Sarah Sala Interviews Yanyi at BOMB

Writer Yanyi, author of the debut poetry collection, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019), is interviewed by Sarah Sala for BOMB. "The collection begins with an epigraph from Susan Sontag about literature requiring a lot of voices," says Sala. "How do you envision poetry as a conversation we enter into?" Yanyi's response, and more: 

Y I pulled that quote from Susan Sontag when I was reading through a book of her interviews, backwards. The full epigraph is, “Literature needs a lot of people. It’s enough to honor the project.” So many words in there buzzed at me. The first one that I think about is needs. Also, there’s this idea that art is supposed to be inaccessible to the masses or elevated in a way that ordinary people—or people who aren’t into the arts, but may be extraordinary in other ways—aren’t supposed to engage or appear in it. Why is it that we think artistic processes are about one person in a room alone? That’s a really isolating experience and not my experience of literature. I would not be able to continue on as an artist if I didn’t have people who loved me and cared about me, who were part of my artistic process. 

SS That’s a much healthier picture—it’s enough to write it. 

Y I don’t think we really get that message enough, not just from the literary world, but there’s an American mentality of “You need to work hard to make something of yourself” doubled with an immigrant one of repaying your parents. But that really edges into a place where you can talk yourself down. Of, “well, then there’s nothing I could do or write or be that could amount to something worthy of the history that has come before me.”

Read on at BOMB.