Today’s poem is selected by Yanyi (@yanyiii.com) as part of the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry.
“Who Is a Poet” appeared in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry by J.D. McClatchy, published by Vintage Books, 1996. Shared here with deep gratitude.
The title of the book is set in large white type on the cover of the book. The cover includes two femme-presenting people wearing bright clothing in red, maroon, and pink with bright yellow flowers.
In a way, death, violence and ideas of specific social orders are held, frozen in time, for scrutiny alongside the idea of a good life. The aspirational quality of the music—the dholak, the flute and the tassa-devours the pain, integrating it. Like a palimpsest, the light cheery music consumes some of the blade of the words, and indulges a deep longing for a world that comes into being just beyond reach. In this sense, 'going to Sansur's home' is both physical and unbounded, and 'home' is both a memory and a future, and its location is fixed and ephemeral. It is a place in the heart and mind, and it is right here, under our feet. Part of it dies when the song ends, but some part of it is always right where we are standing.
“Like a palimpsest, the light cheery music consumes some of the blade of the words, and indulges a deep longing for a world that comes into being just beyond reach.”
—Eddie Bruce-Jones, from “The Urn” in I WILL NOT GO (2024).
The book is black with white writing on a wood table.
OSSIA I am neither divine or the garden like it. No difference, what's taken away, and what I've given up. Why come here then, the angel's trumpets scant suggestion of music. A new karaoke that says come hither from a dusk-gold rapeseed disco. But what is promise if not slaughter and yield? An animal's call and response of here I am to take off my work and scatter my divinity to the winds, come to find something like home or nothing like it, lives? Would it be any other garden than a farm?
“But what is promise if not slaughter and yield?”
—Jimin Seo, from OSSIA (2024).
how we choose to interpret life and death is not neutral; interpretation itself is always strategic. Some interpretations are more politically and personally enabling than others. I think of this when I write my dreams down in the morning. When I had this dream I thought, Here is the destroyed world, and here-beyond the threshold—is the luminous world. Simone Weil says that the greatest calamity the human race can experience is the destruction of a city. That's where I was: walking through a destroyed city. But ... the luminous tree!
Wang’s book on a wood table with a mid century orange stain. The cover contains the photo of a young person in a pink dress with a white pattern of medium complexion and dark shoulder-length hair. They are standing next to a sunflower about their height.
“[H]ow we choose to interpret life and death is not neutral; interpretation itself is always strategic.”
—Jackie Wang, from THE SUNFLOWER
CAST A SPELL TO SAVE US FROM THE VOID (2021).
SONG FROM ANOTHER TIME A song from another time survived with me. It follows me wherever I go. It rushes after me. I crumple it up, a small piece of paper, and throw it away. But I peel the paper open and smooth it out whenever I remember one of my dead friends.
The book on a wood table.
A song from another time
survived with me.
—Dunya Mikhaïl, from THE IRAQI NIGHTS (2014), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
#sealeychallenge #womenintranslationmonth
From Yanyi's book, Dream of the Divided Field: bookshop.org/a/862/9780593230992
#poem #books #writing
Transitioned In the corner, the bodega doesn't quite approach me. It hides its face in its awning. The yellow lights awake in the taco place and, forever romantic, on the mayo and slaw strewn on tilapia. Eating, with new reasons, are new mouths. The window views the third floor, which was once my bedroom. Immersed in the view was itself. An arch in the bathroom still remembers my chest. How there was more that’s now lessened. The floors had just been mopped. Those five years taken off.
“Transitioned”
Yanyi, *Dream of the Divided Field” (One World, 2022)
@yanyiii.com
Book people: the following small presses have just lost funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Please consider supporting them!
A Thread.
Thank you to @splitthisrock.bsky.social for including me in The Quarry!
This poem surprised me one morning during a twenty minute writing practice. I hope it moves you.
1953: US orchestrates a coup in Iran, deposes democratically elected prime minister
1953-1979: US supports dictator reinstalled in coup
1980-88: US supports Iraq in war w/Iran
1979-present: US sanctions on Iran
2018: US abandons nuclear treaty with Iran
2025: US bombs Iran
if you're interested in conversational fluency, I've had relative success with pimsleur
My Summer 2023 @warrenwilsonmfa.bsky.social lecture, “A Formal Feeling,” on writing pain with/around Toni Morrison, Linda Gregg, Agha Shahid Ali, and Mary Oliver, just came out this month in APR! I’ve been so glad for the convos that this lecture initiated and am glad to share it more widely.
Quite excited for this! The inaugural term will be January 2026.
I got to talk to poet Jennifer Chang about her complicated and many-stranded new book, An Authentic Life, for Adroit.
"Friendship is, I think, a kind of utopia. You never think it’s going to end, so it’s also a kind of eternity."
theadroitjournal.org/2025/02/17/a...
Screenshot from the newsletter. "I think about all the advice I gave on this newsletter in those two short-long years. I miss giving advice, but I also wonder if there was more advice to give, and perhaps I had answered all the questions that I could answer? Because, after all, whatever your question, my answer is a question that only you can answer. Does it honor life? Do you possess your life enough to know how to honor it? What would it take to do that?"
it does feel nice to write a new newsletter for The Reading! yanyiii.com/the-reading/...
Sometimes, when we are lucky, titles come close at the time a piece is written. Yet, this is usually not the case: to title a piece of art may be just as mysterious a process as creating the piece itself. Explore titling strategies and more in this craft intensive!
Sign-up: https://buff.ly/4hxZNQ2
Congrats!!
In the Middle of This Decade In the middle of this decade, we turned and walked the same direction. I held your hand and didn’t look at the war you thought would kill me. The last good year had a memory of cheeseburgers: I ate them sitting on grass or rock emptying paper of meaning. You walked with me and then, still, we could stop the fighting. I had not yet closed death’s eyes with my lips. Your mouth was not yet familiar.
Non Sequitur The purpose of the poet is to say what is not so different. On these days of death I walk around as after all, I’m still alive. For now I roam in a garden of steps, two feet chiming in paratactic melody, and wait for sun to crown the floor of our room. To get to the dream of the end I garden by night. Pea stalks pale blue by moonlight.
I contributed 6 poems to the Feb 2025 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. A homecoming & perhaps the most poems I've ever published at once. These both speak from 2020. May the new year, new moon, bring you something all good. Ty to editor Erica Hunt.
brooklynrail.org/2025/02/poet...
in my deepest interior moments, I am writing, and when I am lucky enough to find the door in, there is nothing--nothing nothing nothing--that feels more truly myself than to have captured "it:" that which I sought, but had to write to see--
Photo of Muriel Leung and I in front of a large black sign in white letters that says Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, Ravenna, and Seward Park. We are holding up her new novel!
Here I am with @murmurshewrote.bsky.social and our peppermint teas from Friday at Third Place Books Ravenna! It was a pleasure to talk about ghosts, hauntings emotional and actual, and the after-afterlife in her new novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster.
A patch of grass that is mostly frost in the shade and green in the sun.
something about summer in the light and winter in the shade
I want to share my experience today with Google support, trying to get Gemini (their AI/plagiarism machine) turned off in my Google workspace account. That account is where I personally do all my work communication—I am an editor, and most of my work contracts explicitly ban any use of Generative AI
If you're in Seattle this week, I'm looking forward to catching up with Muriel Leung on Friday at Third Place Books Ravenna! We'll be discussing her new novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster: www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/muriel...
