Waiting for a Final Shapeliness to Occur

Anthony Piccione and Stan Sanvel Rubin

The following conversation took place 27 February 1991 during Lee’s visit to the State University of New York College at Brockport. He spoke with poets Anthony Piccione and Stan Sanvel Rubin. Printed by permission of the Brockport Writers Forum and Videotape Library.

Rubin: In the new collection, The City in Which I Love You, I’d like to ask you about the notion of waiting in “Here I Am” and “Waiting.”

Lee: For me so much of poetry and the making of poetry have to do with a willingness to wait for something to yield itself. It’s a powerlessness that one allows to occur. In my own life I feel as if I do a lot of waiting, and it seems to me a proper posture of the heart, or the mind, waiting for the poem to arrive. Or waiting for a final shapeliness to occur in my own life. Or waiting for a god to show himself. Waiting for the dead to come back.

Rubin: In a later poem you say something like “Because we have not learned not to want, we have to learn how to wait.”

Lee: It has to do with desire, of course: the waiting is so fraught with desire, and longing. It’s the hardest thing to do. As I said in “Here I Am,” it has so little to do with patience—or even hope. Sometimes that’s the whole point: to be full of longing, of desire, to be waiting.

Rubin: Does the poem sometimes come when you were waiting for something else?

Lee: I keep wondering whether or not I can realize a personal destiny. Once I begin wondering about that, I begin longing, reaching ahead, and waiting for and desiring that final form. The whole work of a human being is to try to reach that final form before one ends. And that has to do with the shapeliness in the poem, too.

Piccione: I want to ask you about the waiting which that implies, even beyond ordinary faith. What is beyond that faith?

Lee: It fluctuates, or it falls in different directions, each time. Sometimes it is a faith in an acceptance that no matter what unfolds, no matter what the shapeliness is, that it is right, whether it’s dark or not. Somehow I have to accept that.

Piccione: What does it feel like having to accept that? Is that where the anxious energy is?

Lee: Yes, it’s there, and it’s full of terror. It’s full of a desire and longing for the shapeliness, but a terror that the shapeliness might not be exactly what I had bargained for.

Piccione: When someone makes a great statement such as: “God, I’ve had enough of Your love and I’d like to break now.” This isn’t imitative of, say, Milton; this is a real human being in Chicago, a real city, on the third floor of his apartment, late at night, saying this. Can you talk about that a little bit? It’s a very, very personal and particular relationship, isn’t it?

Lee: First of all, I grew up having the Old Testament read to me continually, and when my family was wandering around in Southeast Asia, my father would translate from the Hebrew. He gave his whole life to this God, and the God was one who chewed us up and spit us back out and asked us to love him. The poem is a quarrel with the demands of that God, and somehow a participation. I don’t think that—and when I say this, it seems so arrogant—the only task of being human is to submit to a Greater Will. Somehow I feel like we have to participate in that Greater Will: we have to bargain with him or it, or denounce it, and somehow reaffirm it by our arguments. I don’t see how submitting affirms so much the existence of a Higher Power. Submission leads to complacency.

Piccione: How do you feel about being one of the few people using the word God in a poem? How do you end up being the one to use that word so comfortably, so personally?

Lee: God, I don’t know . . . I . . . I . . . . It’s for me an absolutely critical issue. Whether or not there is a Godliness and a sacredness in the world—everything rides on that. The stakes are so high for me. It isn’t choosing between sacredness and the mundane: for me the mundane isn’t even the mundane without the sacredness; it isn’t even a thing itself. It isn’t as though without the sacredness bread is just bread; the bread isn’t even just bread without the sacredness. So I have to locate that sacredness. I guess at some point I just gave up and began addressing the God I grew up with.

Piccione: Just to have this go one step further, we would be hard-pressed to explain to some students that what you just said about your relationship to bread and the sacramental everywhere you look is what we mean when we talk about poetry. And that your poems aren’t by any means imagined, or made up. How do we begin to talk about this real subject, in real terms? It’s you, the solitude, it’s late at night, you’re writing something, and you’re not making it up. I think about workshops especially, workshop poetry students, whose first instinct—and it’s not their fault, either—is to imagine, make something up imaginatively. What do you say to that split?

Lee: I suppose that there is room for imagined literature, a literature written as a cultural event. I’m not sure one is better, but I know that I grew up witnessing a man for whom literature was bread. It meant getting through the next day, through the next year, a belief that countries dissolve, friends die, people get imprisoned, governments abuse you, and yet there’s something else. It wasn’t a polite activity; it wasn’t a literary event. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I grew up reading the Old Testament as a sacred text, not as literature. Milton did not read the Bible as literature; for him it was a sacred text. Donne did not read it as literature. In a way we’ve lost something if we can only approach it as literature.

Rubin: Your father, we all know, was such an amazing and powerful presence throughout the collection Rose, and the poem “Furious Versions,” that begins this collection, The City in Which I Love You, still has him very actively present. The collection seems a shedding of that tremendous influence, a finding of some other direction. In the poem you read, “This Hour and What Is Dead,” there’s a line, “Someone tell him he should sleep now.” There is a poem I like very much, “My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud,” which also seems to me to be accepting the presentness of your life and in some sense trying to put some kind of final shape to that father who so dominates Rose and the beginning of this collection. I wonder if you’d speak about this issue which I think is simply the presence of your father in the second book.

Lee: The shedding of this influence of my father is more than changing subjects. Part of me wishes that it were that simple. But for me the writing is so personal that I have to get beyond the figure of this all-knowing, all-powerful, fierce, loving, and all-suffering figure. I have to somehow get beyond that in my own life, in order to continue, in order to achieve my own final shapeliness. Or I’ll be forever contending with the existence of these fabricated characteristics of all-powerful, all-knowing, and so on. Part of me has to dismantle that in order to get through it in my own life. I guess I’m doing that in my own writing, too.

Rubin: I wonder how you put the book together. I see in my own reading this movement away from the really dominant father-figure to other things, to this moment, the next moment: is it praise or lament hidden in the next moment of your life? Did you feel consciously or later in organizing the book that you were moving to an assumption of a newer identity, or that you were looking in a different direction?

Lee: You know, I felt something very strange when I was organizing the book, a grief: while I was moving away from the figure of the father I was also moving away from the last evidence of a life I would never see again—that is, the life of the refugee and the immigrant. I feel as if I work hard to stop becoming a refugee. Part of me wants to become, of course, assimilated in America and at home. I want to feel at home here in this continent. And as I put him away, part of me realizes that what I’m putting away is this vestige of refugee and immigrant life, which has to do, of course, with old coats and rotting shoes and books falling apart and old luggage. I’m putting all of that away so that in a way I’m moving into a life that I don’t really recognize. I’m leaving a life I recognize—my father, that ferocity, that consummate love for a God that devours. I see all of that and I recognize it. I know how to live under those conditions. I know how to live with the rotten luggage and the inability to speak in another person’s tongue. The new thing I’m moving into, I don’t recognize. When I was putting the book together, it was full of a grief as I was moving into America. I don’t recognize America. I don’t know how to be American—although I am, I think, ostensibly very American and assimilated. But there must be a void deep inside of me, still wandering around with his father in Macao and Singapore with all his luggage and stuff. I feel deeply attached to that.

Rubin: How many years have you been in the United States?

Lee: Let me see. I came here when I was about six, and I’m thirty-three now. What is that? About twenty-seven. That’s a long time, and I can’t believe how long it takes for a person to feel at home. I feel absolutely dislocated. Totally alienated. I didn’t know that until I finished this book. I don’t think I felt dislocated before because I had him, this great figure of the refugee that I recognized and I could identify with.

Piccione: Have you finally come to terms with your father enough to ask God to relax so you can understand him? What audacity, in fact, what wonderful audacity, you have to demand that God explain himself.

Lee: I don’t see it as audacity. I feel like that’s what God would want—what she or he would want. In the title poem of The City in Which I Love You, God is a she. I feel as if that’s what our job is.

Piccione: So personally, when waiting for the next moment to reveal praise or lament, if you get five laments in a row instead of some other kind of blossoming, does that affect the tone or the pitch of your questioning?

Lee: It might affect the tenor or the pitch, but I don’t think it affects the direction. Finally, I think all of my being’s attention—I hope—is turned to God. If I get five laments in a row, I’m not through yet.

Piccione: Is it a matter of luck changing the tone? In fact, you’ve had enormous good luck, and your family has had an enormous long line of pretty horrid luck. What your father stood for, you stand for in your own way and in your own terms. And he would live and die by what he said and believed in, and you know that you would, too. Could you talk about that sense of luck?

Lee: When I turned thirty-three, I thought to myself, When my father was thirty-three he was thrown into jail, and I thought, God, even my suffering can’t compete with that. I don’t think that a human being, strangely enough, wishes only for good things; I think a human being finally wishes for the largest things . . .

Piccione: . . . or the real things.

Lee: . . . or the real things. 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. I don’t think I’m being romantic when I say that suffering occurred to a lot of people during the time of my father’s imprisonment—all over the island of Java—but that suffering was about something. It was about human darkness. I’m not saying that makes it any better. All I’m saying is that I’m not trying to reduce it into a manageable thing. All a person wants is everything in its right proportion, not reduced or enlarged.

Piccione: I wish I could think of an example, but part of the change in your voice has to do with your finding yourself being the spokesman for a nation not quite awake, or a nation of sleepwalkers whose dream this also is and whose luck this also is, this kind of psychic luck that we’re encountering. Your subdued, agitated ferocity, which I notice as culminating deliveries toward the end of a poem, where you say, This is what I know and it includes God, and it’s this and this and this, and it’s dark or it’s light, but this is how it feels—that’s not in Rose, that voice especially. You have much more opportunity in Rose to stay young and to stay soft. “The Weight of Sweetness” is one of my favorite poems, because it’s sweetly true about a certain way of the psyche. And now you’re carrying this other weight. Of course, that happened gradually. Could you tell me a little bit about how you came that way?

Lee: I don’t think I ever intended, or intend, to be a spokesman. I think what happened was really very simple—not simple, maybe, but the step is a short one. As soon as a human being begins to wonder about the possibility of a personal destiny—a personal, ultimate shapeliness—that person can just lift his or her eyes half an inch and begin wondering about a kind of collective destiny, whether or not humankind has an ultimate achievement to meet with, or to attain. It’s about attainment and fulfillment so I think from the personal to the communal is just a little step.

Rubin: Can I bring that very point to the title poem, “The City in Which I Love You”? It’s a tremendous poem, one of several long poems in the collection which leave me really breathless and silent. I wonder about composing such a poem in terms of what we were just saying: it’s a phantasmagoria, in a sense, of all the cities of the twentieth century—the bombed-out cities, the prisoners, the tortured, all the exiles, you expand your own personal situation or history into the communal. How did you go about writing this particular poem? How did this dream/nightmare come to you, in the guise of a love poem?

Lee: I started out to write a love poem. I think there is a kind of love for a specific other, which becomes so intense that it transforms itself into a love for a greater other. You want so much to locate the core of the other that as you begin penetrating into the other you begin realizing that what you’re really after is the great other in each and every one of us. I thought I was writing a poem that was sexual, a poem of longing and desire. It began to be something else. I was in fact wandering around a lot in Chicago, and walking through the bombed-out neighborhoods.

Rubin: How did it start? The first word of the poem is and. How did it first come to you? How long did it take to grow? How did you work it?

Lee: It took me a long time. I write so slowly. I think it took me about three years to write. It began as a love poem, and the more I wrote, the more desire I felt; the more desire I felt, the less fulfillment I felt, and the less fulfillment I felt, the more desire I felt and so the more I wrote. It just kept growing. I did feel as though I was trying to enter the other, to locate the other, which felt like entering a city.

Rubin: Were you surprised when this darker imagery, which is really almost hallucinatory, so intense with twentieth-century political history . . .?

Lee: Yes, I was surprised, and in the poem I keep saying, I’m not that woman, and I’m not that man. The imagination would be committing a criminal act if I said I could identify with all these people, but I know exactly what they’re going through. I witnessed that as a child—the man lying there and the woman fanning his face. Now I realize that the greatest act of love I could commit is to give them their otherness, their absolute aloneness, their dignity. I don’t want to go in there and muddle it up, to say, I’m just like them.

Rubin: That’s an amazing moment in the poem, and it seems to be possibly the important moment for you, when you were finding your own separateness from what you identified yourself with so strongly.

Lee: Yes, because it’s so easy, of course, to feel brotherly and sisterly, a love for all things and a wanting to enter them.

Rubin: At the end of the poem you come back to the city in which I love you, and you say, “I enter without retreat or help from history.” There is no help from history, is there?

Lee: Right.

Rubin: Where is there help? Is it in the waiting?

Lee: I guess only in the waiting. Somehow there is a kind of faith I have in the waiting itself.

Rubin: Is that you? Who is the “you” at the end of the poem? How do you feel about the final “you”? “I re-enter the city in which I love you.” Is that the particular beloved that you thought you were starting to address at the beginning, or is it a wholly expanded “you”?

Lee: I don’t know.

Piccione: It has to be all of the above. Part of the question that you just asked, I was going to ask, too. We can talk about poetry and your explanation about the poem turned to your noticing something about evolutionary spiritual life which includes finding out by noticing exact particulars of your first love, finding out what otherness means. I was prompted to add, finding the way in the things of the universe, above and beyond books and words. You went to the scary place as a samurai-orphan, saying, I don’t know anything, let me try again. What’s it like to love the beloved? What’s it like to seek God? That’s what your poetry does.

Lee: I’m really moved by what you’re saying, Tony, and in fact I wish it were otherwise; I wish I could have it some other way. There’s a kind of dumbness about me: I feel sometimes like a dumb animal, especially when I was writing that poem. I really felt—this is very personal now—I was so full of craving I was just going out of my mind. Again it wasn’t an idea: I didn’t think, Well, I’ll do this. I was just so full of craving and longing, wandering around, looking for the center of my beloved, wondering, There she was asleep in bed, but really where is she? I couldn’t locate it. I was just going crazy, hungering, waiting. And a lot of the poems, I think, are about hunger, too.

Rubin: Hunger and food are important in these poems. In the process of writing this one poem, I gather you found yourself writing it over three years, while other poems were coming, complete.

Lee: Oh, yeah.

Rubin: How does it end up being essentially in these five-line stanzas? How does it achieve form? Is it coming all the time in form?

Lee: The poem did come in long lines, and I noticed that some of the lines began to cluster around five lines. That was almost a hint, and I began to look for that to occur in other places. In a way the poem gave me the clue to its own form.

Rubin: In such an intense process that this poem called forth, do you do much revising?

Lee: Yeah, I think during the three years most of it was cutting and revising. It was originally about forty pages and I cut it down to what it is in the book. It feels like it wants to be longer and then shorter. It feels ragged to me.

Piccione: Your poems are getting longer. How do you account for that?

Lee: Because I am so in love with the attention of the poetic moment that I just want it to go on.

Rubin: When do you write best? When is your most receptive moment?

Lee: I think when the kids are asleep. Usually at night. I work from about nine at night to five in the morning.

Piccione: You said something before that I’m going to add to my definition of what I mean by “poet”: any poet, good or bad, must be called a “craver.”

Lee: Yeah, it seems to me that desire, longing, craving, hunger—without it there’s no urgency, or impetus.

Piccione: And your good luck is that you’re a slow learner, and so you slowly, patiently, carefully look at each thing. What about that attention to form? And part of your attention has to be the public attention you receive. Do you start thinking, What does it look like? How will it be received? Is this clear to nearly everyone? Is that entering more and more your editing consciousness?

Lee: No.

Piccione: So it’s not a great danger for you.

Lee: I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever taken that into consideration at all.

Rubin: When you were talking about becoming an American as an ongoing process, you said you were alienated and hadn’t fully realized it. Would you speak about this alienation?

Lee: I should say first of all that one of the things I’m beginning to discover is that this alienation is not all bad. It’s a gift, in a way. My otherness, though I’ve spent years being pained and anxious about it, finally is a gift. Finally, we are all other to each other. It’s not a sweet gift, necessarily, but it is true. And again as long as it’s true I don’t want to reduce or enlarge it. It is something; it isn’t hollow.

Piccione: That’s what set you out trying to overcome it in the first place, right?

Lee: Right! Right! Exactly! That was it absolutely there, and it’s all attached. It has to do with the way I sit inside my body, that growing up, looking like the other, made the others around me treat me like the other, and so I began to feel like the other, the foreigner, the alien, and it’s very simple if you have that physically impressed upon you, then you are trapped inside this body so everywhere you go you do feel like you are the other.

Piccione: Everybody else has that. I think you’re on to something.

Rubin: It’s almost a definition of America you’re offering, in a way: I suppose multiculturalism, which is much talked about in education and art, really means everyone acknowledging everyone else’s otherness, which you do in “The City in Which I Love You.” Along this line I’d like to come to the final poem, “The Cleaving,” in which you come back to your face, opening and closing the book with your own face.

Lee: The poem was a little terrifying to write because finally in order to see everybody in myself and to see myself in everyone else I had to do violence to myself. I don’t think it was transcendent in the way one normally thinks of transcendence. I used to think of transcendence as easy, light, full of wings, or something like that. I realized there’s only one kind of transcendence, a kind of violence, because I think living in America is a violent experience, especially if you do feel like the other. And I think assimilation is a violent experience. One of violence’s names is change.

Rubin: This is literally a very bloody imagery—butchering—and it’s an imagery of eating really wonderful food. It’s a vision of being consumed and consuming. That seems to me the opposite of transcendence on some level.

Lee: Right, but it’s also a way of becoming attached to humanity, but it comes through a kind of imminence.

Rubin: But you’re also accepting death in some way, participating in it.

Piccione: How do we end up? Do we win in this, or not?

Lee: That’s the other thing when I was writing the poem. I came to the realization that poetry isn’t pretty or nice. It’s very hard, when we talk about being obsessed or consumed.

Piccione: In order for the light and sweetness to remain real you have to go here, too.

Lee: I think you have to.