An Interview with Li-Young Lee

In the May/Summer 2002 issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Marie Jordan interviewed poet Li-Young Lee. I had not heard of Lee, but the interview was stimulating and I wondered what I had been missing. His books include Rose, The City in Which I Love You, Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and Book of My Nights. Of course, because I have a book addiction I immediately bought all the titles.

Here are a just a few quotes from the lengthy interview:

An Interview with Li-Young Lee by Marie Jordan

I understand all poems to be projections. And to study those projections is to begin to understand the projector, the mind, or ground, of the projection. Let me add here that by the word mind I mean what the Chinese mean when they use the word shin. That is, mind and heart. A poem is an image of the maker, as a human being is an image of God. But a poem doesn't simply transpose being. It also proposes possibilities of being.

If I look around, everything that goes on is saturated with meaning and mystery that I can't quite get my mind around. I see it and sometimes I can verbalize or find the verbal equivalent -or correspondence in the world. Doing laundry is an instance. I do laundry every day, or watch my wife, kids, or my mother do it.

We're always folding or doing laundry and I come into the presence of an eternal mystery while folding clothes! I don't know why, but it feels that the world around me is saturated with another presence, mystery, and splendor all the time. It's a matter of cocking our heads the right way and seeing it. Poetic presence is there all the time, even while doing laundry.

Some of the problems with the state of reading in the country, and the world, might stem from people not being able to read presences, not knowing how to read the presence a poem projects. On top of that they may never recognize that it's a projection they're reading. And if they never recognize that they're reading a projection, they never learn to interrogate it....Is it hysteria that's being projected? Ignorance? Intelligence? Anger? Compassion? Love? What presence gets imparted by, say, a Dickinson poem? Or a Blake?.

I have to believe [reading the unsayable within a work can be taught] or I’d feel as if there was no hope in the world.

The thing that obsesses me is always beyond language. Language is almost an inconvenience. I have a feeling that 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 and if writing it's the language. But if we don't at some point move beyond our hyper-consciousness of language, we're stuck in the land of the medium. On that plane, only the relationships of words to other words is available, while the relationships of words to their ground, mother-silence, on the one hand, and to the concepts they name, on the other hand, gets abandoned. That would be like seeing the significance of people only in relationship to other people, in other words, only as social units. Meanwhile, their relationship to the ground of their being and to their individuality is disregarded.

The Chinese, especially the T'ang and the Sung Chinese poets, believe that the poem is an object through which to contemplate or experience cosmic presence. I happen to feel that's true.

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.