Yanyi's "Detail"

Thoughts on attention and how we share it.

Detail

I’m wiping the glue off an old book,
a fact so small who knows if I would have
told it to you. Afterward, there continue
these accumulations. We woke at this time
and spoke first to each other each day
for three years,
and now what?

I was in love and once illuminated.
Now I am alone. Peddling in plain morning
like a god who walks toward a street of only
birds. Only in their singing do they fly apart
and grow their understanding.

from New England Review (Issue 42.3, 2021)

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I have read and re-read this poem so many times. It is, like so many poems are, something that rewards attention — that offers a multitude of generous doors to walk through, little details and open windows and new ways of seeing.

I just took a break from reading only “big books” this year to sit down with Richard Powers’s relatively new novel, Bewilderment. Sensitive and wide and curious, it’s a book that takes the risk of vulnerably dwelling in the perpetual why of the world — why is it like this, why have we surrendered our imagination, why the loss of everything? I was so struck and enamored by so much of it, especially these moments:

A child’s question was the start of all things.

How would we ever know others? We can’t even know birds.

I’m thinking of that latter moment as I read Yanyi’s poem today, which is a poem that begins with something so small but then becomes expansive and luminous in its truth. I love the way it opens:

I’m wiping the glue off an old book,
a fact so small who knows if I would have
told it to you.

That phrase — “a fact so small” — reminds me of Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” an elegy for Eric Garner that is also a moment of sustained, imaginative attention. In full, it reads:

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Both Yanyi’s poem and Ross Gay’s poem teach me something about the way in which the smallest of details within our lives are what make up our lives. Gay’s poem operates like a microscope that zooms both inward and outward at the same time, illuminating the relationship between specificity and interconnectedness: the more we allow ourselves to consider the small fact of something in its specificity, the more we grow in our capacity for understanding. And the more, perhaps, we learn about the way the world so often intentionally obscures the specific for the benefit of the powerful.

Yanyi’s opening — though seemingly unrelated — also touches on something powerful about the smallness of things. I’m struck by the lines that follow Yanyi’s opening lines:

Afterward, there continue
these accumulations.

What a magnificent way to describe a life. I think I have often associated the word “accumulation” with objects, with things that distract me from a life — with money, with power, with shame. But here, Yanyi offers something simpler. Yanyi offers the sense of a life being an accumulation of small facts, of seemingly little details. And not just that — not just the details! But, again, what we do with them. I think, often, of how our lives are acts of attention. In other words: what we pay attention to is, in part, our life. But again, it’s also what we do with that attention — if we share it, if we don’t, if we realize our acts of attention, if we don’t.

In one of my high school classes, as we prep for the AP exam, we’ve spent the last month close-reading a number of texts — Virginia Woolf’s “Death of the Moth,” parts of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto,” James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers.” As we’ve read them, we’ve focused on rhetorical moves. We’ve tried to zoom in closely and pick out choices each author made: the use of first person plural, moments of figurative language, repetition, asyndeton, polysyndeton (those two have been fun), and more. It’s been a real joy to spend time on the smallest of moments, seemingly insignificant choices — the granular, the overlooked — and talk about what they do, and how they affect the piece as a whole. I tell my students to talk about writing like no one has allowed them to talk about writing before, and we come up with imaginative ways to speak about these moments. It’s like looking through a pinhole to spy on a whole universe.

Each day, I’ve left that class feeling so inspired and renewed, and it’s in part because it’s wildly fun to pay attention to things. To think about smallness. To look back at the overlooked. But it’s even more wildly fun to do such things and then share in the results of that attention with others. This is why I love the opening of Yanyi’s poem. I love the very consideration of sharing. The idea of what we notice and what we share. So often, I find myself beleaguered by the big picture of life. Beleaguered by the future. Beleaguered by questions of money and want and loss. Beleaguered by bureaucracy, which is the attempt to take the bigness of life and organize it into smaller parts that occupy one’s time and labor and force their attention away from potential moments of wonder. I don’t often stop to think about the beauty of small and ordinary things.

So, when this poem begins with a moment so small and ordinary — glue on an old book — I think of the joy that comes when I’ve allowed myself to share such moments with others. Hey, I thought of you while rinsing out an old mug. Hey, you might not believe this, but there was a smidge of dust on my windowsill that looked like you. There was a cloud dangling behind a building that I really wanted to show you. Someone on the train was reading the book you told me to read. I scraped my knee. Remember how often that happened as a kid? I did that thing again, where a pen ran dry, so I kept testing it on the back of my hand. Remember how I used to do that? And I sat next to you? And you thought I was odd, but maybe a little funny? Remember? Remember? Remember?

One sadness of the world is the way that the malaise of life and labor so often reduces our desire to share what seems insignificant. Right now, as I edit this on my phone, I’m commuting back from work on a Saturday. I’m tired and a little bit annoyed. And there are two people dressed exactly the same — huge red overcoat, same sunglasses worn indoors, same black shoes — on the subway, and they are each almost seven feet tall. Seriously. Their heads almost touch the ceiling. It is a moment of ordinary magic that is part of the ordinary joy of living in New York. But if I wasn’t writing this, I don’t know if I would share that fact with anyone — if I would commune in that delight with someone. I’m too tired. I just want to go home. How often this happens. How often I feel too overburdened to remember that part of the joy of this life is to seek smallness in the world, and then offer that smallness to someone else.

This propensity toward sharing is why the remainder of Yanyi’s first stanza is so heartbreaking:

Afterward, there continue
these accumulations. We woke at this time
and spoke first to each other each day
for three years,
and now what?

If life is the accumulation of small acts of paid attention, then love is, perhaps, the sharing of such acts amongst the sharing of so much else. The way that question — and now what? — hangs on its own line is such a profound poetic act of despair. It is a revealing and saddening enactment of how it feels to be left alone in this world of so much accumulation. Loss does not just involve the body. It involves the wholeness of ourselves, the way that each of us, as our own people of attention, give that gift of attention to one another.

The final stanza mourns such a loss:

I was in love and once illuminated.
Now I am alone. Peddling in plain morning
like a god who walks toward a street of only
birds. Only in their singing do they fly apart
and grow their understanding.

That word — illuminated — is such a beautiful way to talk of love. I feel it referring back to the ordinary dailiness of the first stanza — how the simple act of speaking and noticing together, day after day after day, is a kind of illumination. So often, love is described in big terms, ones almost unattainable for their width and breadth. But to be illuminated through dailiness? To be lit up by small noticings? To be brightened, each day, by the ordinary acts of attention and the ordinary way in which such acts are shared? Isn’t that a kind of love? Isn’t that love?

And it’s that same description of love that is echoed in the final two lines of today’s poem. Two lines that truly, I think, astound:

Only in their singing do they fly apart
and grow their understanding.

On a craft level, I love the mental twist that these lines ask the reader to undergo. In the first line, the singing and the flying apart are paralleled. There’s an odd contrast there — a contrast of both the physical and the thematic. As such, the line offers an invitation for the reader to say “Singing? Flying apart? I thought when people sing, they don’t move. I thought when people sing they come together.” I find a great delight in moments like this, when a poem operates like a math problem and a poet places an equal sign between two unlike things. This is the beauty of reimagination — that moment when you realize that 2 can equal 1, that 2 has equaled 1 all along.

Finally, I love the pivot from the initial line to the final line, because it adds one more layer of complexity, where the aforementioned flying apart is thrown in relief against the idea of growing in understanding. How do you grow by flying apart? How do you fly apart by singing? How do you sing, then fly apart, then grow together? How? How? How? These lines alone are absolute testaments to Yanyi’s craft as a poet. It’s like turning the screw a little bit more each word, challenging the reader to rewire their imagination. And then it finally clicks into place. I read these lines and think about the lines that come before. I think about how what we sing about is also what we notice, and how, on a granular level, what we notice is specific to us — is apart from others, and how, to share what we notice is to acknowledge our apart-ness, and how, to acknowledge our apart-ness is also an invitation to grow in understanding of one another. I think of that. And I think, too, of the challenge of love. And the way, sometimes, to sing what you notice is also to fly so far apart that, though you might grow in your understanding, you don’t fly back together.

There’s another poem by Tyree Daye in that same issue of NER, part of which reads:

we could do this for long time   love 
like this   beside our grandmama’s 

watching Bob Ross make birds 
& bushes in her hushed living room 
every summer a craft lesson
no one told us was happening 

Those final two lines feel in such conversation with today’s poem, and with Ross Gay’s poem, and with the very fact of attention. No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a new way of framing, of thinking, of imagining. The delight of reading involves developing an awareness of the way so many people pay attention to this world, and to themselves.

To that end, Yanyi writes a newsletter called “The Reading,” and in a recent post, he talks about that very fundamental question — “Why Do You Write?” He writes:

For 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. Something beyond the world you know, because you have glimpsed, out of the corner of your eye, another world that you can feel.

It seems to me this sentience is all we have. Wake up! it tells me, when I am still and barely breathing, for weeks or years in the same apartment, or in the same cycles of abuse, too amenable to giving up, too easy to overwhelm. When I write, I teach myself what I am still fighting for. It need not be in a war.

To explore the range of your sentience is to remember that there is something else possible in your life. I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe the sanctity of art than this. When you are intentional about your attention, the scope of your attention illuminates more than just objects. It illuminates thoughts, feelings, doubts. And this illumination offers possibility and permission. It says: there is a door here, a window. It says: I know you are scared, but look at what just lit up. It says: you can walk through that door, you can open that window.

The other day, I was running in Central Park at dawn. As I turned on the 102nd street transverse, and looked west across the park, I saw the top of a brick building illuminated in the orange light of morning. The fact of that alone was beautiful. There was a mellowed redness to the brick that seemed to glow, and so much of the world was still in the slightly dark and hazy stage of waking up. I ran along the park’s road and stared up at this little play of light. And then, as I was looking at the building’s brick, a bird flew in between myself and the building. It was a white bird, a gull, and for a brief moment, as it flew in front of the building, it too became illuminated by the dawn’s orange light. It spread its wings and I could see the plume of its stomach, and it was no longer white, but orange. It was as if the morning was a spotlight. As if the sun directed a thin, beautiful filament of dawn across the sky, and as if the bird flew through it the way a person stands in front of a movie projector and becomes, for a time, the movie itself. It was so brief, this bird-turning-into-dawn-moment, and so beautiful. And it was beautiful, also, because it was brief. And I just wanted to share that with you.