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“The Songs Prove That We Were Here”: Ocean Vuong on Sufjan Stevens ‹ Literary Hub

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When Carrie & Lowell was first released in 2015, I was still in grad school at NYU, trying to finish what would become my first book of poems, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I remember listening to the album while walking around Greenwich Village, down 11th street towards 5th avenue, then back towards 6th via 10th street. I’d circle those blocks while the album emptied from my phone and into my body, trying to solve particular ticks and problems in my writing. I didn’t know then that Sufjan had studied Creative Writing at The New School, on the that very same block fifteen years prior. That we shared this geographical and vocational space touches me deeply—especially since Sufjan’s music has been such a pivotal soundtrack to my life as a writer: his tenderness for all living things expressed through numinous lyrical softness, the songs populated by peoples of all ilk, parents, brothers, lovers, losers, criminals, ghosts, nobodies, the living and the lost. But also the careful and meticulo

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