a sound that is just pure telling

I would like to make a sound that is just pure telling. I was sitting on my back porch a few months ago, and I was listening to the wind for a long time until I realized: that’s the sound I want to make. I don’t want to write about that, I want to do that. Whatever that is—the wind in the trees. We’ve heard that sound before. It’s oceanic; it’s huge; it’s on the verge of meaning. If you listen long enough you feel there’s definitely meaning there. Then you realize it’s just wind in the trees. I want to make that kind of noise. That big. That elemental. That dark. That fresh. That raw. That mysterious. Right on the verge of human meaning. Entirely nonhuman. I would like to make a noise like that. Full of sound and fury—and maybe signifying nothing, I don’t know. It’s that sound I want to hear.

...

I would like to be right at that place where meaning itself is being made; to hear language at that level. I know many poems that have a lot of content but no meaning; and I know many poems that have a lot of form but no content. I would like to do away with all of that and go straight to meaning. Just meaning staring at you from the page.

- Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Pearl London in 1995, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).  

the kind of peril that gets enacted in poetry

Pearl London: In “This Hour and What Is Dead,” you write “Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.” How did you reconcile that with your own ideas about God? 

Li-Young Lee: The God I was addressing in that poem was very much the God of my father, which is a God of the Old and New Testaments. A very Christian God. A very patriarchal figure. Already very embodied. Kind of entrapped and encrusted with anthropomorphic features. 

Right now I’m wondering about the possibility of writing a religious poetry. A genuinely religious poetry. Because I feel we live in an age of secular poetry. 

London: Can one write a really religious poetry today?

Lee: I’m wondering about that. Maybe not a religious poetry but a poetry whose spirituality isn’t ironic. Which is genuine, sincere, hungry. It would have to be the real thing. I’m just curious what that would look like, what that would sound like. Because for me secular poetry isn’t enough. 

Student: It’s really hard, because in Herbert and Donne’s day there were shared assumptions about what the furniture of religion was. But now there aren’t any. So if you write a poem that is open to a lot of different assumptions it might be rejected by some people because it says “Jesus” if you’re a Jew, or… 

Lee: So it would have to avoid using the signposts that we recognize when we say religion. And the poem would have to proceed by an intelligence that is entirely new, distinct from the intelligence that we use in a secular poem. That’s what I’m interested in: what is that new intelligence?

London: I have a very good friend—he’s a brilliant critic—and he maintains that there is only one important religious poet writing today. He says it is A. R. Ammons. Because, he says, Ammons sees the universe as an absolutely integrated, coordinated system of relationships between people, between atoms and stars, between all of the phenomena of nature. He’s seeing this as an utterly bound-together world in which man and atom and stars all have a relevance and a real meaning for each other. And that is, for him, godlike. 

Lee: I think Ammons is a very great poet. I have a real quarrel with him, though.

London: What?

Lee: He’s too rational for me. His poems proceed with a great, brilliant, rational mind. And for me… there’s no peril in there. The irrational and the rational together make the kind of peril that gets enacted in poetry.

- Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Pearl London and her students in 1995, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).  

I’ll always be late for my own life

Pearl London: I must say that The City in Which I Love You is a wonderful odyssey of interiority, a pilgrimage in search of the self. What’s extraordinary to me is that if one compares it with some of the great pilgrimages in literature—like Byron’s “Don Juan”—there’s so little solipsism in your pilgrimage. Don Juan’s world is completely centered around himself; and your world isn’t that centered. What do you think is the explanation? 

Li-Young Lee: Writing for me is an act of love, and poems are shapes or forms of love. It seems important for me that the poem graduate—from a lower form of love to a higher form of love; from a sense of personal love to a kind of indifference or impersonality. 

I found that as I was writing The City in Which I Love You I was interested in who was actually there, writing. I’m interested in the evolution of the personal pronoun “I” in literature. Not only in literature, but in our culture—what is the “I”? Who is it? 

London: That’s very important. Because one really wonders to what extent the “I” embraces a whole community of people, of ideas. 

Lee: What became interesting to me was the very inexactness with which we live every day with this self. At some point I thought, I’m going to have to be a little more naked. I thought an actual self with all the inexactness and all the confusion of memories, that was more interesting, that was somehow more true, more naked, than very neatly trying to assemble this Frankenstein monster and saying, “This is me.” That somehow felt dishonest to me.

London: Do you now feel—now, grown and father of two children and so forth—do you now feel a sense of identity which is utterly your own? 

Lee: No. No, I don’t. I feel more than ever that there is no “I.” That’s where I am today—I might feel differently five years from now. All the versions of personhood—that my parents have given me, the culture has given me, my brothers and sisters, wife, children, friends—one is greater than all of those versions. And that greater someone can’t be nailed down with a pronoun like “I.” 

London: “I” could be a universe.

Lee: Then that “I” is the “I” I’m interested in writing toward. That “I” which is the universe. I’m trying to move toward an ecstatic state in which the small “I” is extinguished and merged into a larger “I.”

Part of me does feel that if I keep writing and living according to afterimages, then I’ll always be late… for my own life, somehow. If I’m living dependent on who I thought I was, who my parents told me I was, all of those things seem to me cumbersome—they’re obstacles toward something more immediate, something more naked. For the longest time I’ve walked through the world thinking, Well, I’m this, I’m that, while there was always a voice inside of me that knew I was nobody. In the way that Emily Dickinson said, “I’m nobody; who are you—are you nobody, too?”

- Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Pearl London in 1995, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).