IN DEPTH INTERVIEW WITH POET LI-YOUNG LEE
by Marie Jordan

This review was published in The Writer’s Chronical, May/Summer, 2002.

Li-Young Lee’s great grandfather, Yuan Shikai served as China’s first republican president from 1912 to 1916 and tried to establish himself as emperor. Lee’s father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a profoundly religious Christian, was a physician under the Nationalist Chinese during China’s civil war. He was physician to Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Lee’s parents escaped to Indonesia where Li-Young was born in 1957. His father helped found Gamaliel University, a college of religious thought, and was arrested by the Indonesian dictator Sukarno and jailed as a political prisoner. He spent more than a year tortured in prisons and finally escaped with his family to Hong Kong, then to Japan and finally to the United States where he spent the remainder of his life ministering and preaching the Christian faith. Li-Young’s first book of poetry, Rose, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award in l987. The City in Which I Love You was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Other honors include grants from the Illinois Arts Council, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. His first poetry collection in eleven years, Book of My Nights, has just been released by BOA Editions.

Marie Jordan: You call your new collection of poems, Book of My Nights, a book of lullabies. Can you explain how these poems can be understood as lullabies?

Li-Young Lee: I have the feeling that a line of poetry, Marie, is the articulated dying breath. We sing a lullaby to a child because he doesn’t want to go to sleep. He wants to stay up. Maybe the child is afraid of sleep. So we sing a lullaby to the child to tell him it’s okay to go to sleep. In the same way a child doesn’t want to go to sleep I think sometimes we deny our death. We deny it happens.

Jordan: So the child’s sleep is a metaphor for our death?

Lee: That’s the way it feels to me. I was hoping that this book basically says that it’s okay to die, and so the book is kind of singing us into our dying. I don’t want to seem morbid, but it feels to me that the process of dying is actually dying into greater presence. It isn’t lessening, it’s actually more. And we die into greater awe, into greater splendor, into greater terror, into greater presence. I have the feeling that a line of poetry, Marie, is the articulated dying breath.

Jordan: Did you have that theme in mind as you were writing these poems?

Lee: I think became clear to me as I was writing them that that’s what was going on.

Jordan: When you speak of breath, how are breath and poem related?

Lee: When we use our breath to speak, it’s with the exhaled breath. And the exhaled breath is the also the dying breath. We inhale and then we read the poem exhaling, so the poem is our exhaled breath. It’s our dying breath articulated.

Jordan: And the inhale? Do we inhale the poem with our breath?

Lee: Maybe the best way to explain it is, breathing is like a wheel. It isn’t linear. If breathing is a wheel and mind and breath are part of that wheel, maybe the mind is inhaling the poem. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t want to get too esoteric here, but it seems to me a line of poetry is an instance of greater presence as it travels along the page and so in that way, our life, our process of living and dying is enacted in the poem. Since I was brought up practicing the Taoist breathing technique, we were told, and it feels true, that when we inhale, our bones and our muscles become very compacted, full of life, but when we exhale, our bodies become very soft. They become full of something else; something like our ego-life is actually exhaled. In fact, if you practice exhalation really long, you can do a three minute exhalation and feel your body becoming full of that something else. I think that a line of poetry actually enacts that and that’s why I think the prophetic poets use the very long line. I think a poem is actually a yogic process.

Jordan: Theodore Roethke said he wanted poetry to extend consciousness as far as it can. He said he sought to write poems that try in their rhythms to catch the very movement of the mind itself. Do you think in this way, too, as Roethke, in terms, also, of the mind?

Lee: I do. My hope is that the practice of writing poems is the practice of the whole mind, or whole heart. Heart is important. In the Chinese language, the word for mind is the word for heart. It’s shin and so there’s no separation. It’s presence. The poetic presence is the most complete presence we can practice because it is saturated presence.. That’s what it is for me.

Jordan: How do we enter this poetic presence?

Lee: When we’re in poetic presence, it’s something like you told me earlier about the sanctity of art being the same as sweeping the floor. If we’re sweeping the floor or boiling water, we’re completely present. That moment becomes sacred. It becomes religious. It becomes poetic. It’s unfortunate that when we hear the word poetic” we think it means something embroidered or prettified, and I don’t think it means that at all. It means that moment is saturated with meaning and mystery and presence, and that’s what poetry is to me because poetry is the language saturated with meaning. It reflects sacred reality, which is saturated with presence, with God.

Jordan: I see this especially true in Book of My Nights. In your two previous books, Rose and In The City in Which I Love You, there seems to be a sort of underlying wrestling with self and God. Now you seem to be far more intimate with the unknown, with God, and that wrestling, like Jacob’s pulling at the thigh of God, is missing. Did you feel that when writing these poems?

Lee: I felt it in my life. I think because when I was young I deified my parents, so I had projected, or transferred all the god presence onto my parents and world around me. So I think part of my own evolution or development as a person is to try to recognize that presence is in my being, too. God’s presence is in the cells of my body and deep in my subconscious. God’s presence is not only out there in the world in trees and oceans and birds and people, but it’s in me. I guess in these poems, the new ones, maybe I was more successful at that. I was more open to what somebody called, "the invasion from the inside."

Jordan: Your new poems appear at once semiotic and mimetic. Fluid, diffused, disseminated, yet you maintain an analysis of universal relationships. Do you see your poems as beyond language, or metalanguage?

Lee: I see that the thing that obsesses me is always beyond language. And so language is almost an inconvenience. I have this feeling that maybe no matter what kind of art we’re practicing, at some point we become hyper-aware of our medium. If we’re painting it’s paint. If it’s writing it’s the language, and I think at some point if we don’t give that up and somehow become more aware of something beyond the language, then we’re stuck in the land of the medium. We start playing language games, we toy around with the language. On the one hand we can get really better and better at it and on the other hand we can become more playful. But finally, my real obsession is something beyond language, something I can’t express. And I hope that comes through in the poems. Ultimately my obsession is something that’s unspeakable, not easily verbalized.

Jordan: You have said we are all guests in language and once we start speaking our language we bow to that language and at the same time we bend that language to us. What do you mean we bend language to us.

Lee: The beautiful Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, said something like: the difference between prose and poetry is that in prose you use language and in poetry, you yield to language. It feels like there’s this weird dialectic between us and the language. I can’t tell whether we just yield to it or we bend in it, or maybe both. Sometimes it feels like we’re bending the language. Maybe it’s a process of self-making or something. I can’t tell.

Jordan: What, besides language, does the poet have to work with?

Jordan: What do you mean by using inflecting to silence?

Lee: It’s like the way everything seems quieter after you’ve heard a bell rung. Like after church bells ring everything seems quieter. It’s almost as if we’re using language, but the real subject is silence. The silence is like a primal silence. I would hope that after a line or after a stanza that there’s a silence imparted to the reader. That’s my worry.

Jordan: But aren’t there different kinds of silences?

Lee: Yes. Different colors and shades, and I think the deepest possible silence is the silence of God. So I feel a poem ultimately imparts the silence of God. And then that way it’s again disillusioning. It disillusions us in our own small presence in order to reveal the presence of this deeper silence, this pregnant, primal, ancient, and at the same time, contemporary, imminent silence, which is God. I don’t know another form of language where this is possible except in poetry.

Jordan: I see a circular form in your new poems, this going toward and coming back, the life-death tension between poles. You take risks moving deeper to more daring levels of consciousness, including the dream state subconsciousness, but there remains that tension between poles, that day-night, child-parent, light-darkness. You call it "miles of the sea arriv[ing] at a seed" ...

Lee: It feels true when I’m writing the poems, that’s what it feels like.

Jordan: What do you mean by the silence being God?

Lee: Do you know the verse in the Bible that reads, "Be still and know that I am God"?

Jordan: Yes.

Lee: That kind of stillness, that kind of silence. I think a really good poem can impart a stillness which is God, which is also awe. I would say that disillusionment is revelation and revelation is apocalypse and every poem is apocalyptic. On the one hand we have ecliptic things, things that hide and on the other hand we have apocalyptic things, things that reveal. And I think that the writing of poetry is writing that reveals, but it doesn’t just reveal a personal presence, it reveals a transpersonal presence, and the dualities of that presence is silence and stillness and the saturation of presence.

Jordan: Is the appearance of birds in Book of My Nights a metaphor for transcending or taking flight from the temporal?

Lee: No, I think I just love birds.

Jordan: You mean they’re birds, nothing else?

Lee: They’re birds and everything birds can possibly mean to us. Ah, there’s that thing again. To me, everything in the world is saturated with luminosity and meaning, so you could say that birds are just birds, but they’re everything a bird could possibly be in billions of years of evolution. What does a bird mean to a billion year old man? All of that.

Jordan: Of the many recurrent images in this new collection, the most frequent is that of birds.

Lee: I worried about repeating myself. Sometimes I felt I was writing the same poem over and over again.

Jordan: I’m reminded of something Galway Kinnell said: if things and creatures who live on the earth don’t possess mystery, then there isn’t any.

Lee: That’s true!

Jordan: To carry that thought further, Rilke wrote that touching mystery requires loving the creatures that surround us and becoming one with them so they can enter us.

Lee: Is there anything that is not saturated with meaning? Even when I write about my father or mother, they are very much my father and mother, but at the same time they are more. They are whatever father and mother could possibly mean to us.

Jordan: Another of the images you use which I find arresting is that of folded clothes, folded and unfolded laundry compared to life and death, like the folding of nights and days in The City in Which I Love You. In Book of My Nights, you write about lying down on clothes, folded and unfolded, the life and the death.

Lee: I guess if I look, everything that goes on around me is saturated with meaning and mystery that I can’t quiet get my mind around, but I see it and sometimes I can verbalize it or find the verbal equivalent of it or the verbal correspondence in the world, but doing laundry is an instance. I do laundry every day, or I watch my wife do laundry, or my kids, or I watch my mother do it. We’re always folding laundry or doing laundry and it feels to me I come into the presence of an eternal mystery (laughs) -- folding clothes! I don’t know why, but it feels true that the world around me is just saturated with this other presence, this mystery, this splendor and it’s there all the time. It’s just a matter of us cocking our heads the right way and seeing it. So I guess poetic presence is just there all the time, even in laundry.

Jordan: You’ve been likened to Theodore Roethke, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams -- do you feel their voices echo through your own?

Lee: Well, I read them with love and I suppose you can’t help but have them influence you on some level. Isn’t that the way you read, too, Marie? I mean, you can’t help but take them inside you.

Jordan: You’ve also been compared to Rilke, especially with your first book of poems, Rose. Was he an influence in those early poems?

Lee: It’s a funny thing. I hadn’t read Rilke yet when I wrote those poems in Rose.

Jordan: We’re told that the first poets we read will always be with us and always have an indelible influence us. Who were the first poets you read?

Lee: I think it was the poets my parents recited in Chinese. The Chinese poems they recited gave me the sense that they were instances of the small consciousness embedded in, or residing in a larger consciousness. Particularly the T’ang and Sung Dynasty poems they recited. These poems have that echoing feeling of a voice speaking within the context of a larger voice.

Jordan: Were there other influences?

Lee: My father taught us English by reading the King James Bible to us. He was a Christian minister. The consciousness of the Bible stays with me, the words kings asked of the prophets in the Old Testament, "Is there a word from the Lord?" When I come to the page to write a poem, what I’m doing is, I’m asking, "Is there a word from the Lord?" That is basically what a poem asks.

Jordan: Is this true of the poetry of the T’ang and Sung Dynasties?

Lee: There is that tradition in Chinese poetry that a poem is a model of psyche. Psyche is a model of cosmos, and so a poem is a model, or an instance of cosmos. It’s a little instance of cosmic presence. The Chinese believe, especially the T’ang and the Sung Chinese poets, that the poem is an object through which to contemplate or experience cosmic presence. And so I happen to feel that’s true.

Jordan: I understand also the classic Chinese poets’ intimacy with nature and the belief that the past, having accumulated much of civilization’s wisdom, is the authority to draw creativity and inspiration. How do you see your work in relation to nature?

Lee: I feel that a poem is a product of nature because any product of the human psyche is a product of nature. The psyche is embedded in nature. -- Maybe I should back up and try to answer it this way -- because poetry is an art form that explicitly engages the left and the right brain. The left brain is linguistic, sequential and temporal, and the right brain is intuitive and spatial.

Jordan: I remember your saying you can’t dance with your left brain. When you say that art must exercise the whole being, do you mean art in general?

Lee: The wonderful poet and teacher I studied with in Brockport, New York, Anthony Piccione, could never remind us enough times that poetry is the art form that engages both sides of the brain; therefore, any time we read a poem or study a poem, we’re studying the human psyche. Ideal is the human psyche well-informed of all its parts because a poem is a natural product of the human psyche, and the psyche is embedded in nature. And so the poem is a product of nature. When I say a psyche well-informed of all its parts, I mean an intellect well-informed of the body, a body informed of the intellect, and both informed of the feeling faculty, and so on. When I write a poem, I want all of me present. Poetry is the one art form that explicitly opens channels to both hemispheres of our brain. My wish would be that when I write a poem my body is present in the language as well as my mind, my intellect, my heart, feelings. It’s about that total consciousness, total presence.

Jordan: Do you think your life as a poet began when you were a child and you began transposing letters of words and spelling them backwards, as you tell us in The Winged Seed (1995)? When did you first take pen to hand to write your first poem?

Lee: That was when I first started to learn the English language. The words seemed -- and again I use the word "saturated" -- words like yarn or bird or tree felt to me saturated with meaning. And I think that’s when I really was taken with the English language. I started writing little things to my mother.

Jordan: What kind of things?

Lee: I remember my brother and I caught a fish once, and this is the most vivid memory I have. We caught a fish and I wrote a poem. "Here is a fish. Make a nice dish." I thought it was really cool that I rhymed fish and dish. I safety-pinned it through the gill of the fish and gave it to our mother. It seemed that the word fish and the thing we gave her were one and the same thing.

Jordan: The painter,Magritte, was taken with resemblances of the real, and ridiculed representation being the same as the word. I think of his Betrayal of Images, the painting of a pipe with the words at the bottom, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. The word and the image are not the same ...

Lee: Right. A picture of a fish isn’t a fish, but the word fish is exactly that, it’s a fish. It’s the word, f-i-s-h. My brother is a painter. And paint is a thing. With paint you’re using a thing to represent another thing. But language isn’t quite a thing. A fish is both thing and not-thing. Paint is almost sculptural. You can touch it. It has smell. You can put it in a tube. You can’t do that with language. Language is not a picture. I think maybe poetry and prose are different from other arts in this way. Language is closer to reality, I would say. It’s as evanescent as reality. We experience the world through words, through language.

Jordan: Is there a connection here with the first chapter of the Gospel of John in the Bible, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God"?

Lee: Absolutely. That idea, that reality, feels so true to me. If Jesus is the word, we have to assume that what is meant by that is the word is a mode of being. It’s not a linguistic tool, it’s a mode of being and I would say being in the word is being in God. Being-in-God is being in the word and that state of saturation we’re talking about. Being in the word is the poetic equivalent, the verbal equivalent of that psychic reality. Language saturated means many things at once, and it seems to me a perfect paradigm of nature or the universe because of this saturation with meaning and presence.

Jordan: Let’s talk about illusion and disillusion. You speak of art as a form of disillusion.

Lee: I have the sense again, that the world around us, the whole universe in fact, is saturated with presence, and it’s saturated with terror and wonder and splendor and death, and I think sometimes we do all we can to create illusions that it’s not so. Then art comes along and disillusions us in order to uncover this original saturated condition. I think that’s the great thing about art, and of course, that’s why probably not many people read poetry. I don’t know if they can stand that kind of saturation of meaning and presence because with it comes not only splendor and wonder and awe, but terror, horror and death. You can’t get one without the other and so we do everything we can to stay in illusion.

Jordan: You have said that art directs us to uncover sacred realty. Do you mean art demands this of us?

Lee: I think that sacred reality is basically that condition of the saturation of presence in the world. Wind and trees and clouds and people and rocks and animals -- all saturated with presence. At least it feels that way to me. I think the saturated condition is the sacred condition. There has always been only one subject, being.