RLU: This project is really just for fun and just to connect with people. I honestly don't know who's reading this website, if anyone. Given this (small) scope, I hope it doesn’t feel like you have to sound a certain way or arrive in a certain way.


Yanyi: The funny thing about interviews is that every time I get asked a similar question that I've been asked before, I always answer it in a way that I am not expecting. So I look forward to the surprise of that. Also someone is reading this. The kind of person who wants to think and read about queer aesthetics with poets is a very particular kind of person and they are going to seek this out. That's who this is for. That may be an unknown person or past you.


RLU: Yes. As you were talking I was thinking: this is for me two years ago when I started being curious about all of this.


Yanyi: That is non-hierarchical, actually, but highly individualistic because this wouldn't exist if you weren't doing it. Maybe someone else would do it, but you were looking for it. 


RLU: That feels like a great place to start. I've written these questions down and I’m going to read them as I've written them, but I only say that to communicate that I don't talk like this. Usually, I write like this, but I don't talk in this way. 


I wanted to talk about trans as a prefix, meaning ‘across,’ ‘beyond,’ and/or ‘through.’ Trans is woven through both of your collections and has also emerged in interviews. Trans as an experience of gender, an experience of someone who immigrated to the U.S., and, as you said in one interview, the negotiation of leaving one life for another. Your words helped to bring some point of recognition to the surface for me: that a departure from ourselves is required in order to become ourselves, a definition of which (the self, slippage from the self) is far more various than how we are encouraged to comport ourselves to so-called “identities.” In thinking about movement, I wanted to ask, who are you now and what does your voice sound like in this present moment?


Yanyi: I'm going to answer this question sideways because what you've asked is very rich. Also, thank you for being that particular person who read and watched all the interviews—you are precisely the person who I was just talking about, which is kind of funny.


I have always been someone who is in search of transformation. Actually, there have been transformations in my life that have been very much unwanted or unsolicited, but I'm kind of coming into a deeper understanding of myself as a poet. I've been working a lot in prose over the past several years and trying to understand what my voice is now. To me, the culmination of a collection is a crystallization of a particular voice, of a particular mode of expressing one version of myself. It's like a corpse flower: it blooms once and then it falls away. My experience as a writer is that I have to just start all over again. Suddenly, I have this identity crisis of, well, that was all I had to say. 


I’m in this soup where I'm running toward who I think I am. This morning, I was thinking about my sustained attachment to the epiphany in poetry and thinking about how epiphany is, in its own way, a kind of transformation that happens for the reader or the writer or the character in a poem. I realized that throughout all of my work, even though my style, form, theme and topics have changed, there's a throughline I've always been invested in: this idea of epiphany. I've been thinking about that really deeply as my relationship to writing feels very different from what it was in my 20s, where I looked to writing as a possible career for myself. It is a career, obviously, but having gone through the different stages of getting my MFA, publishing books, and now teaching, I'm really asking myself, is that all there is? Have I achieved everything that I wanted to achieve professionally? I'm reconnecting with who I am as a poet on a spiritual level. Specifically, as I've grown my career in the writing industry, I've also been influenced—like we all are—in terms of the themes and topics and postures that I write through. I'm letting all of that die back right now. That’s where I’m landing. I'm rebuilding what it means to sustain a writing practice that feels genuine to me. 


RLU: I'm really drawn to how interested in transformation you are. I wonder if this is also what pulls people to your work, is this gaping generosity towards self and towards other; in believing in the ability of perpetual transformation. We don't have to be the person we were five or ten years ago. We can always begin again. I think this opportunity for becoming runs perpendicular to how we are taught to create a narrative of ourselves. 


Yanyi: I appreciate you seeing that. 


RLU: In the interviews you did after Year of Blue Water, you were asked about the prose poem a lot. People were so curious about form! I think it means that people have a lot of hang ups about what a poem should look like, which I think is just such a fun mirror or footnote or wink to—if we're thinking about queer and trans beingness—conventions of how a body should look. I wanted to pull on a thread from this question of prosity because you said that prose enabled you to write. That it allowed for a kind of freedom of movement to say what you wanted to say directly and to refuse this expectation of what a poem should look like. I’m reminded of something that Eileen Myles has said before, that all poems are about desire. They're about, if a poem is about anything, declaring a statement of want. I wonder how the prose poem sharpened or honed a relationship with your own desires. And if you were able to refuse expectation of what a poem should look like, how that refusal opened a pathway into your second collection? 


Yanyi: The thing that kept blaring out of me was this question that I'm asking myself a lot more nowadays, which is, what is a poem for? Or, what is poetry for? What do I want out of a poem? If we go back to that idea of epiphany or transformation, that is what I am aiming toward. I am aiming toward a construction of reality that we all wear and trying to see between and through what I want in my life. I feel affinity to that Myles quote. 


I’ve been thinking about desire paths, and how these paths show up. More and more creatures going in a certain way in a landscape creates an actual path. I think of prose in a similar way. There are expectations. There are the formal expectations when you write in prose and expectations about who and what it’s for. It’s very business oriented or more about just getting the job done in terms of communication. I’m interested in the question of, what would it mean for me to communicate with myself without those expected hang ups of what I'm going to say? Up until that point, I had been really horrible with trying to have a diary. I would start a diary, and then, I was like, I'm never going to be Virginia Woolf. When I let go of the expectations of what I thought my notes or my diary was supposed to look like and once it became this open space where I could explore ideas, it became a much more fruitful endeavor for me. Or, fruity endeavor. (Ha.)


Something that I'm thinking about, queering, querying, is when your desire path is the same as the main path, you're not going to notice that there isn't a path for you to go in that other direction. One thing about poetry and what it has become for me is this field of possibility that is mine to play in. It can offer me visibility into what my desire leads to and sometimes it tracks into or through that scene that I was talking about, of what lies beyond what I can see or experience right now, or what is part of my experience that is so deep within me that I cannot access it. 


RLU: Go with me here, but listening to you talk about sight and paths, reminds me of how I recently learned that donkeys are excellent trail companions because of their combined binocular and monocular vision—they can see all four feet at once! 


Yanyi: You know, that really reminds me of the Man of La Mancha because Don Quixote has a donkey instead of a horse. This whole story is about seeing oneself as a knight fighting monsters or giants, but actually you're just some guy and you're fighting a windmill. Perhaps there’s an optimistic way of reading this story? What does it mean to look into the world and see not just what it is, but what it could be? 


RLU: Or, what is it to look into the world and only see your fears?


Yanyi: What I love about the queer community and about being queer is that vision of, what can you see about your life that is not offered to you right now? Then, also, the courage to pursue that. Even if the thing that you can see is no. Then to pursue that no until you find out what you want to say yes to. That's also, I think, courageous.


RLU: What you’re saying, in another way, is that desire is courageous. Moving towards your desires is courageous.


Yanyi: But sometimes desire is so scary to have, that no is the only thing that is available to you, or maybe, or I'm not sure.


RLU: Or if you fulfill your desire you're scared by how good it feels. 


Yanyi: Or you’re worried, will I lose it? 


RLU: Don Quixote’s solipsistic windmill battle reminds me of Susan Sontag’s opening line in On Photography, “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” 


I know you’re a fan of Susan Sontag and I wanted to ask about her quote that foregrounds Year of Blue Water. She says, “Literature needs lots of people. It’s enough to honor the project.” In a previous interview you said that the word need caught you. Hopefully, this question feels related to those we've been juggling—of desire and want and now, need—but why do we require literature? Why does literature require us? 


Yanyi: What comes to mind now is this deep understanding that the books themselves do not matter. They are a mode of transporting what is alive in us. Literature is the occasion for us to encounter our own consciousness and our humanity. Literature needs a lot of people because there's so many more understandings or answers to that question of, what does it mean to have life? than any one person can answer. If we think about literature not as the library itself, but as what the library means—which is a lot of people—then it seems obvious to me that that is a need of what literature is.


RLU: Literature also teaches me that the world is unknowable, and that people, as constituent parts of the natural world, are also to varying degrees, unknowable. I think about this in terms of relationship, where there's this digging that happens to get to the center of someone in order to know them. This seems to me a fallacy that we could reveal ourselves so much that we could be known. I think it's just as possible that we reveal ourselves and someone still does not know us. So in that way, I think too, that literature communicates this almost impossible possibility that there’s an un/known way of moving through the world. You've spoken about a lot of this, thinking about the ways that doubt and faith and not-knowing, or to go back to the first question of departure, all of these are about stepping into something that is yet to take shape, or that doesn't necessarily have a peripheral vision. There's a narrowness or a waiting to be opened, if you're thinking about a lens or an aperture. You previously said something really beautiful in an interview about writing against completion. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what your relationship is these days with remaining unknown, maybe as an ethic.


Yanyi: When you were talking about this idea of literature reminding us of what we cannot know, I thought of Umberto Echo's idea of the anti-library. The anti-library is the library of the things that we want to but have not yet read. That in itself is a way of making visible one's possibilities or one's desires. To go more toward your question, writing makes visible to me what I do not yet know and what I want to know, and when I stumble upon what feels like a cache within myself as I'm doing my writing, there is this simultaneous feeling of I'm looking to say the exact thing, but I also don't know what I'm going to say. Being in that space is where I feel most alive and where I feel I'm doing the work that I'm supposed to be doing in this life.


I've spent so much of my life responding to the identities that have been given to me and the practice of being unknown is a profound connection that I maintain with myself and death and what is beyond everything that we are in. It is a political act and statement not to be known given all of the ways that I can be hyper-visible, or have been hyper-visible to speak to my past genders. After having published a couple of books and being on the carousel that is the writing world, I’ve noticed that I strive to maintain a certain level of anonymity because in order for me to really access that place of being a writer for myself, I cannot be a writer in the public way that some other people are able to. I've had to learn how to recede a little bit in one world in order to exist in the next. It's actually quite difficult to be in both at the same time. I'm not just speaking about being a writer publicly or privately. I mean all of the identities and ways in which we must enter and cross thresholds. 


RLU: In talking about dreams, titles and poems and ideas come to you in this plane. You’ve said previously when asked about the names of books, “your body brings you things, you can't go to it.” There's a beautiful sonic quality to this sentence. I wonder, though, about ways we do go toward our bodies. In marking ourselves as queer or trans, we move toward other trans and queer bodies. We do politically and socially abject things with specific others, and those enactments are what designate us as queer subjects. We move toward trans beingness through various modifications to our bodies, the deviant corporeal brings us closer to ourselves. 


Yanyi: I don't disagree with you. I've made changes to my body in this life. I'm thinking about my body in terms of being responsive to it. I have had to learn how to notice desire in it. When I want something it feels physiological. I have this involuntary response. When I first put on a binder before I realized I was trans, I had a total change in my posture. My experience of desire and my body is mediated by the fact that I've spent a lot of my life dissociated from my body because of how dangerous it is to want in a queer body and a trans body, that it's better to not be interested in it.


Over the past several years, I've been becoming more responsive to noticing the world in a more symbolic way in addition to a physical way, but allowing that to become more imbued with the spiritual quality. So, in seeing a deer on the road for instance, having an encounter like that is both sublime (in the mere encounter with the deer) but also, in the Miłosz sense of the word, bears a larger implication in that it reminds me of all the encounters I've had before with deer. Not to mention that it could also be the dead coming to say hello. When I was talking about dreams at that point, I wonder if I was thinking about it in terms of becoming more open to my dreams meaning something. That when the dream version of someone I love who has died comes and shows up in that dream, rather than dismissing it as a dream that I had I could invite myself to think about it as an actual dialog with that person. That's what I mean by “my body brings me things” because in a way, I don't know how to approach my body due to various kinds of trauma in my life. 


RLU: Thank you. I wanted to talk about the Asian American Literary Archive. In discussing the archive previously, you also mentioned a curiosity in how writing came into form and being. You’re curious about history and lineage, not just what happened but the texture of relations and events. Can you talk about building this archive, how you want others to engage with it, and the relations that are constructed via the archive (maybe this is an archive as medium?)


Yanyi: The archive itself came to me on a flight I took in 2023 on my way to the planning session for the Asian American Literature Festival. I was just suddenly getting all these thoughts and ideas. At this point, I had traveled to a bunch of different archives and was beginning to understand that you can just walk into a special collection and bring out a box of someone else's letters and just have at it. Ephemera and records that are not available anywhere and that are not published; the detritus of someone's life that creates the shadow of how they lived. I realized I wanted that experience for the Asian trans/queer writers who I wish I had access to as a younger person. The older I get the more clear it becomes to me that we are who we are waiting for. Not to be cheesy about it, but if you want something to exist, you are going to be the one, probably, to make it exist. 


The process of putting the archive together has very much been about questioning what we think of as an archive. The archive started really as that opportunity of gathering, which is in the classes for Asian American studies that people can take from wherever as long as they can make the time. They're remote classes and they're opportunities for students to learn Asian American history and the ideas that have come out of Asian American studies. It’s also a place of gathering. I am thinking about archives very much in the same way that literature needs a lot of people, history needs a lot of people to make it, to contextualize it, and to analyze it. I don't even know if there's such a thing as being able to learn from history, but I wonder if we are not necessarily learning from history collectively, then what is history for? is kind of what I'm starting to think about like, what is this archive for? 


RLU: In your interview for the Greenlight Bookstore, Sandra Lim asked you about the racial and ethnic (“identity”) marketing or enclosing that is foisted upon writers of color in the literary world. That a reader might pick up (and a publisher might market it this way) your book to “understand the trans Asian American experience. I want to situate this important critique with the Asian American Literary Archive, a space/place/container made by Asian American writers where people can actually go if they want to learn more about Asian American literary traditions and legacies. This might be reaching or not at all on the mark, but I was wondering if the flattening of so-called identity in the (literary) world is related to the archive.


Yanyi: When I conceive of the idea of ‘Asian American,’ I think of it particularly in that mode of coalition building that it came from the political standpoint of when the term was first coined. I'm very much not interested in cementing or canonizing one idea of what it means to be Asian American, rather to express the plurality of the differences within the community and to not be an organization that speaks for everyone. That feels very important to me. The fact that it's an archive without a physical space and that it is a place where we to think about literature not just as writers, but also readers of it. That is really important to me; there being a way for us to move forward our intellectual, intellectual and literary goals, whatever they may be in different parts of the community. 


In terms of the flattening that is marketing, I don't really think I need to say much about, like, how dehumanizing and simplifying that is for anyone. Something else that’s been talked about is the fact that it becomes a door or an entryway for someone who is looking for you to actually find you, who may not be in your immediate community and doesn't know your friend's friend's friend who is your ex girlfriend's ex girlfriend. That is also kind of important. I think I've settled on it as a necessary evil part of this. I also think part of a way that we can move out of that is by supporting and doing the intellectual labor of helping us see what's different about each other and to come to each other's work in a way where we recognize the collective soup that we came out of. 

So much of our experience is of not being seen or of being hyper-visible in a way that exposes us to violence. What does it really mean to see someone? One of the ways that I do that is by really looking at someone's work as much as possible and reading it as well as I can through all of my valences and experiences. Like everyone else, I'm not able to see everything. That's why literature needs a lot of people. That's why you have more than one reader. It takes all of us to see each other. We reflect to others what they can't even see in themselves.