"You can’t make anything if you have nothing to make from" Yanyi on DREAM OF THE DIVIDED FIELD
wust el-balad #6
It is eerily beautiful the way a book of poems can come along at exactly the right moment. In a time when my future is less clear than ever, and not even in a bad way, 2022 has already proven itself to be the year of dreaming. I genuinely can’t remember the last time in my life I have dreamt this consistently, or of such a wide range of subject matter. I’ve been visited by joy, grief, and everything in between these last few months. It’s neither been stressful nor magical. It’s just been. Into this hazy state entered Yanyi’s second book, Dream of the Divided Field, a work itself obsessed with haunting, and our emotional relationship with our past. I had already been shaking with excitement having read a couple of the poems in the lead-up to the book’s release, especially “Tenants” in Granta and the title poem in the New England Review, but having the final manuscript in my hands led me on a journey that, much like my recent wave of dreams, was as electrifying as it was melancholic. I was very lucky to have been able to speak to Yanyi about the book, and the following is a condensed and edited version of my conversation with him.
HAZEM: The book opens up with an epigraph from Czesław Miłosz that reads: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person, / for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will.” Do you feel like writing Dream of the Divided Field has helped you find those invisible guests in your home?
YANYI: In general, I feel like I’m at the threshold of consciousness in my own life when I am writing—and not just poetry. Finding those invisible guests is a matter of writing out whatever it is that is on my mind, the things that need to come out. I’m just constantly surprised by the things that my notebooks tell me about myself, things that I don’t notice until about a year or so later, if not more. It wasn’t so much writing the book that gave me access to them, rather it was more about the practice of writing itself. I think books are just the product—an encapsulation of the thinking and feeling that happens during those moments of discovery. I feel like I’m always discovering who the invisible guests are, and always in the process of learning who or what will influence me next; what will bring me to the next transformation that is coming for me. I feel very much in the flow of—I don’t want to call it “fate,” maybe you can say: the feeling of being present in the movement of where my life is supposed to be.
H: Is there a particular guest whose discovery startled you over the last year or so?
Y: I don’t think any of them actually surprised me. Neither was I startled by the writers whose influence made it into the book. The thing that most surprised me was the granularity of what I was able to be conscious of. I don’t think that in the past I would have allowed myself to write poems that feel obscure and hard to understand—not consumable or digestible in certain ways. I think that is the influence of invisible guests, as well as writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who wrote works that were difficult, or rather seemed difficult to other people, but had their own logic and way of movement that is discernible once you care to understand the work and look deeper. I have also always been grappling with what it means to be a binary trans person. And to at once not feel particularly attached to that binary, and feel attached to my particular expression of masculinity and the freedom to be recognized as such.
H: I resonate deeply with what you said about clarity, or rather the lack of it. Sometimes one has to remind themself that a poem is not an essay. The book plays around a lot with form, particularly the aubade, and even includes an “anti-aubade.” What do you see as the relationship between that form and dreaming?
Y: Man, so much! All the aubades in the book are written about this person after they were not actually there. I was thinking, and responding, to a fantasy of a person that I could no longer access. That’s an aspect of being in any relationship with anyone; there’s an idea you possess of who that person is, and then there is the actual person. That’s what I see as the relationship between the aubade and dreams: we dream of that person when we’re not with them. There’s a level in which a relationship is a co-created hallucination. That is basically what the title is about, this view of a place in which you reside together, but is ultimately divided.
When I say a co-created hallucination, I am also thinking of the ways in which you begin to believe how the other person sees you, and to internalize that about who you are. And vice versa. A relationship is this weird threshold, a space between illusion and reality. That co-creation becomes a part of who you are for that period of time, maybe even afterwards. That balance is, of course, different depending on the power dynamics of the relationship and whatnot. For me, it’s ideally about a particular way of looking at another person—hopefully, in ways that are understandable to them. I think the greatest thing to strive for in a relationship is finding someone who loves you and sees you in a way that allows you to grow and change with them in a reciprocal fashion.
H: The poem “I Had a Vision of a Hill” highlights how sight, vision, imagination, conjuring, and dreaming are all intimately linked throughout the book. What role do these words play in your poetics?
Y: That poem is about an actual vision that I had when I was 13. I wrote it in a very short period of time, and used to think that it needed to be longer. But then I realized the vision was the entire poem. It was one of those poems that I just found in one of my notebooks and thought: “wow, that’s exactly what it is.” When you’re with someone you really love, you have a vision of the future and the life that you can have together. And then part of the breakdown of heartbreak is the complete dissolution of that image, that co-created vision. But there’s also a vision in you.
The hill is one that I actually used to go to all the time where I lived in the suburbs, but obviously here it takes on a metaphorical idea of a place that you and someone you love live together. And the point is not to own that place. I see love rather as being in that place, and cultivating it—building a house there, creating a future out of it. In terms of my larger poetics, that is what I’m trying to figure out next: how to think about the future—how to imagine a future that is co-created. And not just within romantic relationships, but within large collectives of people, which includes platonic partnerships.
H: In “The Cliff,” the speaker refers to a “dream me” and then to a “waking me.” Very often in writing and media, when there is a distinction made between the dreaming and conscious self, it’s often articulated as the “dream self” vs. the “real world self.” Do you consider those to be separate, or are they one and the same for you?
Y: I definitely think that they are part of the same “self.” I think that we live whole lives in our dreams. It’s like when you read a book, and you live a life in imagining and thinking about that book. Most of the time when I dream, I’m just following the dream. It is a place of chance encounter for me. I often very randomly write down very vivid dreams that I have. In my previous book, actually, I wrote a poem called “Dream Diary” that is about the process of me remembering, backwards, a dream that I’d had, and it came from a transcription of that dream that I’d edited and turned into a poem. Dreams are just part of the material of our lives. Some people turn their dreams into paintings, I turn them into poems.
H: The title poem is prefaced by an epigraph from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which reads: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” What role do you see theory as playing in your work?
Y: I would say an ancillary one. Thinking about things theoretically is like a way of looking at a piece of art for me. The best theory, I think, is that which gives me insight into art in way a way that I otherwise would not have been able to get to on my own.
H: In “A friend.” the speaker says: “I don’t want violence to be beautiful. / That I am responsible to what I make beautiful. / But does beauty have anything to do / with violence and what’s made of it?” I personally think about this question a lot. Do you feel like you have any answers since writing that poem?
Y: Initially, I really didn’t want to write that poem. I really didn’t want to interrogate the relationship in question with a “poetic voice.” That relationship was traumatizing in a way that feels very complicated, it made me think about the abuse history in my family, as well as that in queer communities, not to mention general structural issues. So I was very much concerned with this question: “what happens if I stylize these things that happened to me? What kind of message am I bringing into the world by talking about them?” In general, I’m not interested in writing about my trauma in a way that is very easily tokenized. But, of course, it is tokenized no matter how hard I try.
I did come to a very helpful conclusion, though, which is that the story that I need to write for myself and the things that I need to say have nothing to do with the violence of other people’s appropriation. It’s about letting go of control and accepting that your art is something that creates a life of its own. In other words, your art has a private and a public life, and you can’t control the public life. The most you can do is come out in an interview and say something like: “I was not influenced by that person.” But just as we read authors who are dead and try to imagine what they were thinking, or what they wanted, someday that is going to happen to us.
I think my experience and understanding of racism has actually taught me a lot in terms of how to respond to how others look at my work. I always like to remind myself: “racism has nothing to do with me.” Race is a system that makes you their business, and that is the violence of not being given a choice. Something that I carry over from that to writing is the notion that that violence has nothing to do with me.
H: This leads me to a question I had about craft. In “Lengthening, Rites” the speaker says: “In the mornings, / …the poems were there. They didn’t need to be written.” To what degree do you feel like your poems are, in a sense, “already there” as opposed to an idea that needs to be pushed out and given form?
Y: There’s a cycle to writing. Every couple of years, I’ll have an experience where I won’t write, even when I’m experiencing something profound that I want to write down. But the important images in one’s life always come back to haunt you. They were always there. That’s the kind of thing that’s true about life, as well. It’s always there and it’s always happening without you, whether or not you want to be a part of it, whether or not you want to notice it.
I very strongly believe that, as long as I’m paying attention, and as long as I’m writing on that day, whatever it is that I feel like writing about, that the poems will come to me. This is not to mention the fact that whenever I wasn’t writing poems I was reading poems, or otherwise was engaged in the things that felt important to me. Things I’ve experienced look like poems to me come because I’ve read a lot of poems. In general, one cannot write if their house is not in order. I mean the physical house, but also the house of one’s consciousness; their psychic well-being. You can’t make anything if you have nothing to make from. You need nourishment. You need safety. You need structure. We never think about all these things that we need because of the ways that capitalism sets us up to produce, produce, produce.
H: Absolutely. It’s also ironic that we’re pushed to think of writing as a commodity to be produced, sold, published, etc., which is very unhealthy. But there are also ways in which we don’t think about writing as a commodity produced through labor that hurts us. The production of anything needs certain conditions and resources. This also goes for how we think about writing as an activity that requires bodily energy. You’d never tell an athlete to run if they were dehydrated. You shouldn’t be expected to lift something if you have a cramp. But we’re only pushed to think about writing as a commodity in the ways that benefit the people who will then make the most money off of it.
Y: Yeah, and I think our expectations are just too high for ourselves. How do you expect to labor for love if you’ve never been given the time, or the resources, or the space, to learn how to do that? The only thing we’ve ever been taught around labor is laboring for capital, for money, or laboring for others in ways that can be manipulated. I feel like a lot of the work that you have to do as a writer involves learning how to dismantle our ways of understanding what labor is for, and how to do it. That is really difficult because there’s almost no one who’s going to tell you how to do it. You can read as many “writers at work interviews,” but no one’s going to tell you how you in particular are going to do it. Your work is yours.
Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, Granta, and New England Review, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and was most recently poetry editor at Foundry. Currently, he teaches creative writing at large and gives writing advice at The Reading.
Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. You can find his work here and follow him on social media here.
Dream of the Divided Field is out now from Penguin. You can find it here, as well as in local bookstores and libraries across the US.