On a late summer evening,in the small, brightly lit space of Massy Arts Society, David Ly turns everything that seems solid into a fluid, expansive, porous possibility. Having arrived to see the launch of Ly’s 2022 poetry collection, Dream of Me as Water, the crowd of eager listeners also find themselves simultaneously at the 2021 book launch for Mythical Man —during the release of which gathering in-person was unsafe — and additionally feel the anticipation of the release of an upcoming anthology, edited by Ly and Daniel Zomparelli, Queer Nightmares. Time folds, and every poem Ly reads from his collections, whether just published or already widely praised, is, in this moment, new.
A line of books displayed on the table at the back of the room — If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, it was never going to be okay, The Shadow List and Dream of Me as Water — is mirrored at the front of the room, where their respective authors sit in a row. Ly is joined by Adele Barclay, jaye simpson, and Jen Sookfong Lee, each of whom opened the evening with their own introduction and readings. It is an honour to be in the room with such insightful, talented people; to be invited into our own vulnerability and fluid porousness by the generosity of theirs. The four sit in affectionate and easy conversation as they discuss Ly’s career and latest release, and their respect for one another is tangible in each question, answer, and smile. When Ly reads the title of a poem from his new collection, “Godzilla (2014),” he glances with a cheeky grin to where simpson sits behind him. The audience laughs, recognizing the nod to simpson’s poem “godzilla” in it was never going to be okay. In this space, literary bodies, as well as physical ones, lean towards each other to form community.
The synopsis at the back of Dream of Me as Water describes Ly’s latest collection as a reflection on identity: “Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how identity is never a stagnant concept, but instead something that is intangible, fluid, and ever-evolving” (Ly, paratext). Ly invites the room to join him in his exploration of identity, choosing “Seas of Origin” as one of the poems he reads aloud to introduce the collection.
“Maybe it’s natural for him to return / to the three seas where his existence is rooted / from time to time, pulled back to write about / facets of identity while trying to imagine how else / he can be seen, like a freshwater eel instinctually / finding its way to the Sargasso Sea in order to spawn” (Ly 36).
Waves of laughter, snaps, nods and sighs ripple through the audience as identities are recognized and challenged throughout Ly’s reading, opening up or slipping away like the eels. We can see ourselves reflected, uncertain and wavering, in Ly’s poems — We, too, wish we believed in essential oils. We would love to witness the mysterious beauty of the life of a Spinosoraus. We know the emptiness of waking up, even if we do not share dreams
A poetry reading is one of the rare and beautiful spaces where the written and spoken word meet; where the tongue and mouth create language for the ears of listeners until each body in the room is holding poetry. In the Q&A session after Ly’s reading, Sookfong Lee points out the motif of unsettling creatures’ body parts that populate the covers of Ly’s books. The room chuckles, then nods with appreciation as Ly offers that after the intensity of Mythical Man, he welcomed a lighter tone in Dream of Me as Water. In this collection, a human body can instead be a body of water, or an eel within it. There is both discomfort and joy found in these options, and the hosts banter playfully about the creatures that populate Ly’s work.
Stepping for a moment aside from a discussion of all things slippery and scaly, Sookfong Lee asks Ly to respond to a statement regarding the style of the generation of writers to which Ly belongs, and the tensions between work that is accessible and work that is deemed ‘literary.’ In Ly’s response — accompanied by the laughter of the poets alongside him — the current state of ‘CanLit,’ and the fractures that run through a genre born out of nationalism and into elitism, feel less real than the eels, serpents and octopi that entered the room when Ly opened his new book. The works of these writers, who are gathered in a small gallery on a Saturday evening to hold space for poetry, expand beyond the confines of any genre or literary expectation, and reach instead towards something vast and generative that cannot be labelled. If we trust Ly to pull us into a world where we are hugged by tentacles and chased by fish, perhaps we can trust the poets who tease each other as they reflect on the power of metaphor to lead us into a different world; Maybe not necessarily one with octopus hugs, but one nevertheless more livable, open and vast than our current reality of smoky air from burning earth, or fiery oceans which Ly references in a poem about astrology that, as the room fills with laughter, has found its audience.
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Cited: Ly, David. Dream of Me as Water. Palimpsest Press, Windsor, 2022.
