NEW LAURELS:

Yi Wei

The New Laurels interview series dives into the poetic minds of our recent Open Competition winners. From thoughts on their writerly influences and habits to the intimate, often complicated process of writing their manuscripts, New Laurels invites readers to get to know the hearts and minds of these poets with an inside look at their upcoming publications.

 

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How did you first get involved in poetry? Was this your first writing genre or something you came to over time? 

When I immigrated to the U.S. at two and a half with my parents, my mom wanted me to read english early so I could learn to speak with others. At three, I was collecting language from road signs, TV dialogue, paper bag snippets, and books. I would read on the carpeted floor and notice what felt like conversations between me and the words on mugs, other peoples’ grocery lists, tattoos, fortune cookies, everything making noise in the world. Any fragment in the world was part of something being said to me, for which I would speak or write back. This was also a way I felt I was always with the world, and never lonely. Though loneliness, as I write in Diary, was also a friend. So I thought and wrote in fragments before I really started reading poetry; fragments and poems offered me the room I wanted to communicate outside the constraints of grammar, sentence structure, logic, and what was “supposed to be.”

I did start with poetry, though I had a brief love affair with fiction that I still reminisce about; I was interested in what writing would be like in thought and language when I was intentionally working on building out a world, laying out the description of those intentions line by line as opposed to image by image. At the time, it felt more rule based, which, again, interested me. I was curious about the sites of puncture and places of relation between genres. My friends and I are praying on the downfall of genre every day.

What are some of your writerly habits (e.g., a daily practice, a preferred beverage at your side, music, writing analog)? 

I had a long period of time where I would write exclusively on my laptop, though I’ve now transitioned to writing largely by hand. I find that the possibility of being able to instantly delete an entire idea or sentence is too desirable on the computer, and often at the cost of what can be when sitting with its incompletion.

Writing is what funnels the music—frenetic or lyrical—from my head to the page, so I usually write in silence in order to better listen. Sometimes I’ll light a candle for my ancestors who came before me and have it burning as I write. Coffee almost always.

Some of my friends and favorite writers work in gloriously regimented and disciplined ways; I admire this deeply. I find that most of my writing currently gets done when the music gets too loud and I need to find a way out. This is the period I’m in now with my words, though I feel my habits will change as I do.

Manuscripts often come together slowly, but sometimes all at once. How did this collection begin for you? Did it take you in unexpected directions? Can you describe how you ordered the poems?

This collection was a fluid project of my early twenties; it’s gathered by attempts, failures, desires, and grief that I wrote through to better understand. I suppose it took me in the unexpected directions that my life did; it still is, as I read, write, and rewrite anew.

I ordered the poems in four sections—“What is was,” “Else where / Before and after,” “Composition of the heart / space,” and “Sacred flame.” As a book named after a passing document of time, Diary seeks to rupture the feeling of time as a linear and isolated event. The first section, “What is was,” punctures the present with pattern—family rituals, ancient stayed violence in the everyday, and the practiced living of the dead. These concerns overlap with other, more difficult questions that visit the speaker in following sections—how are the madonnas of love, truth, and beauty in American poetry complicated by the noisy morass of being alive? How is loss fed and nourished by the privileged carrying—or listening—of our dead? How do language, image, and form fight me on the page as I attempt to accurately map the full ecosystem of a feeling? With “before and after” named as an elsewhere place, the voice becomes the site through which time is shared and experienced. Like a diary, the voice tells the story.

What sort of craft elements and themes can readers expect from your work? Why do you find yourself drawn to these things? 

My manuscript works with epistolary writing, grammatical and imagistic fragmentation, collage revision, footnoting, and formal ruptures in order to challenge the formal expectations of linear clarity in a story. There are also long, single-stanza poems. I’m drawn to more experimental craft devices because I find that they often more effectively communicate the complication or context of a voice or time shift. As previously mentioned, fragmentation is also the form of dialogue I learned first.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection? Why is it your favorite? 

My current favorite poem in this collection is “Tree study.” It’s my favorite because it’s a companion to the movement in my life at the moment.

Was there a particular poem that you struggled with in these pages? What was complicated about it, and what did working through the challenge look like for you? 

There are multiple poems I’m struggling with now, but the first poem in the collection is the one that I’ve been writing for the longest period of time. “Rituals” is the only poem in Diary that took me two full years to write. I wrote the first draft in response to the murder of Christina Yuna Lee in New York City when I was in my first year living there. Throughout that year, I would read it back, add a comma or a line, delete a verb, flip a page of Dictee towards it. The year following, I rewrote the entire poem over the course of six months, one section every month.

While the first draft was more experimental in spacing and feeling, the rewriting attempted to pattern six different concerns that emerged from the first draft and my reflection of it—the dissociation of the self/body in receiving the news (the body as subject of violence), the rhetoric of political response and social response, the hypervisibility and flattening of these crimes in the media, the mountain of intimate disarray and overwhelm when commiserating with loved ones, the experience of continued life after and through the grief, the staccato of the self re-emerging from that private and public grief. Still, I find myself sitting with the poem over and over again because the language, the lyric still feels inadequate. The poem ends in its incompletion, but even this is a door—“still Still / the heat is / unforgiving / and that / is not enough.”

Looking to your future writing, are there forms, subjects, or themes you want to engage in that you haven’t yet? 

I want to engage more deeply with the imaginations of shadow and soil, through which the world is made and light fractures. I’m in a period of disassembly that is investing me further into the constellation of a full terrain around static subjects in this manuscript—the woods, pond, wildlife around a tree; the rocks, stars, spiraling, satellites around smaller luminaries or “light”; the quiet space around a loud block of text.

Who were the poets, artists, or other individuals who most influenced you? Do you find yourself most influenced by a particular form of art? 

When you aren’t writing, how do you fill your days? 

I walk. I try desperately to live.

In a more casual way, I like having something sweet and collaging how I’m feeling to disrupt whatever I’m thinking through or to see it more clearly.

What advice do you have for aspiring poets just starting out? What were you told, or wish you were told, in those early stages? 

Take a breath. Your writing is alive because you are. You can visit it like a mother, a child, a guest, or a devotee. The poems will always tell you something—where to look, where you weren’t looking, where to look now.

Practically, nothing matters more than continuing to write through it all. The grief, the disappointment, the glory of new work or the surprise of new joy. The material structures aroundthe writing you do matter less than the act of writing itself. Your writing is a map by which to mark your struggle alongside the coordinates of all struggle, more important and all-encompassing, ancient struggle of those you write for and with. This, too, is a privilege.

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Yi Wei is a Chinese writer and visual artist unconditionally supportive of Palestinian resistance and liberation. She is invested in the struggle of the Global South.