Li-Young Lee Interview continued.

Jordan: Your poems speak of your childhood, of fleeing China, and of your family. Your 1995 family odyssey, The Winged Seed, centers on the life of your father, and as Ed Hirsch says on the jacket, "it’s a book of intense ... metaphysical questions ... excavat[ing] and exorcis[ing] the past." You write the secrets and mysteries you lived with for years. It was difficult and painful for your mother to discuss the events of the past and to reveal to you the truth about your lives. What does she think now of your writing your family story for others to read?

Lee: Well, it’s kind of complicated. She thinks I’m somehow fooling around by writing poems, like I should get a real job or something. But I think her attitude has something to do with the fact that she doesn’t speak English. The English speaking world doesn’t have much reality for her. If I say I’m writing our story in English and people who read English will read it, she doesn’t seem to mind. I thought about this years ago because it was as if whatever we did in this country didn’t quite count, that somehow we were not included anyway. Our vote didn’t weigh as much or our opinion didn’t weigh as much and so everything we said or did didn’t really matter because we weren’t natives. I think she is unfazed because she thinks our story couldn’t possibly interest anyone.

Jordan: Do you read your poems to her?

Lee: Once in a while I translate a poem for her. Her idea of what a poet is would be the classic Chinese poet like Laotzu or Li Po. She has such respect for them. When she gets together with her cousins and family, when they all visit, they sit around at a table eating and one of them will start reciting some passage of Laotzu or Li Bai or Wang Wêi or the philosophers. When that person stops reciting in the middle of the poem, the person to the right completes the poem. So they have a really high regard for the writing of China. My mother probably can’t believe that I’m as serious as any of them and so I probably don’t weigh in at all compared to them. Every time I translate a poem of mine to her I’m aware of the fact it’s not Li-Bai; my poems are not Du fu or Su Tong Po. The poems really fall short, I think, so I don’t do it that much. I’m an un-enlightened poet if I’m a poet at all.

Jordan: In China poetry has never been thought of as a career, has it?

Lee: That’s it. My mother looks at me and says, "You’re not enlightened." Those guys were enlightened.

Jordan: Do you write every day?

Lee: I have tried that. I have tried to put something on paper every day. And it doesn’t always work. My habits are so erratic. I love working at the kitchen table. I have a study here, a room, and sometimes I get real organized. I have drafts of poems, a rock on each draft, and I know what’s going on, and within two weeks, it’s a mess. I don’t know what’s what. I am just so undisciplined.

Jordan: Do you think it’s important to have discipline?

Lee: I don’t know. I was raised with discipline in many things. Like my meditation. I thought writing was like that. I feel there is a kind of inner discipline and maybe I always have my ear listening. I’m always asking, Is there a word from the Lord?” Whether I’m washing dishes or taking a walk, I’m always in that asking mode, so I guess that’s its own form of discipline. I think my whole life is writing. I’m just doing it all the time.

Jordan: What decides the form of your poems?

Lee: I think it’s my body. I think I read the poem with my belly and the soles of my feet, and my hips and my arms, my neck. My body encounters the poem. If I read a line, I can almost feel my body say when the next line should happen. It’s a very visceral experience for me. I don’t know if it translates at all into the poem, but I wouldn’t know how else to do it. I don’t have any theories about form or line or anything like that. You know, I’m really unschooled. I’m ashamed to say it, but I am.

Jordan: Have you ever been part of a writing workshop?

Lee: Yes, I have. I spent a year at the University of Arizona and I dropped out. I thought I should go study literature at SUNY Brockport and I dropped out.

Jordan: Tell me about the experience you had in a class reading Wuthering Heights aloud. That had a strong influence on you. It made quite an impression.

Lee: Yes. I had a wonderful teacher there at SUNY Brockport. His name was Peter Marchant. There were about five of us students who met once a week in his office where we read Wuthering Heights. He made shepherds pie for us. We ate the shepherds pie and drank tea and he would begin reading, then pass the book around and each of us would read aloud. It was just an incredible experience. An amazing experience. I think it changed my world. I remember after reading the book, walking out of his office into the night air and feeling as if there was no threshold between my experience of the book and my experience of the world. The book was just so present. Reading it aloud became something I took with me into the world. World was book and book was world. When we finished it, we started reading D.H. Lawrence out loud and it was the same thing.

Jordan: How important is reading out loud?

Lee: I feel as if, when we read we read presences. You know, that’s what we’re reading when we read. I feel that a lot of problems with the state of reading now in the country, maybe in the world, is that people don’t read presences any more. They read for information, or other reasons. They’re not reading the presence. I think that when we read for presences, and aloud, we can tell the kind of presence that is there. Is it a whole presence? Is it a double presence? I’m going to use these words with you, Marie, and we can define them: like the presence of God and the presence of the human in the poem.

Jordan: So then if we read with our whole presence, reading another whole presence can become that icy fusion Dickinson may have been referring to when she said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry?"

Lee: I bet that’s what Dickinson was talking about but I never understood that statement. Let’s put it this way: if I understand her, I would agree because it does feel like the top of your head has been opened and you’re somehow spacious and huge or something. If that’s what she means, yes. But she follows that by saying her whole body goes cold. I disagree with that.

Jordan: Would you enlarge on what you touched upon earlier about the average person in this country having little or no interest in reading poetry? It seems true even among the majority of college and university students, as well. What do you think we can attribute this to?

Lee: I suppose because most people don’t understand the values of silence. I think that poetry imparts, gives to us silences of different shapes, different sizes, different colors -- and I think that people don’t read poetry because they are not aware that silence has a presence. They are used to words, noise, what’s said. I think, for instance, there’s so much in Stevens’ lines, I do not know which to prefer,/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after. There are different forms of silence. Immense silences, tiny silences -- I think that one of the things that allows us to experience those silences-- and it’s a paradox-- is that the medium allowing us to experience the silence is language, or words inside poetry.

Jordan: Can the silences also happen in the white space on the page, the breath between lines?

Lee: Sometimes-- although I think you can write a poem that has a lot of white space, but when you read the poem it may not actually possess silence. I think the silence has to be part integral to the line itself and, of course, to the page. I don’t think you can just take a page of any poetry and just space it differently, give more space on the page to impart silence. There’s something about the combination of words that creates silence, what goes on between the words.

Jordan: You mean the movement between the words, in the words, around the words?

Lee: Yes. And how deep the images mean. I think the deeper they mean, the more silence surrounds them. I know that when I’m reading a great poem, my sense after reading the poem is speechlessness, awe, a deeper sense of my own silence, my own, I-don’t-know, the unsayable.

Jordan: Is that what silence is? The unsayable?

Lee: Yes, the unsayable. The way haiku is meant to impart a kind of silence to us, you know. We read, Such a moon the thief stops in the night to sing and something inside us just nods in a deep, deep way. Like the belly silence. And I have no idea if my own work in this book imparts that. But I know that’s what I’m trying to get to.

Jordan: Do you think reading in this way can be taught?

Lee: I have to believe it can be, or I’d feel as if there was no hope in the world.

Jordan: I’d like to talk more about your poems in your new book. You often use flower and fruit imagery: Am I the flower,/ wide awake inside the falling fruit? (Hurry Toward Beginning) and also the surprise of honey, occurring as the taste of itself within a line of a stanza: Look again/and find yourself changed/ and changing, now the bewildered honey/ fallen into your own hands,/ now the immaculate fruit born of hunger, (Night Mirror) .

Lee: I wish I could insert a little piece of butterscotch in the book. The book should come with a piece of butterscotch.

Jordan: Recurrent images such as rooms, wind, stars, moon, trees, books, clocks and the sea echo through Book of My Nights, each tolling with complexities and paradoxes through the prevailing lyric lullaby rhythms. Are these images part of an organized plan or intended structure?

Lee: No. Just obsession, you know. I almost want to apologize for it. I wish I could have written about other things, but these are just what I was obsessed about at the time. Rooms and wind and stars and clocks and sea... So I didn’t plan anything at all.

Jordan: And roses. Always the roses. You love roses, don’t you?

Lee: I do. I bought roses for Donna, my wife, and they’re on the counter now and dying. They’re the most magnificent things, even when they’re dying. They just get more and more beautiful. The edges are kind of rotting and there is something so gorgeous about them.

Jordan: The image of the rose makes its appearance and moves through each of your books.

Lee: I’m still obsessed with them.

Jordan: The rose, for instance, appears in Book of My Nights in the short Whitmanesque poem, Heir to All, which speaks of endings and beginnings, of going into autumn knowing its name and inheriting the unfurnished rooms inside the roses.

Lee: I think they’re probably the only flower that is just as beautiful as they’re dying.

Jordan: How much and do you rewrite?

Lee: I do rewrite. But revision is a process for me of uncovering. I have the feeling that when I’m writing there is my will and then there is this bigger mysterious will and the two of us are in some sort of negotiation on the page. A lot of times when I revise it’s because my own will is too present in the first draft. I have to uncover the other, the deeper will. Sometimes the Big Mind doesn’t make it the whole way to the page. It gets refracted or distorted.

Jordan: What was it like for you to go through the editing process of Book of My Nights?

Lee: I always have the feeling when I revise it’s like unearthing. Uncovering. I think I was very lucky that my editor, Thom Ward, helped me in that process. He was a very close reader and a good reader, and so I had the feeling that he was trying to move me closer to that presence I want to achieve. Another wonderful reader for me was Anthony Piccione. If there was something wrong with a poem, it wasn’t so much a process of changing this line or moving that word or adding, it was more that the figure of the poem was caked in dirt and he wanted me to do something to remove some more of the dirt to clarify the figure. So it was almost archeological. It’s the kind of revision I’ve always done since studying with him and luckily it’s what my editor, Thom, was moving me through.

Jordan: --A dream editor.

Lee: Yes. He’s very wonderful.

Jordan: How often do you write a poem that fails? You’ve said at times that art is a glorious record of great failure.

Lee: I have claimed my poems to be failures, when in fact, I guess maybe what I should do is every time I write a poem say thank you and move on. We should be grateful when a poem visits us and we complete something.

Marie Jordan is the author of the forthcoming Italian immigrant novel, I Love You Like a Tomato. Her book of poems, Slow Dance on Stilts, was published in June, 2001. She received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and teaches poetry and creative writing at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, CA.