but one thing that I found is rarely talked about, that’s so essential, is daringness and disobedience.
David (70:01 – 70:02):
What’s the difference?
Ocean (70:03 – 72:04):
Daringness is the willingness to risk it, to make a wager and see what happens. Or, you correct yourself, step back in line, and be praised accordingly. You move on, even if you sound like everybody else. Conformity and innovation are two very incongruent relationships in art making, not just writing. Any artist, I think, can tell you better than I can because I only work in two mediums.
Do you have enough courage, enough fortitude to risk it? Maybe I had that because I was a skater. The idea of skateboarding was that you threw yourself off an eight stair, never expecting to land it. Landing the trick is a miraculous moment of cosmological agreement with gravity, physics, and time. You almost feel chosen when you land a trick like that.
The idea is that failure is not just a prerequisite to success, but part of experiencing life. Sometimes all you do is throw yourself off an eight stair, and all you have is bruises and a broken ankle. There’s not even a payoff, and yet there is a delight in doing it with your friends and seeing your body move through space.
My expectations were so low, where I thought, “I get to write books.” My family came from factories and nail salons. My job is to try things and throw them over my shoulder. Why wouldn’t I try everything? Why wouldn’t I relentlessly throw myself off an eight stair?
David (72:04 – 72:14):
So what I’m hearing from you is basically when you’re writing, you’re just trying all tricks. And then a book, a poem, is a collection of the tricks where somehow, through cosmological agreement, it actually worked.
Ocean (72:14 – 72:22):
Yeah. And being open to the curiosity, one of my favorite poets, Eduardo Corral, compared moss growing to applause.
David (72:22 – 72:24):
To applause. Like clapping.
Ocean (72:24 – 73:00):
Yeah. He says, “Moss grows along the tree, like applause.” This is a very sophisticated simile.
He’s after the nature of applause, which is nebulous, growing quick to moss. By using applause, he actually increases the rate that the moss grows. You see it?
David (73:00 – 73:01):
It rules.
Ocean (73:01 – 74:26):
Moss grows. You can’t even see it grow, but by using applause, he retroactively changes how the moss behaves. So he’s comparing the behavior of the two, rather than the image. That’s a tricky one because if you gave me that assignment, I would forego it. I’d say, “No, thanks. I want to leave that one.”
Eduardo Corral won the Yale Younger for that book for good reason. He’s hunkered down. I asked him how long it took him to write that 45-page book of poetry. Nine years. You can tell. This is a man who’s looked at moss for a long time. He’s looking beyond what it is, beyond its definition.
He’s looking at it beyond applause. He saw the nature essence of applause, harnessed it, and asked it to modify this thing that is stagnant.
You don’t need to know that this is in a poem called “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” that the exuberance of life after such mass death and loss, the thrillingness of the renewal, the lucency of that growth. You don’t need to know that to feel that rejuvenation in that simile.
David (74:27 – 75:03):
Last question. Can you talk about how language and your deepening relationship with it is this tool that gives you might and power and expands your reality, but also how language is limited and contracts what we’re able to see? You’re a citizen of Vietnamese and English, and there are things that you can see through Vietnamese you can’t see in English and vice versa. You have this master command of language, but also this deep sense of the futility of it.
Ocean (75:03 – 75:58):
Yeah, that’s a great question. Being bilingual taught me that all words are stained by things beyond the definition. It’s how they’re used, not the definition. The definition of the word sadness in Vietnamese would be a feeling of sadness, but it’s how it’s used.
Wittgenstein says the meaning of a word is its use, not its definition. Use changes definition. The dictionary has to catch up to us, and that’s really important for students to learn because they often feel intimidated by the dictionary and standardization. They think, “I need to learn the rules to be a real writer.” No, you use it. How you use it is how the dictionary will change. We introduce new words all the time, like “Netflix and chill” or “throwing shade.”
David (75:59 – 76:00):
Literary edging.
Ocean (76:01 – 76:03):
We’ll call Webster, see what happens.
David (76:03 – 76:05):
But word of the year 2026.
Ocean (76:06 – 77:14):
But “edging.” That’s a new word. It’s important to remember that what happens on the margins of society and power is where things are most mobile, most dynamic. It’s often what’s in the margins that changes the culture.
The culture then captures what’s on the margin, commercializes it, brings it into the center, and shoots out a product. Lotman talks about this, too. He says that there’s a concentric circle to how culture works. It engulfs innovation, brings it into the center, and then spits out homogenization. It keeps doing that until things are constantly destroyed.
That goes to the futility of it. What’s the point of all this? It’s important for me to say that language has made my life. I’m here because of it. I’ve been able to materially support my family because of this thing that has no weight. In terms of speech, we can’t even see it.
David (77:14 – 77:15):
How about that?
Ocean (77:15 – 77:36):
Literature and writing doesn’t really save us the way we always wanted it to because it’s still the tool of tyranny. Authoritarian regimes, the first thing they do is capture newspapers and radio.
David (77:36 – 77:37):
stations, change the stories.
Ocean (77:37 – 79:18):
Right, right. So it’s always a ground that we’re tussling with.
Look at Thomas Thistlewood. He was a slaver in Jamaica in the 17th century, and we only know about him because he left detailed diaries of all his crimes. He sexually assaulted and raped his slaves, monstrous acts.
We also know from his diaries that he had one of the largest libraries that mirrored the Enlightenment ideals. He read Chaucer, Milton. He read astronomy and nautical explorations. He wrote poems.
Then you think of the SS officers who ran the gas chambers going home and reading Rilke and listening to Beethoven. What’s all that art for if you can still do something so monstrous, if you can be so inhumane using humanity’s greatest treasures?
I have a skepticism that I’m working within this material, but I don’t have this romantic notion that what I do will do anything beyond what happens, the magic we see on the page.
If it does, great. Sometimes literature does that. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin created the Civil War, according to Lincoln, which freed millions of people. So it happens.
But I don’t wake up counting on that because there are examples on both sides historically.
David (79:19 – 79:29):
Ocean, thank you. You’re invited on the show anytime. I could talk to you for the next 27 million hours, and we still wouldn’t run out of things to talk about.
Ocean (79:29 – 79:33):
Thank you. It’s a pleasure. Thank you for tolerating my rambling.
