A few days ago, I finished reading The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi. This collection, the poet’s first, is a well-crafted sequence of meditations situated within the liminal space of transformation itself.
The speaker is, at various points and all at once, an adult concerned with childhood, a trans man indebted to womanhood, a person who aches to be both known and unknown, wholly individual, and yet, not entirely unique. The collection’s recurrent theme of dreams and waking works to further the sense of transience and transcendence therein. If it is true that “the only way out is through,” then this book details that process quite faithfully.
Other dualities on which the book focuses are harder to outline succinctly. The speaker’s life is inextricably connected to art, particularly writing, which seeps into his own work by way of references and quotations. He gleans certain answers from his personal engagement with art while simultaneously questioning it, affectionately, as many of us do. One poem in the collection begins as follows:
Last night, I had a dream about giving a speech on art. I had no notes and felt awash with calm. Why is art necessary?, the first line ran, and nothing was easier to answer because it was so unanswerable.
What fascinates me here is the implication that having no true answer validates, almost encourages, endless consideration. If one could ask why art is necessary (or, harder yet, why it’s beautiful) and receive an indubitable response, how many of us would shrug our shoulders and say “OK, I guess that’s that!” before moving on to fill our time with something less facile?
And what do we do with the non-believers who can answer that question more quickly, who aren’t shaken up by art so soul-entirely that there’s almost no pursuit more worthwhile? “[Rebecca says]” by Yanyi centers this very conundrum.
Here is that poem in its entirety:
Rebecca says, in a lecture for her Intro to Poetry and Poetics class, that poetry is the process of making nothing happen. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s there, nothing’s the matter: What is nothing? Nothing must now be something. And how can nothing become something— who makes it something?
When you say it is nothing, poetry is where that nothing goes. It is insistently useless.
The assertion in “[Rebecca says]” seems to be that poetry is what you make it. Thus, if you think that poetry is nothing, your poems will be filled with nothingness. But nothingness in what sense? Having no content, meaning, or beauty? Is a bad poem a nothing poem? Is an abstract poem nothing? Can a poem full of nothing actually exist?
If we’re thinking of “filling,” or content, it seems appropriate to reference another thing I read recently: Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” In the essay, Sontag calls for a movement away from content, towards form. More specifically, she believes that critical interaction with a piece of art should focus more on its form than on any interpretation of its content.
Sontag expresses her consideration of both abstract/avant-garde painting and ‘modern’ (symbolist/surrealist/modernist) poetry as being inherently against interpretation. These experimental forms avoid being interpreted by either “turning away from content” (as in Ezra Pound and the modernists) or “using a content so blatant, so ‘what it is,’ it, too, ends by being uninterpretable” (Warhol’s Pop Art, and the like).
Many of Yanyi’s poems arguably defy interpretation by being so grounded in lived experience. Other pieces in the collection simply describe daily occurrences: the speaker cooking for himself, or walking with a friend, or waiting twenty minutes for a free tarot reading. To demand more from these poems or burden them with unnecessary interpretation seems, to me, like a way to overlook the enchantment of their earnest brevity.
In the two poems I shared earlier, art (poetry) is both a feature of the form and the content. I think they even ask an almost identical question. “Why is art necessary?” becomes “on what grounds is this artful expression not useless?” And if the person writing poetry sees said poetry as “the process of making nothing happen,” then it is useless, or at least was somewhat intended to be.
Ben Lerner, in his short book The Hatred of Poetry, also addresses the question of poetry’s value. Historical assaults on poetry have characterized it as “somehow… at once powerless and dangerous.” A poet’s labor is viewed as something “both more and less than work,” a sentiment which may explain why poetry mostly fails to spend much time in the limelight of the modern day.
Lerner spends a lot of time explaining and then dismantling the concept of the ideal poem; a poem that is successfully universal, and thus, able to bring everyone together. This is, of course, impossible. As there is no irrefutable reason why art is necessary, there will never be a poem (or song, or painting, or TV show, etc) that is universally understood and/or beloved.
Which brings us right back to where we started. What is the value of poetry?
Is it valuable to be moved emotionally? What of poems that deliberately do not evoke emotion? Is it art for art’s sake, beautiful in and of itself? But isn’t beauty also subjective? Is it a godlike thing, useful only for those who believe in it and pitiful at best in the eyes of those who aren’t similarly faith-bound?
In the piece “[Form gives space],” Yanyi appears to follow Susan Sontag down a path away from content, towards form.
Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear. Poems are a way to ask for what exists, to invite what wants to be visible.
At only four sentences in length, this poem offered me a glance at one of many potential answers to the ever-looming question. More specifically, the second line elucidates a massive truth, which is that art is embodied. “You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it,” but also to determine what you’ll get from it, why you’ll return over and over to its complicated and glorious presence.
By placing this poem in direct conversation with “[Rebecca says],” we can see that even though art may truly be useless, it is also a way of engaging with what already exists. When you say that a poem is nothing, you imbue the poem with the weight of that nothingness, which is, of course, something.
Here is a brief and baffling poem called “Mildred’s Umbrella” by Gertrude Stein:
A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.
In roughly the same amount of words that Yanyi took to chip away at the ceaseless argument over why his (and my, and possibly your) passion matters at all, Gertrude Stein seemingly blathers on about nothing and proves his point exactly.
Despite using the prose poem for vastly different purposes nearly a century apart, Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons make something exist within its form.
Maybe these particular poets and countless others, including myself, have nothing of value to say. Maybe art is a golden seam forced into the cracks of a useless existence, or an ego-filled attempt at crafting something not quite universal, but shiny enough to attain a sliver of finite human attention. To quote an early-2010s one hit wonder that will inhabit the same grave as our literary greats once this planet turns to dust anyway: “I don’t care, I love it!”
Hello, friends. I hope this rather impassioned defense of poetry doubling as an excuse to talk about all the books I’ve read recently was at least somewhat interesting. Really, I don’t expect poetry to be everyone’s thing, but I’m SO glad it’s my thing.
Anyway, I finally have the mental capacity to read and write prolifically again, so uh, expect to see me all up in yr email abt it.
Until next time!
<3 Bee