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).