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).