New England Review

Behind the Byline

Yanyi

Tiana Nobile talks with Yanyi, whose poems “Dream of the Divided Field,” “Detail,” and “Catullus 85” appear in NER 42.3, about fragments, memory, and choosing uncertainty over mastery.

Tiana Nobile: I recently attended your Kundiman class, “Architectures of Resonance,” and really loved what you said about fragments. While many often think about fragments as lacking or incomplete, you said, “The fragment is not threaded to nothing; it’s threaded to the silence that surrounds it.” Could you talk about the role the fragment plays in your new work? I’m also curious to hear what you think about the relationship between the fragment and translation, particularly when translating classic work such as “Catullus 85.”

Yanyi: Oh, to me fragments and silence are everything. One action, one image, one happening is connected to another, and so on and so forth. Fragments are what I have when sense does not serve anymore—when sense is unreachable. A fragment marks what is there. Something to be returned to when you are strong again. So, in grief, a small occurrence in “Detail” dominoes into a larger contemplation of loss. The many fragments in the titular poem of my second book, “Dream of the Divided Field,” create a frame into a story, an experience still difficult to broach. The fragment, whatever it is we manage to translate, can make the frame of a window. Silence contains what the reader sees through it. It’s similar in translation. The original poem comes from an experience, a context, that does not exist anymore. My own translation of “Catullus 85” was the epigraph to this book before the final edit. But I wrote “Catullus 85” without thinking of it—I was just attempting to understand an experience in an untitled draft. It was only in rereading the poem, remembering “hate” and “love” and “why” with Catullus, that I saw the parallels. My own fragment, my own context that doesn’t exist anymore. Something I tried to return to when I was stronger.

TN: I’m interested in your exploration of memory and how it shifts based on the person who holds it. In “Dream of the Divided Field,” you write, “Once you leave someone, the dream becomes divided. / Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.” What would you say is the difference between memory, dream, and reality? Do you think the fragment better serves one or the other?

Y: All three of these things have complex effects on each other, and the fragment is part of each of them. I would say that reality is what happens in the world—the “factual.” Unfortunately, human access to what’s happened is limited by memory, which I learned in an undergraduate neuroscience class is reconstructed every time one recalls something. So in one way it is not that far from dreams that are involuntary reconstructions of not only reality, but the imagined worlds we make while reading, say, a fantasy novel. And then there are dreams that have become inscribed onto reality as the very ways we perceive it—the imagination of white supremacy, for example, which factualizes non-white people as beasts in the split-second before recognition. Or Said’s Orientalism, in which whole systems of knowledge have been created using fragments of others’ symbols, practices, and lives, but ultimately have not very much to do with them. But these imagined facts have and have had consequences in reality.

TN: You’re so right that regardless of what we perceive or imagine, our lives are still impacted by how we experience memory or others’ perceptions of us/their own memory. In “Detail,” you mention this idea of “fact” but you immediately undermine it as “small”: “I’m wiping the glue off an old book, / a fact so small who knows if I would have / told it to you.” Relationships often become defined by a litany of small facts. What can a detail like this reveal about a relationship? 

Y: It reveals both everything and nothing! On the one hand, witnessing a detail is an extraordinary intimacy that a bird’s-eye view could not provide, but without the rest of the painting, the rest of the relationship, it takes on a life of its interpretations. Moreover, a relationship is a constantly changing thing—it exists in the actions and beliefs of those in it. Without everyone, a relationship remembered can only be a detail. So this poem plays with the idea of the detail. What is it—that is, what is left? The book, the act upon it, the impulse to share it, the speaker, the poem itself—they are all details making a life in the after.

TN: You mention details again in “Dream of the Divided Field”: “In a voicemail, you’re walking downhill / to your house, a detail I now know about.” There’s a recurring tension between what is known and not known, the details of the past, one’s memory of it, and how they shift over time. You write, “The dream reminds me: what I see and what I know / are never settled.” How do you reckon with the tension between the before / during / after, particularly when they become so collapsed in the re-telling?

Y: I accept the uncertainty over mastery, I think. And I try to be with what I’m seeing while it’s still in front of me. What I see becomes what I remember, what I remember ebbs into what I know, and what I know changes what I see. Poetry holds what stays for me. I know, for example, that I prefer to love over anything else.

TN: I love the idea of a poem being the container for what stays, for what we hold on to. Do you arrive at the page already knowing where you want to go, or is it more spontaneous—do you arrive through the writing of it? 

Y: Poems like “Detail” come like unannounced guests, but they are only beginnings. Very rarely has a poem come to me in its entirety. The only poem in recent memory that’s come to me whole was “Translation,” which appears toward the end of the book. Usually I have to follow the music which carries a feeling, then somehow put that into words. It’s all chasing after the tip of the tongue. The more tools and language I have, the easier it is. And even then, the poems are sometimes mysterious even to me, until later. Often I live a little more life, and retroactively I understand the poems I have written in the past. Poems that are more intentional,  like “Catullus 85” and “Dream of the Divided Field,” are me thinking through things I cannot know clearly. I think “arrive” is the right word here. That feeling after a long journey. I’m not writing to uncover a truth—I’m writing to be with the change that is already happening to me; change that requires new language to be understood.

TN: Speaking of “living a little more life,” how do you spend your time when you’re not poeming? What is bringing you joy these days?

Y: Well, my partner and I are welcoming a dog home next week. I look forward to responding to letters for my writing advice column, The Reading. I enjoy baking (most recently this Taiwanese Castella Honey Cake). Taylor Swift’s new reissue of Red just came out, so of course I’m spending time with her. And, somewhat counterintuitively, death has been bringing me joy. My grandmother passed away this week. I’m remembering her and appreciating how much my life now resembles the life I had with her when I was young. When I cook or dream of a garden or soak my feet at night, I feel part of a long line of quiet pleasure that she gifted to me. It isn’t very glamorous, but it is meaningful. Often beyond measure. 

Tiana Nobile, a poetry reader for NER, is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean-American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives in Bulbancha, aka New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.

November 2021

New Books from NER Authors

Another month, another busy release schedule for our authors—and just in time for holiday wish lists! Here are eight new books from an accomplished assortment of New England Review poets, essayists, and short story writers.

The New Rivers Press publishes NER author Rosaleen Bertolino’s debut book, The Paper Demon and Other Stories. A collection of twelve stories, The Paper Demon counts among its subjects “runaways, witches, violent children, and shape-changing cats” as the book explores the interior insights, and mysteries, of love, death, family dynamics, and “meanness conscientiously displayed.” The manuscript won the 2019 Many Voices Project Prose competition. Bertolino’s fiction appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 38.3, and has been read at our NER Out Loud event. 

Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press) is the eleventh poetry collection from NER author and poet Marianne Boruch. Written following Boruch’s Fulbright sejour in Australia, the collection thematically engages the poetic ecology of human and environment to explore Pliny the Elder’s perennial question: Is the world finite? Boruch’s poems and short essays have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 42.1 and NER 39.1. 

Inventory of Doubts (Tupelo Press) is the latest collection from NER poet and artist Landon Godfrey. The winning manuscript of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, Inventory of Doubts juxtaposes anthropomorphic subjects in all arrangements with the book’s alphabetized structure. The influences of surrealism are not lost in this book, described as “thrilling” and full of “whimsy,” as Godfrey explores animal and object sentience. Godfrey’s poetry appeared in NER 38.3. 

NER founding editor, author, and poet Sydney Lea releases Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life with Green Writers Press. In this compendium of newspaper columns authored by Lea during his 2011-2015 tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate, Lea explores “how the making of a poet’s art resembles the making of any reader’s life.” Lea’s appearances in NER are numerous; his poetry was most recently included in NER 41.3. 

Author, Best American Poetry editor, and  NER poet David Lehman adds another poetry collection to his list of publications with this fall’s release of The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press). Meditating “on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age,” The Morning Line engages subjects with intelligence, intimacy, and inclusivity. Lehman’s poem “The Red Death” appeared in NER 27.4.

From Askold Melnyczuk comes The Man Who Would Not Bow and Other Stories (Grand Iota), a collection of eight stories spanning the New World and the Old. Melnyczuk’s fifth book, The Man Who Would Not Bow builds upon a subtly linked cast of characters, all grappling with their “angels and demons.” The title story appeared in NER 42.1.

NER author Julia Ridley Smith’s memoir, The Sum of Trifles, is out from the University of Georgia Press this November. Composed through a series of essays, the memoir pulls apart the layers of meaning to the objects her parents left behind. A remembrance and a dive into the material symbols of identity and purpose, The Sum of Trifles explores grief and things in both past and present. Smith’s essay “A Miniature for My Mother” appeared in NER 38.4.

Translator, author, and NER poet Carolyne Wright releases her sixth poetry collection, Masquerade, with Lost Horse Press. Rooted in places—Seattle and pre-Katrina New Orleans—and identities, Masquerade is “a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems” that reflects on finding place in aspiration, passion, and ideals despite the ever-present backdrop of American racism. Wright’s poem “A Reply to Storms in New Orleans” appeared in NER 21.4.

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Dave Griffith & Kyle Peets

Station XI

Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966. Photos by Barnett Newman on WikiArt.

T

his text/sound collaboration between Dave Griffith and Kyle Peets is an excerpt from Days Between Stations, their fourteen-part audio project set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The text reflects on Griffith’s experience viewing for the first time Barnett Newman’s fourteen-painting series Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958–1966). The viewing was not in person but online at Griffith’s dining room table.

The project takes as its inspiration the Stations of the Cross or Way of the Cross, a religious ritual carried out during the Christian season of Lent in which participants memorialize the Passion of Jesus by praying, singing, and processing before special icons depicting his journey to his crucifixion.

While not intended to be explicitly religious, Days Between Stations does borrow the narrative structure and the narrative device of tableaux from the ritual. It also draws on the rich literary tradition of walking as an aid to personal reflection and as a means of exploring the isolation, longing, and grief experienced by many during the pandemic.

The text and accompanying ambient music were composed independently of one another during the pandemic at a distance of over 2,000 miles—Griffith in Indiana and Peets in Oregon. They did not have access to each other’s work during the composition. This was to ensure that any synchronicities would be accidental, though in the sound mixing stage, some musical choices were made to accentuate textual decisions.

An e-book version of the original MoMA exhibition of Newman’s paintings can be viewed here.

Dave Griffith is an essayist and educator and the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in print and online at the Paris Review, the Normal School, the Utne Reader, Killing the Buddha, and Image, among others.

Kyle Peets is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO), as well as various group exhibitions, including Character Profile at Root Division gallery (San Francisco, CA), Art Is Our Last Hope at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, as well as a graduate certificate in book arts from the Iowa Center for the Book.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings.

Behind the Byline

Nicole Cuffy

Malka Daskal talks with Nicole Cuffy, author of “A Delivery” from NER 42.3, about facing the mortality of the people we love, how it feels to be haunted, and relationships that transcend language.

Malka Daskal: In your powerful story “A Delivery,” we are given a glimpse into the delicate and poignant weft that binds a daughter with her aging father. What was the inspiration for these two characters and their relationship with each other?    

NC: Honestly, after going through some seismic life changes, some good and some painful, I started having these vivid and terrifying dreams of my father dying. My own father and I have a close but very jocular relationship, and I remember understanding him as a kind of benevolent force of nature when I was a kid. These dreams were really disturbing to me—I think my subconscious, in the process of grappling with my own mortality (I’d just had a significant birthday as well), was also grappling with that of my parents. I knew I had to get it out somehow. So I just started sketching a little, and this father that was not my father began to take shape. That’s the father in “A Delivery,” who does and does not resemble my own father.

MD: Your characters feel so alive and breathing, it wasn’t until I had read this story for the second time that I realized the narrative is absent of any direct dialogue. What was involved in the decision not to give your characters direct lines of dialogue? Is it intended to reflect their avoidance of candid verbal communication?

NC: I wanted to illustrate both their avoidance of candidness and the wordlessness that exists between them. To a certain extent, with the people we’re closest to, I think we develop this understanding that transcends language. Not that we can read each other’s minds. But I do think that our closest relationships have something of the languageless, or the unspeakable, in them. I really wanted that to come through for this father and daughter. 

MD: Reading your story I felt very much like the daughter looking out on her patio: “When you were sad, looking out there made you sadder, but in a way that was strangely beautiful…” For me, your story is both sad and strangely beautiful. When did you know the story was moving in that direction and what was your process for cultivating that ethos? 

NC: Because this story came from a series of dreams I was having, I wanted the experience of reading it to evoke that feeling of the kind of dream that sticks with you or, in a sense, haunts you. Being haunted is necessarily sad—you carry around remnants, incomplete experiences that won’t let you forget or fully remember the whole. One of the ways in which I tried to add this into the story was through allowing lots of space and lots of silence. 

MD: The daughter speaks of her father being a source of comfort from fears she can’t quite articulate, dark terrors that overwhelm her for “no reason she could explain.” Her fears strike me as all the more real for being idiopathic. How do you decide when to provide concrete explanations for a character’s behavior and when to leave their qualities or motivations fluid? 

NC: I think a lot of us have experienced that kind of idiopathic anxiety, and so when it comes to what I need to spell out and what I don’t, I try to think about how much the reader has in common with my character in that moment. The more my character and the reader have in common, the less exposition I need.  

MD: The shadow of her aging father’s death elicits a new fear, one that has always existed even when unacknowledged, and one he can’t protect her from. To a large extent, the strain she experiences while reckoning with her father’s mortality powers the story forward. How do stories such as your own successfully harness a strong emotion to advance the narrative?

NC: Universality, I think. We often talk/write about our fear of our own deaths, but just as universal is our fear of the deaths of people we love. When we as writers successfully tap into these universal experiences, our stories really become self-sustaining.

MD: Can you tell us more about your choice to divide the story into titled sections? How does the structure affect the reader’s experience?

NC: This speaks to my wanting this to feel a bit like a familiar dream to the reader. I wanted it to be episodic in a sense, so that we get these bite-sized but intense moments just as we so often do in dreams. 

MD: In the final paragraphs of your story, the narrator and her father brave the ocean waves, and a transformation occurs in which the father can once again lift his daughter in his arms and provide the protection and reassurance of a younger, stronger father. At what point in the writing did you decide to give these characters this final redemptive scene? 

NC: It actually was the scene I had been writing toward the whole time. It was the first scene to fully form itself in my head. I knew when I began typing that we were going to end up on that beach, in that almost regressive moment when, due to the water’s buoyancy, her father gets to be young again, and she gets to be supported by him. 

MD: It has been such a pleasure reading your story and learning more about its crafting. What projects are you working on now that we can hope to read in the future?

NC: Thank you! I actually just finished a novel—it’s in its very early stages, but I haven’t reached the point at which I start to hate it yet! And I have a book coming out with One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in spring of 2023, which I’m very excited about. Its current title is All the Beautiful Music, though that may change.

Malka Daskal, a fiction reader for NER, received her master’s degree from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Kind Writers, december Magazine, the Dalhousie Review, and Adelaide and has been anthologized in the Bookends Review’s “Best of 2020.” Her short story “Symbology” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

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