
Shedding Myth: David Ly’s Mythical Man
Every myth, from cultural storytelling traditions to urban myths and tall tales, is trying to teach us something. Deeply rooted in our human curiosity, myths offer fantastical answers to situations that, when the metaphors are stripped away, we encounter ourselves on a daily basis. Take the fairy tales “The Princess and the Frog” and “Beauty and the Beast,” for example: behind the captivating—yet equally terrifying—possibility of transformation, both stories teach the simple lesson that appearance is deceptive and that people deserve second chances. Yet myths and stories can also be used to villainize. Their ability to push a thesis while shrouding its truth can be turned against marginalized communities to incite fear of the Other. The snake is one: both in Eden and on Medusa’s head, it is depicted as the harbinger of evil. But when its scales grace the cover of David Ly’s debut, Mythical Man, they signal the opposite: the transformation and the shedding of social stereotypes, preconception, and myth, as the collection works to rewrite the very definition of myth-making.
Invoking the hero’s journey, Mythical Man’s speaker traverses the landscape of apps and text messages; physical locations that are specific or at least familiar, like downtown Vancouver or a morning bus commute; as well as more abstract spaces, like the flowing stream of memories that unravels while waiting to meet up with an ex, or the process of mentally unpacking racist remarks like “where are you really from?” Every hero is fighting for something, and the speaker in Mythical Man is in search of love: not only romantic but also empathic love. Yet where the typical hero might face fire-breathing dragons and other mythical monsters, the speaker’s obstacles are at times less visible yet more far-reaching, often manifesting online, in racist comments and DMs. As the hero crosses the terrain of the public and private, they are not only hyper-aware of the way myth both romanticizes and others, but they also fight against it over the course of a transformative journey, for which the four eponymous “Mythical Man” poems serve as a microcosmic representation.
In the first of the four, “Mythical Man (I),” the speaker is hidden in plain sight. “Enveloped in a bodice constructed / from the exoskeletons / of Hercules beetles, / lacquered shells / that catch the light / in every pose,” the speaker glimmers, wrapped up in the epitome of material splendour. “White peacock feathers weaved / into a black updo, / a taxidermic bird-of-paradise / perched atop, talons / curved to pluck / out admiring eyes” remind the reader of the speaker’s audience, of the way that this kind of sharp display can also protect. The inner splendour of the self is tucked inside. As more “Mythical Man” poems appear, the speaker’s self comes farther and farther down the runway and into their own as the creator of myths of manhood and identity. At this point, in “Mythical Man (III),” the speaker turns an eye inward:
“This will only feel
like forever for now.
You are not small.
David, you can be good.
You did try. You do try”
In this quiet moment of tenderness between two forms of the self, the speaker offers themself, and by extension the reader, a more sustainable and promising version of a mythical man: not a “better” self, but a self that already exists.
Going beyond the idea that social media is a variation of narcissism, Ly highlights the constructed nature of content: how much time and effort goes into creating the appearance of ease and, maybe most poignantly, how we have come to expect things from ourselves where no obligations are due, as in the feeling that “Nothing really happens unless there are pics.” The behaviours and ways of seeing that originate from a screen-centric form of engagement, even when one has seemingly unplugged from the digital world, permeate Mythical Man’s reality. The boundary between self and public is complicated, muddling what it means to put oneself “out there,” and the different forms this self can take.
Ly also draws the reader through the ways in which social media’s positive potential—to find romantic connection, for example—has been co-opted and harnessed by racism. In poems like “White +++” and “Another Message Received,” the queer Asian speaker is condensed into an archetype, a caricature, not only by the dating app’s white users but also by its interface. Since its inception, Grindr has allowed users to filter results based on ethnicity—and to then justify their actions as a question of preference and not as clear instances of racism. In “Message Received,” a text reads, “You’re cute but I’m not into Asians. Sorry just a preference.” This projected dehumanization is constant throughout Mythical Man, the impact of which culminates in the words of the speaker to themself:
Your total
number of failed conversations through apps reveals
how quiet the world can be to you
or to that closeted Asian boy
daydreaming into the night for rooftop parties
with endless daiquiris when he finally has enough courage
to come out
Ly’s poems require that we ask who these platforms benefit. The anonymity of an app like Grindr allows users to disappear into the dark expanse of the digital world, leaving the collection’s speaker with both the impact of racism and also sudden silence.
Mythical Man gives us a glimpse into what reality might look like if #nofilter was implemented as an instruction for how we might hold ourselves, without excuses or metaphors to hide behind.
The presence of social media apps—Instagram and Grindr in particular—permeates even at the level of form and language. Most notably, “Post One” and “Post Two”’s structure draws on the process of posting on Instagram—snap, filter, share—and reads like a digital-age exercise in iconography, which, in art history, is the first step of describing the elements in a composition. The speaker’s self-narration—“Focuses on the Versace logo on my sleeve, the frame of his Ray-Bans”—is simultaneously self-satirical and honest (and embarrassingly relatable). “For the No Rice, No Spice Kinda Guy” and “Nice to Meet You”’s structural directness, leaping as if they were text messages sent to the reader, belies the layers of trauma that fill the blank space. Combining the sharp sparseness characteristic of the “Instagram poetry” genre with confessional poetry’s unflinching—yet sometimes emotionally dense—honesty, Mythical Man gives us a glimpse into what reality might look like if #nofilter was implemented as an instruction for how we might hold ourselves, without excuses or metaphors to hide behind.
As rooted as the poems are in the present, Ly also makes room for the mythical-as-fantastical. Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Ly mixes fantasy with technology’s terrifying power to perpetuate and exacerbate the horrors of our reality. This is most evident in the final section of the collection, “Wild Spell,” a refreshing twist on what might be considered the ‘conventionally whimsical,’ a poetic landscape somewhere between the waking world and the dream world, where “a serpent stopped us / as it burst from the sand” and a “man made from parts of the dead” sticks out “his nectar bat tongue.” From the loaded imagery in the opening lines of “Boy”—“Surrounded by white wolves, / I plunge a hand into the alpha’s mouth”—to the modern fairytale-of-seduction that unfolds in “I Just Wanted a Blue Hawaiian,” when the speaker examines a “monster jawline and cerulean-eyed kindness” in a quasi Red Riding Hood fashion before “wonder[ing] if he did it because / he wants to know me / or knows there are millions of me,” Ly’s poems have a playfully bitter bite, pulling the reader along with enticing imagery and wickedly smart wording before settling into bitter sediment once the full-fisted punch of reality makes contact.
Spectatorship and the feeling-turned-reality of being watched play a complex role in Mythical Man. In part, this is because Ly’s poems often feel like they are anticipating someone or something, much like when posting a photo or a dating profile there is the inevitable sense of expectation, a kind of openness associated with the desire to be seen, “to exist as the right you IRL.” The two “Post” poems end with a sea of likes, which, while letting the speaker know they or their post have been seen, also invoke the pervasive question as to whether the likes truly denote any emotional response. In the brilliantly playful and third-wall-breaking “Disco the Pug is Mine,” this question of reality-versus-anticipation takes on a more personal and loaded nature as the speaker seemingly addresses their ex and the reader simultaneously: “You can’t write poems about Disco—just don’t.” Perhaps the most striking instances of spectatorship are the book’s scenes of intimacy and sex. In these ostensibly private moments, the reader is made hyper aware of their own position as a voyeur, as when the speaker thinks, “If cum splatters can be read / like tea leaves yours are / shaped like black beetles,” leaving the reader wondering whether they should look away out of respect for privacy.
Ly’s poems often feel like they are anticipating someone or something, much like when posting a photo or a dating profile there is the inevitable sense of expectation, a kind of openness associated with the desire to be seen, ‘to exist as the right you IRL.’
The archetype of the hero’s journey is characteristically marked by its inevitable victory. Typically, this success entails defeating a villain, rescuing an individual or even an entire kingdom, and returning safely home with the rewards. There is a similar sense of victory in Mythical Man, albeit of a different sort. The speaker’s victory is personal, marked not only by the “Mythical Man” poems but by a shift in tone across the book’s four sections, as the speaker’s introspection acquires an increasingly tender tone towards the self and a waning willingness to simply fall in stride with society’s idea of manhood and queerness. The speaker addresses themself across time, their words a call to trust not only in the self but also in a otherworldly kind of serendipity: “Boy, magic exists — / count one two three, / welcome the tingling underneath your skin / and sit with how uncomfortable it can become.”
Mythical Man adopts the snake as its symbol, drawing on its regenerative biology and association with healing, most famously depicted on the god Mercury’s staff. In this way, the myth of the snake as messenger of evil is yet another narrative Ly’s poems challenge and ultimately usurp. Ly’s collection is a story of transformation, of already present strength that reveals itself with each consecutive poem. As layers are peeled back, shed, and discarded, their translucent remnants are just visible enough that the speaker can see them when they look back. They can see themselves from a distance, a new perspective opening up to them. By digging up and overturning society’s and social media’s myth-making, Ly illuminates just how loaded the very notion of a “mythical man” is, how what has been deemed both ideal and unattainable is also so often a function of society’s systems of oppression. Instead, Ly subverts this kind of myth-making. He pulls his speaker out into the spotlight, and ultimately into themselves, where they sparkle, where they can know love.