Yanyi is a poet.
Yanyi is the author of two poetry collections, Dream of the Divided Field and The Year of Blue Water. He teaches poetry at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and runs the Asian American Literary Archive.
DREAMOFTHEDIVIDEDFIELD
(2022)
…Yanyi is a terrific poet, one who’s written for us a book to read when we wake in the middle of the night and need a voice that is filled with longing, and truth, delight of being, despite all the painful odds.
—Ilya Kaminsky
All my life, I believed I was the cruel one.
I couldn’t say what I believed. I lived it.
THEYEAROFBLUEWATER
(2019)
As its title implies, The Year of Blue Water reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity.
—Carl Phillips
Winner of the 2018 Yale Series
of Younger Poets Competition
& Events
SMS: There’s a dream poem where you deliver a speech on why art matters. Why is it important to continually approach the question without answering it?
Y: When I wrote that poem, I was interested in this idea of endlessness. What would it mean for there to be more and more reasons for us to keep going? I think an answer ends those things. An answer is static. What I really want as an artist, and also as a person, is to continually experience that desire to explore and discover and to relish things in the world.
BOMB Magazine, “Love Is Something We Inherit”
Sequencing Poetry Manuscripts
On Finding Interior Logic
Title TK
On Naming the Work
A Formal Feeling
On Writing How It Feels, Not What It Is
- Poetry Close Readings
- Chapbook Consultations
- Manuscript Consultations
To those who rely on force and control, your art is dangerous. To explore the range of your sentience is to remember that there is something else possible in your life. Something beyond what you are being told, because you have something to tell yourself.
The Reading, "Why Do You Write?"