Dream Diary
Review of The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi (USA: Yale University Press, 2019)
by Andy Winter
Winner of 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, Yanyi's The Year of Blue Water quotes Susan Sontag in its epigraph: "Literature needs a lot of people. It's enough to honor the project." Sontag, in her quote, emphasizes that the work of writing is to contribute to the tradition of literature, a conversation between past and present. Yet, who are the writers who contribute to The Year of Blue Water, a work that resists linearity of progression, whose voice is deeply interior in its reflection? The poem "Michelle says" provides an answer about the significance of one person in particular:
Michelle says I have three ‘I’s: a diary I, a lyric I, and an I masquerading as a you. Michelle says the diary I is not the strongest I, the politics of which distracts me for weeks until I come to realize that I want to know who I’ve been talking to. In all instances, I’m talking to myself. At least, I mean to.
The Year of Blue Water celebrates the inner "I," as opposed to the lyric, or universal, "I," and the community of authors and readers which form the ecosystem of literature. The collection's form, part memoir and part dream sequence, is meant to give voice to the inner "I" of the diary. For Yanyi, this move allows him—a transgender Chinese-American man—to speak intimately about the interior experience of his identity and life.
When I first read the epigraph from Susan Sontag, I was reminded of her essay, Notes on ‘Camp’, where she writes: “The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” There is a fugitive quality to Yanyi's prose poems, as if they are the jottings of an identity (or identities) that has remained unvoiced and unheard in the literary world. This quality appears in the private, conversational tone of his poems. In one ("Kate has an idea"), a friend named Kate decides to seek out other people with her name for “camaraderie; a kinship with other Kates.” This superficial community is built on the mere sharing of English names, on reacting to the “same sound.” However, this sense of kinship is not available to the speaker. Unlike Kate, the speaker (implied to be Yanyi) cannot assimilate or simply seek out other Yanyis. In fact, he fully believed that no one shared his name until he met another Yanyi at a raffle. The poem ruefully concludes, “I was never unique; I was just made to feel that way.” While self-directed, the diary-like entry allows the reader to observe the speaker's apparently unmediated thoughts. This tone, characteristic of the collection, is so intimate that oftentimes, it feels as if the reader is reading something that they should not have.
The diary-like nature of the poems allows for familiarity, as Yanyi introduces different people to the reader. In the prose poem, "Doreen and LiZhen are generous," Yanyi bonds with his eponymous friends over their shared identity as Asian-Americans, their shared understanding of how it feels to be a minority in America:
Doreen and LiZhen are generous, they want to know about me. We spend most of the afternoon talking about the things I’ve been thinking and the life that I live in. In fact, I like it. It seems so selfish, to want to be known!
In the fragments, the desire to find a community is straightforward yet profound. It is this everyday world that Yanyi weaves into his poetry. Through this weaving, Yanyi is able to find a sense of community and belonging with his friends, as well as other creative types such as Agnes Martin, Maggie Nelson and Frank O’Hara. Through poetry, he is able to converse with famous artists as if they were his friends. The grids of the painter Agnes Martin especially inspire Yanyi, who allocates two of the collection's prose poems to speaking about her work ("Agnes Martin tells me" and "Agnes Martin works in grids"). For Agnes Martin, the process of “paint-ing” serves as a deconstruction of memories tied to the self. Likewise, Yanyi’s use of tarot as a “finite system” similar to the grids of Agnes Martin signals a “process[ing]” of his trans/queer identity. For Yanyi, the tarot readings reinforce an interrogation of the queer body. It is intriguing how his experience with tarot readings bleed into the form of his prose poetry.
In the entire collection, there are only two conventional lyric poems, "Dream Diary" and "Pomegranates." "Dream Diary" opens the collection, whereas "Pomegranates" appears later to disrupt the sequence of prose poems. As the opening poem, "Dream Diary" is reminiscent of "Scheherazade" by Richard Siken, not just in its use of dream interpretation as a storytelling device, but also in its anaphoric repetitions—“In the dream,” “And on cue,” “Until,” “And the ghosts,”—that underscore the sense of infinitude that accompanies the dreamscape. It is an infinitude carried forth by language itself, by the “backward words” that originate from “people untalking” to Yanyi.
The closing lines of "Dream Diary" also mirror those of Siken's poem. The speaker of "Scheherazade" pleads: "These, our bodies, possessed by light./ Tell me we’ll never get used to it.” In "Dream Diary", the speaker re-describes reality instead: “And the ghosts inside the many rooms illuminate/ the many walls.” In Yanyi's interrogation of dreams, light does not suggest finality or closure. In fact, light only reiterates what is phantasmal, just as shadows are made visible in the light. Perhaps the “ghosts” are people who loved Yanyi. Perhaps they are fragments of a multifaceted self. Perhaps they are both. Whereas "Scheherazade" sets an ominous tone for the rest of Siken’s book Crush, "Dream Diary" situates Yanyi’s collection as an act of journaling that reimagines various timelines of trauma and healing.
The ghosts in the many rooms of “Dream Diary” are many things, but they are also Yanyi’s parents, appearing in the other conventional lyrical poem of the book. “Pomegranates” is also a dream poem, affording an aperture into the poet’s memories of growing up in a Chinese American household:
In my dreams, my parents almost always die, or I do. I
cannot speak
to them clearly. This time my mother and father are in bed,
having been shot in their sleep. They are dying, but they can
talk to me.
In "Pomegranates," we see Yanyi’s parents as the central subject of his dreaming. Their deaths, however imagined, highlight the trauma that permeates Yanyi's relationship with his parents. Even as they are dead or dying, they are able to communicate. This power provides a certain comfort to Yanyi, who in the poem grieves over his family and the loss of his childhood innocence.
What alleviates Yanyi’s grief is the symbolism of the pomegranates. They are the “fruit[s] of [their] lives together.” In Chinese mythology and cuisine, the pomegranate is often associated with unity. Although his relationship with his parents is estranged, perhaps broken irrevocably, Yanyi finds some consolation through the “fruit” that evokes a sense of belonging, a love that is “share[d],” that is communal.
The “fruit”, however, goes beyond the symbolism of heritage and lineage; it branches out into other communities. By virtue of his ethnicity, Yanyi belongs to the same community as his parents. But being trans and queer creates other communities to which his parents do not and cannot belong. Similarly, trans and queer friends inhabit the realm of 'found' family, a claiming of space originally reserved by birthright. Members of a community can belong together and yet remain apart at the same time. If anything, the last few words of "Pomegranates" seem to imply that community itself is fractured and fragmented. This feeling is underscored by the placement of "Pomegranates" amidst a series of prose poetry fragments.
Ultimately, for Yanyi, the act of writing (and reading) as a means of survival is more empowering than tarot or therapy. In “Originally, this was a book”, Yanyi realizes that writing this book has become a (re-)writing of his body. Writing enables him to reclaim what was denied of him. When the tarot cards say, “Trust your body,” they mean trust his writing, in the diary "I," in vulnerability and frankness. This trust in writing allows Yanyi to deconstruct his own gender identity and confront the duality of masculinity and womanhood within him:
For a long time, I was attached to she/her as my pronouns, even when I was non-binary. They didn’t seem as sharp as I wanted it to be. And I like precision. Diana tells me that to be trans or nonbinary is not to be a woman but to be of women. (from "For a long time")
When he discusses pronouns, Yanyi is by necessity discussing the politics of labeling and community. His quest for precision highlights the queer experience of wanting to belong. Just as his self “fills up too many rooms, so much spaces,” Yanyi's journey through the categories of lesbian/trans/non-binary illuminates how chaotic and undefined queerness is. At its crux, queerness is boundless, yet filled with categories. Categories that are rendered moot as they shuffle upon each other like cards in a deck.
In a world that punishes any deviation from the norm, writing is Yanyi's way to interrogate his identity. It is an ambitious process. For the most part, Yanyi’s poetry succeeds at rewriting trauma into a body that is muddled and messy, yet tender and healing. When it comes to discussing family issues and being the child of Chinese immigrants, food is often used to dramatize emotion. In “Louise Glück is surprised,” ramen becomes the centerpiece of all the poet’s memories revolving around early childhood. Although this review fails to find the significance of invoking Louise Glück, ramen is symbolic as a meal that is familiar yet different in its circumstantial taste. It takes on a different flavour at different times of the poet’s life. As the locus of cultural identity, “food becomes endless” (“Suzanne moved to Seattle”) precisely because food can be rewritten. Such is the revolution Yanyi sits in: the boundless form of resistance through writing/rewriting.
At one point, Yanyi quotes Maureen McLane: “in a moment of communal emergency, it is easy to lose ourselves.” He tries to reconcile the concept of the self in relation to the concept of community. Can the self be preserved within the community? “How do we keep each other?” becomes a question. There is an underlying fear that community will subsume the self in its entirety. In the end, Yanyi goes back to writing, to “making notes.” Perhaps, the key has always been about writing our selves into our communities. Yanyi puts it this way in "Definitions are not static":
Definitions are not static. They are where we begin. For what? By whom? Beginning is not an origin. It is the arbitrary place from which we start one life, when that becomes this.
Intertwining various quests and narrative threads, The Year of Blue Water lays out its poems like tarot cards in conversation with one another. Offering a way to explore and engage with queerness, identity, art, mental health, family and the diaspora, these poems ask both poet and reader to trust in the chaos and instability of our selves. In this sense too, literature needs a lot of people and it’s enough to honor the project.
Andy Winter (they/them) is a queer poet and drag artist in Singapore. They can be often found surrounded by cats or tarot cards, thinking of ways to hex the patriarchy. Their works have been published in Cartridge Lit, Cordite Poetry Review, Corvid Queen, Freeze Ray Poetry and other anthologies.