Poet and novelist Yun Wei, whose poems appear in Issue 70.2, corresponds with the artist of the issue’s cover (featured above), Leigh Ann Beavers. In a charming and thought-provoking exchange, the two discuss nature, naming, discipline, and much more.
Naming Nature
Leigh Ann: Your work is so specific in its treatment of natural things. Did your knowledge of flower varieties precede your poetry? Both “It Was Our First Great Sorrow” and “The Best Things in Life” have surprising little jabs of humor, which I love and can hear now in my head.
Yun: Because I’ve found in the past that flower poems can easily veer into cliché territory, this is actually one of the few poems where I feature them. I imagined what a hellscape would look like if it were made of flowers, when beauty turns tragic. There is a certain violence in grief; you feel like your guts have been pulled out or you’ve lost a limb. The flowers I picked for the poem were mainly based on the musicality of their names, as I wanted to use flowers that both look and sound lush and then twist them into violent acts.
I took the virtual tour of your exhibit at Staniar Gallery and I was struck by you saying, “No one will work to save what doesn’t have a name.” I’d love to push that a tad further, and say, “No one will save what they can’t name.” I live in Switzerland, and I’ve grown to be a mountain addict. If it has been more than a few weeks since we’ve gone to the mountains—hiking, trail running, or skiing—I feel parched for nature. I’m ashamed to say that every time I hike, I tell myself I’ll look up the names of flora, but I always forget by the time I’m home, exhausted, eating a frozen pizza in front of the TV. Sometimes, I make up my own names: The Golden Ladies instead of globe flowers, Dandelion Cakes instead of gentian yellow, Velvet Horn for a string of bell-like flowers in the Alps I still haven’t learned the name of.
Learning names does take effort and intention, especially those that are unfamiliar. Through the lens of social justice, I’ve been pushing myself and others to name things for what they are, not avoid certain words just because they’re uncomfortable or awkward. One of the most subversive things one can do is to stay with the discomfort. Unless we call things for what they are–racism, sexism, bigotry–then how can we ever hope to progress?
Do you find that your relationship with plants changes as you learn their names, inside and outside of your work?
Leigh Ann: We’ve been hiking and camping in extreme Southeast Arizona for the last few weeks, within view of the border wall. No people; lots of birds and scrubby oaks; rain every afternoon. We are in our van headed north to Idaho currently, stopping in Tucson. Before I go further, I want to say that I love what you said about flowers degenerating into cliché. It touched me. I despair of this. Trying to find an effective, uncontrived way to talk about biodiversity using specific organisms, who all happen to be distractingly beautiful, is terribly hard.
I absolutely know my relationship to plants, birds, etc. changes when I know their names. Knowing a name—a scientific name—allows me to place something on the spectrum of what I already know. Each flower, each insect, each tree I learn adds to the pot of knowledge I can take from to get to know and recognize another organism. Identification, naming, is troublesome to me in that I think people see it as a form of collection. I don’t. For me it is an organizational tool to distinguish what I know from what I don’t. Naming things isn’t as important as separating them from others, as knowing when you are witnessing something different. I don’t think it matters whether you have the right scientific or common name, just that the thing is named and made separate so you can come to learn others.
Here is an illustration: we’ve seen lizards every day here in the Southwest, many different species. A number of them, ten or so, I can identify at a glance as Sceloporus. I grew up with fence swift lizards in Virginia, which are in the same genus of spiny lizard, or Sceloporus. Their heads, the way they move, their body shape all ring familiar. Carrying that knowledge, making the connection, and connecting the threads is gold to me.
Daily Practice
Yun: I was fascinated to hear that you gave yourself a daily drawing assignment. I work full-time as an economist for a global health organization, so it can feel like I have these disparate pockets of life, and I do feel like I’m not doing enough by only writing in the margins of the week. What do the constraints and obligation of a daily assignment do for you?
Leigh Ann: I’m at work on three drawings; they aren’t there yet, but they ARE fresh, only weeks old, and they are meant to help make decisions for a daily drawing assignment on an upcoming road trip: paper thickness/absorbency/size, media limitations, and most importantly, the parameters of the self-assignment. If I don’t draw every day, I Iose the thread in my home studio, and maybe, maybe, maybe the daily work on this trip will end in some sort of collected visual narrative. For the self-assignment, I am leaning toward a one-page drawing with multiple panels that tell a story (no text, I think) about some observed natural system, micro or macro. I want the drawings to be close, specific, private, inchoate. My drawing concerns are consistent these last few years. Visuals, usually narrative, usually observed, sometimes beautiful but always concerned with natural processes or systems that lie behind the organism or scene or action. The concepts behind the drawing aren’t always decipherable literally. I use them to access the imagery and then organize what comes out.
After a few years of teaching serial imagery and comics, my work has begun to demand panels or separated images to tell a story. The opportunity to draw in panels, small worlds, all on one page, is delicious.
(I just read over this, and the project I am mulling over is clearly a carryover from a large drawing I did during the pandemic: a 30×40-inch graphite drawing of sixteen iPhone images [and commentary] that I have kept on my phone not because of their surface attractiveness but because I want to remember their circumstances, details not necessarily apparent in the image.)
Creating During a Pandemic
Yun: Both my poems published in Shenandoah were written in the first week of the pandemic when we didn’t know this was going to last more than a year. My husband and I created a bunker of my one-bedroom, and there was a feeling of excitement, the other side of the coin of anxiety, like we were living in wartime. There was also a sudden loss of key aspects of our lives, particularly self-expression and human interaction. I found the forced solitude, reflection, and the sharpness of emotions a rich ecosystem for writing poetry.
Maybe the reason there are spots of humor here is that I was yearning for sun, for a bit of joy. Especially with “The Best Things in Life,” I was thinking about how these common sayings are repeated over and over, entirely familiar yet undefinable, unknowable. Those moments that make you feel, on a visceral level, that life is precious are the ones that surprise, the ones that defy rational explanations, and walk the line between absurdity and insight. Now that both our works are out thanks to Shenandoah, it feels like the world has changed so much yet, in some ways, not at all.
Leigh Ann: I am lucky. The pandemic allowed me to be quiet. Not having to make small talk, or talk as much in general, is a relief. The lack of urgency, the sameness, the silence (a slight exaggeration, as I have three boys) set well with me. My studio work thrived from the silence and not having to take the whole world into consideration. Starting it all back up is daunting, but the constraints of a self-assignment are as delicious as ever. Assigning myself a problem relieves me of dealing with limitless possibility. It is a little like making a to-do list: once I make it, then I can sleep. I do break my rules. I can follow them or change them or drop them for another project that presents itself; I just need the carrot to get started. Waiting for inspiration used to be a torment. When I was younger, I was terrified of not having ideas when I entered the studio, but I cannot imagine that now. Projects pile up in my head, get old, and die before I can get to them. There is never a dry time, idea-wise.
A daily studio practice is the best. If you can trick yourself into a regular schedule, it really doesn’t matter how long you give yourself as long as you’re consistent. Fifteen minutes, an hour. It gets you into that zone, and you might stay or might not be able to, but you’ve left a thread. Sort of like a meditation. Both clear my head and sometimes produce a spark.
Conservation, Micro and Macro
Yun: I love how your work encourages ecological reconciliation, making us examine and name the bits of nature on the edges of our homes and communities. We don’t need to fly off to snowy peaks to drink up nature when we can make it a daily practice. Things only seem distant, difficult to attain, and not worth the effort because we’re biased by our present mood. (I am decidedly not a morning person, and every time I’ve woken up early to go to the mountains, I’ve never wanted to go, but I know by the end of the day, I’ll be lifted, chest full.)
You do this incredible zooming in and out of those often-overlooked pieces of nature. Your work seems comprised of fragments but, in the composition, makes me feel like I’m part of something aerial and connected, something that transcends boundaries. The cover of Issue 70.2, whitethorn project: flattened whitethorn bouquet study no. 5, has both colored-in plants and sketches of them in layers. With the finished and unfinished, micro vs. macro: do you see these as contrasts, contradictions, or something else?
Your hedge-making kits made me smile, which struck me as both a commentary on the power of packaging and commercialism as well as the encouragement needed to jump start that can-do spirit. It’s democratic too—anyone could make hedges! I also love Whitethorn (specimen from Coleman’s Well, Co. Clare, Ireland) and how the shape and material of the work is dictated by the plant’s boundaries, not the other way around. In contrast, the use of panels in your newer pieces forces the boundary on the scene; it forces the viewer to focus and observe what has been captured within that square, to imagine the spaces past the border.
Have you read Natalie Diaz? In “From the Desire Field,” she writes:
Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.
It makes me circle back to naming, how transformative it can be, how it shifts the boundaries between words and of the spaces we occupy.
Leigh Ann: Maybe it doesn’t go without saying, so I’ll say it: biodiversity and conservation of earth’s systems matter to me. And as you say, “No one will save what they can’t name.” In the same way learning the names of the people around you shows respect, calling a thing by its name shows respect for each unique organism.
The impetus behind the life-size collage of the whitethorn bush is…well…that I wanted it to be LARGE. It is a simulacrum. The physical fact of its largeness and its intricacy make it so you cannot take it all in at once; you have to stop and intentionally work your way through it visually. This takes time, and my thoughts were that this interval would cause a viewer to consciously experience the fact of this beautiful little tree with all its many, many leaves and buds and flowers. Like maybe my labor, my devotion, will make the viewer honor the piece and perhaps think about the actual organism. The labor and size were intended to overcome this decidedly representational piece being just that—a representation. As I said before, the desire to make and talk about the fate of biodiversity is hard when everything about your subject matter, and I mean everything, is wildly visually beautiful.
Yun: I definitely struggle with this when writing about nature. Even though I live in a place where our weekly mountain hikes fill my photo library with peaks and flowers so beautiful they look Photoshopped, I still haven’t fully figured out how to use them, how to transcend the representational. My poem “Into the Moraine,” which came out in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2021 Issue, is one of the few pieces I’ve located in the mountains, because I wanted to confront the horrors of climate change, make the glacier’s wounds as real as human ones. It’s exactly as you say—balancing the seriousness and urgency of preserving nature with the sheer beauty of it. Some of my favorite writers manage this balancing act between horror and beauty with precision and swiftness, like Jesmyn Ward and Vladimir Nabokov.
What Art Does in Life
Yun: Poetry exists on the edge of meaning and is one of the tools we have to speak the unspeakable, the undefinable, what Adrienne Rich calls “diving into the wreck.” Do you feel that way about visual art?
Leigh Ann: I think this is the hardest question you ask. I used to not take art seriously. I hate writing that. In the past, even as I was making work regularly, I thought art had little impact on anything but other art or anyone but individual viewers. A dead-end exchange. I am not sure why I felt this way—immaturity, probably, or maybe not taking myself seriously enough—or what awakened me, but that misapprehension is gone. Art changes people’s minds. Art of every sort affects the world. Art is human. We are the only organisms that record or mirror or interpret our experiences. Some humans (artists) seem to need to do this, and I am one of them. Maybe, just maybe, my experience will broaden someone’s point of view.
My day job informs my work in that I design drawing problems for students to solve using new media, and I construct classes that address issues I’m concerned with. I know everything affects everything. How does working in economics inform your work, or does your writing affect the way you think about economics?
Yun: I find that my day job in economics brings out my very systematic, analytical side. Sometimes, I worry I’m too organized to be a “real” poet, that I approach my writing and storylines with preconceived limitations. I worry about being conventional, but I’m grateful to have this inside view of a world that doesn’t care about art. I have played around with using political language to write love poems and hate poems; the last poem I wrote for my husband on our anniversary uses macroeconomic concepts. I love refashioning these languages to talk about universal experiences in a different way, sometimes absurdly, other times profoundly, I hope.
The other way around, it’s my writing side that makes me a perfectionist and highly detail-oriented at my job. There’s nothing like obsessing over writing at the line level to teach you to ask, “Is that what I really mean? Am I being precise enough?” There’s also nothing like trying to explain the meaning of love in fewer than two-hundred words to teach you brevity and concision on a PowerPoint slide.
I also love your thought process behind the whitethorn collage, forcing the viewer to work through sections or pieces of the plant, the labor that leads to devotion. In many ways, I think that’s why I love poetry; it makes you examine the minutiae and re-experience the commonplace and hopefully leads to a discovery of a vast and previously unnamable truth.
Leigh Ann: It would seem to me that being a perfectionist would be an absolute boon to making art. Precision is so crucial. Editing is everything. Is editing a drawing the same as editing a prose piece or a poem? I don’t know the answer to this, of course. Drawing, for me, is a process of putting information down and taking information out and changing the way the information is perceived, obfuscating one thing to make something else show up and so on and so on. This last sentence makes me want to get up to draw, because it describes (though clumsily) what I love about the process of drawing: the toil and effort of communicating exactly what you want to communicate, the thrill of finally getting exactly what you want from the tools at hand.
Yes, yes, to your description of poetry making us examine the minutiae; poetry is exactly this to me. Slowing down, sometimes backtracking for more information or surer footing and then, in the end, having to close your eyes to imagine the whole piece. The best visual pieces do this to me as well. A slow-motion bomb of information and you wake to find yourself injured or changed.