The Vietnamese American author and poet Ocean Vuong compares the role of the poet to that of the sculptor or painter. The poet sculpts from and paints with language, which in poetry is in its most tenable and malleable form, he says.
Vuong is the author of award-winning poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is A Mother, and this year saw the launch of his new novel The Emperor of Gladness, whose language clearly shows his poetic side. He is currently Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics at New York University.
He has previously named poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca and Anne Carson as inspirations when he first started writing.
This evening, Vuong will read from his own poetry as well as that of some of his favorite poets who have inspired him in his own writing. Translator Mathias R. Samuelsen will read Vuong's poems in Norwegian.
