Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.
Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.
Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.
“People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.”
“Moonlight and high wind.Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.”
“Memory revises me.”
“I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.”
“That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.”
“..in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.”
“Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.”
“But, no one can tell without ceaseour humanstory, and so we lose, lose”
“While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.”
“You thinkof a woman, a favoritedress, your old father's breaststhe last time you saw him, his breath,brief, the leafyou've torn from a vine and which you hold nowto your cheek like a train ticketor a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade--it all dependson the course of your memory.It's a place for those who own no placeto correspond to ruins in the soul.It's mine.It's all yours.”
“A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.”
“a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soI'm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingI'd eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I don't see me.”
“Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.”
“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”
“We suffer each other to have each other a while.”
“I am that last, thatfinal thing, the bodyin a white sheet listening,”