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Ocean Vuong on why reading poetry is political | PBS NewsHour

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In 2008, grieving for his grandmother in the Hartford, Connecticut, apartment where she helped raise him, Vuong turned to the page. He began to write, preserving the folk songs that she had sung to her neighbors from the Vietnamese rice farm of her youth — communicating news of marriages, sharing love songs and other facts of life. He found himself guessing where she would have put line breaks and other elements of form. Already experimenting with her words, he thought, “Why don’t I give my own hand a try next to hers?” The result was a collaboration across time, his grandmother’s voice beside his own. Growing up, she had taught him how to look at the blank walls in their home as a blank canvas for the imagination. And as Vuong began writing poetry, he learned to leave part of that canvas for the reader. In this way, he subverts the historical erasure of stories like his: of immigration, of queerness, of the aftermath of war. The poems in “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” which came out th

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