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spacestationtrustfund 's review for:
The Year of Blue Water
by Yanyi
There are places I can't go, like outside my body.I always feel bad when I don't like poetry that's highly personal and intimately revealing. Who am I to judge someone's circumstances as not enough to move me emotionally? But hey, writing poetry is one thing and publishing it is another entirely. I don't care for "prose poetry" in the slightest, and this short collection—only 96 pages, and the foreword by Carl Philips is almost 10 pages long—did not change my opinion. There were a few lines that were real gems, but the majority of what was included in this collection was... well, it wasn't really poetry at all, actually.
For example:
Spoiler
I'm working on being alone today. It's the new year. I start with drunk dreams and then texts to Diana about carrying our homes with us. I think about who I want to write letters to: Joe, Katherine, Mary. It comforts me to write letters: they remind me that there is someone listening on the other end. Likewise, I have received writing that felt made for me. People who are dead want to talk to me. I'm writing; I invite you to my life.
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 am talking to myself. At least, I mean to.
Frank O'Hara's "Morning" is the first poem I consciously memorized. I am writing it in Wei-Ming's letter and I am rereading it this morning very slowly. Seeing the text, I realize that I have memorized some parts incorrectly. At first, I was not reading it; I was reciting it from that place where rhythms and bodies begin to stay with each other. Reciting quickly because I needed to catch the rhythm as it happened to me, so that I would not lose the music of the poem and therefore the poem. Right now, losing the poem as it exists may not be the worst thing. If I really knew it, I could do it at any speed.
I tell my therapist that my anxiety made solitude unbearable, and that I was easing back into being alone by writing letters, mailing things. Over the course of one night, the objects in my apartment came alive. There are of or for the people I am writing to. Pictures I took of them; poems that are inspired by their interests. With joy. When I am writing, I am never alone, I say to someone, who says that that is probably right, that is what we need right now. Agnes Martin says to me that I am the source of my own response. The artist is not responsible for the onlooker. It can't be helped that I have no control of my family. They may leave me; I accept that.
Before tarot, I tell Diana that the worst thing about being trans isn't hating my body: it's not having many feelings about it at all. You can't feel what you've never been interested in. I have never felt well in my body. It's not what I've hated. It's what I haven't known to miss at all.
When I'm potting the plants, I think about this little life in my apartment. I have not been home to help it grow. When the sun is treading lightly over winter months, it is so nice to talk to Robin over the phone. It is so nice to nail my poster back up, to put new lights along the wall. There are more ways I can be here. There are things I have not done.
Definitions are not static. There 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.
Kate has an idea to start a podcast series where she interviews other Kates. In high school, a girl who sent me a heart-shaped necklace also sent me a typewritten note in a copy of An Abundance of Katherines. I try not to count the number of Kates, Katherines, Caitlins in my life for reasons that overlap with why Kate is starting her podcast. This is a note to ask Kate why she is starting her podcast. No one has my name or knows how to pronounce it. I believed this until the first week of college, when I was telling someone exactly this on Low steps and a man started calling for me because I had won a raffle. Another Yanyi appeared several feet above me and I had to change how I saw myself distinctly. I was never unique; I was just made to feel that way.
We didn't have cable. We had a satellite dish that absorbed wavelengths. Despite being labeled aliens, this is the closest we would get to extraterrestrial. The plane rides count, too, thirteen hours at a time, which is also the time difference to China. All we did as aliens, we did because at some point, it is easier to be lonely than to continue working. Opportunity did not do work for us. To be a foreigner was to be a guest in all houses, to not know manners, to not have a past. Every day was a day when we started over. Every day we were so rootless, we had to make the same friends over and over again.
This isn't poetry. It's a series of introspective stream-of-consciousness diary entries. Simply stating something in an appealingly aesthetic way doesn't transform it into poetry. The parts that were actually poetry had clear and genuine talent, but unfortunately those were few and far between.