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.

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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).