|
|
 |
|
|
|
Home > Li-Young Lee: A Most Welcome "Guest in the Language"
|
Li-Young Lee: A Most Welcome "Guest in the Language"
|
|
| |
by Renee Shea
Bowie State University
Bowie, Maryland
|
|
| |
Introduction
Transitions, interstices, margins, the mystical space of memory -- this is the landscape that Li-Young Lee visits in both his life and poetry. Describing himself as "a guest in the language," he currently lives in Chicago with his wife and two college-age sons, but he was born in Jakarta and spent time in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before coming to the United States in 1964 when he was seven. Although Chinese is his first language, Lee is not referring exclusively to the immigrant experience of feeling a guest in the English language; instead, in an interview in the San Diego Union Tribune, he suggests that "we're all guests in language... once we start speaking any language, somehow we bow to that language at the same time we bend that language to us."
Common Themes
Lee's comfort in lyric and narrative is apparent in his three books of poetry (Rose, The City in Which I Love You, and Book of My Nights) and his prose-poem memoir, The Winged Seed. Many of his poems center on family -- his wife, his sons, his mother, but especially his father, a former physician to Mao Tse-Tung and a political dissident in the Sukarno regime, who fled Indonesia and eventually became a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania. Just as Lee evokes his father's life as a way of exploring and understanding his own, many of our adolescent students are struggling to understand themselves as part of and apart from their parents. Memories both loving and painful converge as the speaker of "The Gift" recalls his father's "hands,/two measures of tenderness/he laid against my face,/ the flames of discipline/he raised above my head". "Mnemonic" ends with the son remembering, "Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater," an utterly simple yet powerful juxtaposition. In "A Story," the speaker describes a five-year-old child insisting on a story -- "Not the same story, Baba, a new one" -- a request the father both resists and meets, as the speaker acknowledges that sometimes "a boy's supplications/and a father's love add up to silence." Any of these poems pairs well with Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" or Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," two more canonical explorations of fathers held in memory.
Seeking the words to break silence, Lee writes poems that invite close analytical reading; this is true of even such relatively accessible works as "The Hammock." From a position of ambiguity, the speaker contemplates: "Between two unknowns, I live my life/Between my mother's hopes, older than I am/by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am/by outliving me." When students consider the title before reading the poem itself, they recognize a visual and tactile image that suggests connections, comfort, and the leisure of daytime rest; thus, even though the image is never mentioned in the text of the poem, they anticipate the ending that celebrates "a little singing between two great rests." But getting to that final line involves negotiating the big questions of God, mortality, and love presented within the concrete details of a mother carrying her child home from kindergarten and a child's head lying in his father's lap. With the poet's gift for concentration, Lee links these scenes of daily family life with philosophical considerations of cosmic time through the central image of the hammock.
Lee's is not an easy vision, yet students find his poems somehow consoling in the connections he makes between generations and cultures. He understands the dislocations of immigration and exile, expressed so eloquently in "Restless." The speaker tells his mother, "I can hear in your voice/you were born in one country/and will die in another, and where you live is where you'll be buried,/and where you dream it's where you were born." Yet the poem ends with the solace of ancient rhythms, of "rock and water ceaselessly declaring/the laws of coming and going." In fact, in an interview in Poets and Writers Lee disavowed the brittle poetry of alienation and fragmentation, asserting that "art is about integration; it isn't further fracturing." Throughout his work, he draws on and honors his Chinese heritage and traditions of the East, though he questions the kind of labeling that he believes is artificially imposed: "...Asian American, African American, whatever. I have no interest in that," he told the Kenyon Review. "I have an interest in spiritual lineage connected to poetry -- through Eliot, Donne, Lorca, Tu Fu, Neruda, David the Psalmist."
A Return to Poetry
Yet Lee has had his doubts. When asked why over a decade elapsed between his second and third books, he explains that he was "heavily involved in activism," specifically with the International Association for World Peace, promoting rehabilitation activities with senior citizens through massage and breathing techniques, working with at-risk adolescents, and building community gardens in Chicago. He says that during this time he was trying to give up writing but simply could not, and when most of the gardens that took years to build were destroyed through vandalism and neglect, he became both disillusioned and skeptical about his own motivation: "All of this activism involved so much of my ego, and I started thinking about the possibilities of poetry. I noticed that when my ego was involved in a poem, it wasn't a very good poem, so writing poetry was a way for me to keep my ego in check."
He realized finally, he says, that the change he had been trying to effect in the world needed to come from within -- through poetry: "I think, finally, making art transforms the maker." In Poets and Writers, he explains that this transformation was especially important as his own sons became teenagers. Alarmed by a culture where "everything is up for grabs," he says, "For my children's sakes, I wanted to be a reliable compass. So it seemed to me that I really needed to make connection with my own inner life, to know that it's real."
Will we have to wait another decade for Lee's next book? He doesn't think so, but he's not sure. Right now, he says, "I have maybe half a book, but I write so slowly that I don't even look that far ahead. I just want to write a true poem." Whether Li-Young Lee is a guest in our classrooms or in our own personal reading, he is one we welcome back again and again.
Works Cited
Lee, Li-Young, interview in San Diego Union Tribune, 11 April 1996, quoted at
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_poetry/Li
____________. Book of My Nights. Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.
____________. The City in Which I Love You. Rochester, New York: BOA Editions,
Ltd., 1990.
____________. Rose. Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 1986.
____________. Winged Seed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Marshall, Todd. "To Witness the Invisible: A Talk with Li-Young Lee." Kenyon Review, Winter 2000: 129-147.
Pence, Amy. "Poems from God: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee." Poets and Writers Magazine, November/December 2001: 22-27.
Renee H. Shea interviewed Li-Young Lee by telephone in March 2004. She is a professor of English at Bowie State University, Maryland, where she directed the Freshman Comp Program for five years. She teaches graduate courses in rhetoric and is a member of the Honors Faculty. She is the English Language and Composition Content Advisor for AP Central, and has worked with the AP English Program for over 25 years as a Reader and faculty consultant.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course Home Pages