Laura Ann Dearing and Michael Graber
The following conversation took place in November 1996 under the auspices of the University of Memphis River City Writer’s Series and appeared in 1998 in Crab Orchard Review. Reprinted by permission.
Interviewer: Some critics link your work to the visionary line of American poetry by Whitman, Hart Crane, et al. Are you comfortable being assigned to this vein? Do you strive for visionary moments in your work? If so, could you describe one of these moments?
Lee: As I was musing over the questions I found that, while they were great, they come out of an assumption that I don’t necessarily have. If I can explain some of my assumptions, about writing and about our being here, then maybe some of this will come clear.
In the West I know that we are accustomed to thinking of the future as lying ahead of us and the past as behind us. We leave the past behind as we walk forward into the future. And because I think we’re homo erectus, we see the horizon line. We have metaphors of life occurring to us at the rate of walking. We think we’re walking toward a horizon into the future.
In the East it’s very different, and I think this is an essential difference that might inform some of the subsequent questions. In the East our word for the day before yesterday is chin tien: it lies ahead of us. The day after tomorrow is ho tien. Ho literally means behind you. To a Chinese mind, the future is behind us, and the past is before us. To a Westerner you walk forward into the future, and you leave the past behind. To an Easterner we walk backward into the future and everything we see here is in the past.
Now, if we think about that, it’s not only a difference in orientation, it’s a difference in what we assume about reality. When we go out at night and look up at the stars, some of those stars have been dead for millions of years. So when I come out and look at them I’m looking at some late report. I am literally looking at a picture of the past when I look up at the night sky. Now to a Chinese mind this is a picture of the past, constantly. As we walk backward into the future, which lies dark because it’s behind me, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. All of this is the past. The light coming from the ceiling, my voice, my coming into the room, the sips of water I took, it’s all going into the past. We constantly live inside the immediate past. Where is the present? That is one assumption I want to make. And it seems something I live with day-in and day-out.
The second assumption I’m making is that this body itself is already the past. This body itself is the late report of an earlier body. Everything that occurred here, everything occurring here, is the late report of an earlier event. Our being here, telephone calls, plane arrangements, whatever occurred already to make this possible. So we are constantly living in the late report of antecedent events. That’s my assumption.
As a result, I always assume that poetry is the voice of an earlier body. It is not the voice of this body. So that the voice we’re hearing in poetry, being the voice of an earlier body, is the voice of a truer body. Because this body is not our true body, this body, the same way we look up at the stars and some of those stars are no longer there, but we see it, this body is like that dying star. We see it, but it is actually no longer here at a rate of about three billion cells a minute. As we speak, three billion cells a minute are dying in this body. We don’t always know that, but if we choose not to know that it would be like somebody choosing to think the sun goes around the earth—when we know the earth goes around the sun. So if we know the body dies at about three billion cells a minute, it occurs to us at about the rate of falling.
Now can we realize that prime reality? That, number one, all of this is going away, fading away, this minute, as we speak. It is going irrevocably into the past as we see it. And we are falling backward into the future. When we go out we don’t know whether we’re going to find a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, whether we’re going to be hit by a car. The future is dark. All we see is the past. This is a long answer to the question about the visionary.
All art to me is yogic practice. That is, yoga in the sense that it means “link,” or “yoke.” What are we yoking ourselves to? Our true nature. Our original nature. And our original nature is an actual body, that this body is only a late report of. So for me to believe in this body is to believe in a shadow, a dream. I can only believe in the voice that comes from an earlier body. And that body happens to be much larger than this one. It’s much larger, darker, because it’s beyond seeing. We get glimpses of that body sometimes in dreams. When the light of mind falls on that body we see the feeder of that body, but here’s a body beyond the dream body, which is even greater than the dream body.
So that’s my assumption. That’s always been my assumption. I don’t understand the visionary, I suppose. I’m not all that familiar with the visionary lineage of the West. I’ve read Eckhart, and I’ve read some Kierkegaard, Hart Crane, Whitman. But it seems to me that the fundamental assumptions are different.
Interviewer: At an address at Eastern Kentucky State, you said, “The ambition of a poet is to write to a state of nobody-hood, to write from an anonymous source, and to the extinction of the personality.” Yet you write very autobiographical poems—using yourself, your wife, your children as main characters. Please explain this dichotomy of using the self as subject matter, as a means of obtaining selflessness.
Lee: The subject of my poems is the voice in the poem. It’s not the figures that adorn the voice. The voice is silent to these mortal, earthly, time-bound ears. It’s silent, so what do you do? You sheathe it.
If you hear a conversation going on in the next room and you don’t hear the words you can tell by the way the voice moves whether it’s a mother speaking to a child, whether it’s a mother reprimanding the child, whether it’s a mother reading a story to the child, whether it’s the mother telling the child a joke, whether it’s lovers arguing. You don’t have to hear the words. You can hear the rhythms, the harmonies, the disharmonies, in the voices and sentences. Those voices, those sentences, those frequencies, those vibrations, those naked voices, are more interesting to me than the words. The words are like birds that perch on this frequency of sound. And the voice is what I’m really interested in here. It’s almost as if what I’m saying is the ostensible subject is the father, the mother, whatever is in that poem, but the deeper subject is the voice. Has this poet heard the voice? Because you can have a poem where there is no voice, but there are a lot of words. There is no voice from that earlier body.
Interviewer: How does that fit in with selflessness?
Lee: I always assumed we have no self. We go through, day-to-day, sub-personalities. I’m a father now, when I walk out of the house to visit my mother I’m a son, then when I’m speaking to you I’m a poet. Those are all sub-personalities. They are not eternal. There is a self, but it’s earlier than this, and it’s earlier than the sub-personalities that I walk through on a day-to-day basis, but the selflessness that I’m talking about is somehow extinguished and the nobody-hood is this larger body. Because it does not recognize any specific role—this larger body simply is, it’s pure voice, and that’s probably why I think that poetry is the instrument of that body more than any other art, because that body is pure voice, which you can’t see. But you recognize it with your ear.
Our true body is a body made up of pure vibration, and we know this; physics tells us this is all vibration. You break down the plastic of this chair and it’s made of molecules, made up of atoms. Atoms are 99.999% space. There is no materiality. This chair is 99.99% space. It is vibrating space. This is vibration. My voice is vibration. This chair is a coarse form of vibration; my voice is a higher form of vibration. Silent thought is vibration. The larger body has as much or as little materiality as this (chair). The larger body is truer than this, because it doesn’t fade like this. The chair looks like it’s going to be here forever, but it won’t. These walls won’t be here forever. These words already are gone. The selflessness, the nobody-hood, is not speaking these tinny versions of personhood, but speaking from an actual personhood. We’ve been duped, in a way, to think our body is our personhood, our job is our personhood. The whole universe is humming, is vibrating. It’s that hum that I want to hear. That’s the subject of my poems. But I can’t write a hum. I tried that in one poem called, “From Blossoms,” the last line says:
From blossom
to impossible blossom
to sweet impossible blossom
I thought that I just didn’t want to say any words. I just want to make some sounds. The words are both a fortunate and unfortunate happenstance. We’re lucky to have them so we can hear the underthing. We don’t listen for the underthing. Our art is very much in danger. It’s going to be just words. And we forget what we’re trying to hear is the hum. Humming supports the chair; humming supports mountains; humming supports this body. To be a poet is to reveal the hum, which is “logos.” It’s pure mantra, that’s what it is. Logos, mantra, Tao, law, whatever you want to call it. It’s all one thing, it’s the humming through the trees, through the chairs, through our bodies, the water we drink, it’s all humming. If we’re quiet enough we can hear it. And poetry is that frequency.
Interviewer: What is your take on the poetic aspects of narration, specifically, what are the factors that make a narrative poem a poem rather than a story?
Lee: Not everything we write on that page has the same vibrations. If we write an anecdote, the vibrations don’t go out as far. If we write a story it might go deeper. What I listen for in narrative is such a wide hum that it encompasses all of our story. There’s only one story. Every story we tell is telling that one story. I don’t know what that one story is. One will never know it. We only hear parts of this great story. When I’m trying to write a narrative it isn’t the specific narrative I’m interested in. Even though there’s a strange magic that happens. The more specific you get, the closer to the hum you get. Faulkner gets it a lot. Sometimes I’m reading him and I don’t even hear the words. I just hear the hum, for instance, in “The Bear” or in As I Lay Dying, when the dead woman talks. I hear that.
Interviewer: Is the hum different for the poet than it is for the reader?
Lee: I would think it would have to be. It would depend on what you’re listening with. If you’re listening only with these dying ears, that’s what you hear. But if you listen with an earlier self, that’s what you hear in poetry, or you hear its absence.
Interviewer: Is it the process that’s important? You have to work to hear that hum.
Lee: Yes, absolutely.
Interviewer: It’s a different work for a reader than it is for a poet or a writer, I think. There are two different realities. Would you say they are variations on the same hum?
Lee: Yes. It’s varied in terms of its orientation. When I’m writing, I don’t even know what I’m doing, because it isn’t even writing. It’s more akin to hearing. The writing is almost in the way. I wish I could not write. Just hear purely. And I happen to believe that if I were only hearing purely, that is work done in the first body. I think if I’d never published it, I’d still have done the work. And that’s what Li-po was doing when he was writing his poems and sending them down the river. He realized, I’ve written these poems, the work has already been done, because he also believed there is only one mind.
Interviewer: Do you agree with the language poets’ take on writing as a separate entity from the poet? That they try to write without involving the self?
Lee: When they say, “writing without a self,” and I say, “writing without a self,” it might be a little different. I write with a self. I don’t believe in these sub-personalities. I believe in a true self. A self free of its temporal, earthly roles. That makes me nervous of the way the language poets talk about it. Sometimes some of the language poetry that is read is about writing, or literary activity. It’s not hearing. I’m not really interested in literary activity like, Gee, I think I’ll take an album cover from one of my children’s rock-and-roll albums, like Alice in Chains, and cut it up, and mess it up on the floor, and say, Hey, there’s a poem. That’s literary activity. It isn’t the hearing I’m trying to achieve. I’m not saying it’s a lesser activity. I’m just saying it looks like literary activity. I’m trying not to write. The fact that I have to write is unfortunate. I’m just trying to hear something, so there’s a difference. Occasionally, when I read Michael Palmer I think he’s hearing something. Occasionally. And he’s a beautiful writer. But in a way that’s not available to me.
Interviewer: Many poets from a cultural minority have a lot of political emphasis in their poems, but your poems don’t. How do you feel about politics in poetry?
Lee: We’ll get as concrete as possible. I see something I don’t like. Let’s say that I see a man hitting another man. The minute I see it I realize what it is that I’m seeing. That is the late report of an earlier event in the mind. If I think I can break up that fight, and I’ve solved something, maybe, but I know that the problem I’m looking at is a problem of mind. The mind is the problem.
It seems to me that we are dealing with symptoms all the time. So let’s say there’s this body of humanity, and it’s this pure perfect body. And we see lesions appear on it. And we keep cleaning up the lesions with none of us asking where are these lesions coming from. A lot of the way we deal with politics is like that. It would be like my son, when he was four years old and he saw something on television, or on videotape, of someone perpetrating some cruelty on someone else. And he’d say, “Come on, Baba, let’s go save him.” I told him, “This is already over, honey. If we get in the car and drive to L.A. there’s nothing we can do.” What are we going to do? This is the field of endeavor.
Our minds are the sources of all our pathology and neuroses. Prevention of that is what we should deal with. Art is one way to do that, unless we practice it as literary activity. Art, practiced as yoga, introduces only one body. If we look at the earth, we think, There’s the earth and there’s me. Well, the earth is teaching us differently. Whatever you put into the earth, you put into your body. Where is the other body? Whatever you put into the rivers, you drink. Whatever you do with that body, you do with your body. There’s only one body; there’s only one mind. Every time we see a precipitation of violence, rape, war, we’ve got a lot of work to do. If we don’t clean things up, that stuff is going to keep precipitating out. Prevention on the earthly level, on the horizontal plane, is dealing with symptoms. It’s not dealing with the source of our pathology.
The source of our pathology is mind. That is earlier than the body. So, we need to ask ourselves, How does the mind work? If I drive a car, and I’m teaching my son to drive, and I say to my son, “You keep your eye on that guard rail because I don’t want you to hit it,” what do you think would happen? He would hit the guard rail. We know when we’re driving we go where we look. This is the way the mind works. That’s why there is repeat behavior in abusive relationships. The child who was abused by his father abuses. He doesn’t walk through life and say, “I will never do that.” If we’re looking at this we’re recording it, recycling it. All we see are versions of the past. What we can look at, where we can drive to, to keep from hitting the guard rail. War, bang, disease, bang, we keep hitting the guard rail. And we keep saying, “Don’t hit the guard rail, don’t hit the guard rail.” The Holocaust, bang, the Khmer Rouge, bang. We keep saying, “Don’t do that,” but we keep doing it.
The mind works by going toward what it sees. The artist is looking toward something else. Art is totally ideal. Otherwise it has no function. Then we are no longer legislators of the world. Poets are the legislators of the world, insofar as they deal with the first body. If you want to call it ideal, call it ideal. I would like to think of it as primary reality. We’ve mistaken this for primary reality. This is all over, this is finished. Art can get us to primary reality. And if we can’t get there we’re doomed to keep repeating what we see. Because that’s the way the mind works.
Interviewer: What about the other arts?
Lee: Yes, the other arts, absolutely, like during van Gogh’s time, when he was painting—throwing all that paint on the canvas, before everybody was painting on flat surfaces—and he was throwing paint on the canvas, people could literally not see the picture. In other words he had already turned his back on the past and really looked ahead into the future. But the picture that he saw, no one else could see. All of us are looking here. He was looking the other way. So nobody that walked into his brother’s galleries could see those pictures. Now we can see it. Jackson Pollock, when he was doing his thing, we think it’s paint thrown on a canvas. It is not. There is a picture. But he is seeing so far into the future, it’s going to take us years to see that picture. It will take us years before we see a lot of those pictures. Rothko’s pictures. It will take us years to understand the best poets we have. It will take us years to understand the significance of them. They’ve already relinquished the past. Fading away is the law of the universe. To align ourselves with that law is empowerment.
Interviewer: Words appear frequently in your work that most other working poets are afraid of using—love, beauty, and tenderness—for fear of being sentimental. Sentimentality seems to be the cardinal sin of poets today. Yet many of our daring poets straddle the fence of the sentimental, and the payoff is great. Discuss the great line of when a poem is emotional and personal, and when it becomes sentimental, perhaps in your own work.
Lee: I don’t ever want to be sentimental in my work, but if there’s a value to poetry, its value is praise. If I’m not praising I should shut up. Because I’m trying to line myself up with laws I perceive in the Universe. Yes, there is death, there is disease, but the flowers keep blooming, the ocean keeps coming home to the land, the sun keeps turning, so all of this is vibration. Let me go one step further: it’s all song.
Now, that song is praise, because it just keeps making it up. Every spring it makes it up. Birds come back. Everything comes back. And to praise, that means spilling over, that is brimming. We master the bowl of this temporality by brimming it. We master it by staying inside it.
Interviewer: You have said before that you are a guest in the language, and that once we start speaking any language, somehow we bow to that language, and at the same time we bend that language to us. Do you think being a guest in the language has helped you or made it difficult?
Lee: I used to think that I was a guest in the language because I was Asian and I learned the language at the age of eight. But I see now that we’re all guests in the language. And I think my being an immigrant heightened that realization. I’m sure that it has something to do with my wanting to write poems. Because it’s a feeling of dislocation with the thing that you love.
Interviewer: In the poem “The Interrogation,” the speaker says, “I’m through with memory.” Does this explain the non-linear movement of Winged Seed?
Lee: Yes, my relationship to memory is very complex. I try to take my eyes off of it because my parents kept trying to turn my head and saying, “Look at this,” and after years of this it dawned on me that I can’t be looking at this because the more I look at it the more I repeat it. If a future is possible for my kids, I can’t keep looking at this. But I can’t help looking at it, because wherever you look it’s the past. That’s the strange thing about the eye. But I have to live with this notion or this intuition that all of this comes from an earlier realm. This body is the immediate past; I live constantly in the immediate past. So the past assaults me and every time it assaults me I try to purify it through art. I try to find the praise that’s possible.
Interviewer: Frank Chin argues that the novelists Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan do not legitimately represent Asian-American culture or an authentic Asian-American voice. Their success, according to Chin, is due to their insidious manipulation of racial stereotypes. Is there analogous debate for poetry? Is there an Asian-American poetry? If so, what are the formal characteristics? And finally, do you consider yourself an Asian-American poet?
Lee: I’ll be honest with you, I’ve devoted about fifteen minutes of my life to that question. I like Maxine Hong Kingston’s work. It meant a lot to me. I realize its importance on this horizontal plane. But if people find her work empowering that’s the wrong way to go.
Interviewer: In the poem “My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud,” you said your father had you recite a book a month; I assume these are books of the Bible. You were his secretary, typing his sermons for him when you were old enough. You are more familiar with the Bible than most contemporary poets. How does this familiarity factor into your poetic ear? Do you find yourself working in biblical cadences or hymnal patterns?
Lee: I don’t know the Bible all that well, but the logos is important. The idea, the reality of logos, is the law of the poem. The law begins from the first line. We’re just there to unfold it. From the first line of the poem [Robert Frost’s “Directive”], “Back out of all this now too much for us,/” [the end declaration] “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion,” is already built into that line. A lot of it is walking that tightrope of the law. That’s what logos is: it’s law, it’s Tao, it’s iron, it’s subtle. When we hear law in poetry we’re not hearing human law; we’re hearing universe law. In the poetry I’m interested in writing, and the poetry I’m interested in reading, which might be very narrow, we see a great painting, a revelation of law. Laws of composition, laws of color.
Frequently, an artist like van Gogh will see so far ahead of his time that it seems like lawlessness. Look at any archway. An arch is a great invention; it’s not the rock it’s built of, it’s not the wood it’s built of. It’s a transparent law. How does it stand up? Law.
In the same way, sculpture helps us see space. The vaulted ceilings of gothic cathedrals help us see space. So, in a poem, it is not all about the words, the shaping of the words, jars spilling on the floors, a found poem. That’s not interesting to me. Can we hear the law in the poem? That’s the question.
Interviewer: You’ve been quoted as saying poetry is the language of longing; it tries to discover why we’re all here at all. And also, for many years, you said, “I feel my years of homelessness and outward longing was because I didn’t feel represented until the last few years when I realized my longing was for God.” How do you feel this longing for God and other types of longing have affected your art? What role does longing play?
Lee: I never want to be away from that voice. Anything that distracts me from that law, that Tao, is a waste of my time. How many times have you turned on the TV and fifteen minutes go by and you realize, Wow, fifteen minutes have gone by and what have I been given? It’s been taken from me—you’ve been drained, not fed? So much of the culture I feel drained by. But listening to poetry and looking at art, you feel fed because you’re near the law.
Frost’s great poems, Dickinson’s great poems, Emerson’s great essays—people read them and say they don’t make sense, that they’re lawless. No, he heard another law, a higher law. I don’t give a shit about manmade laws; that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t care about good and evil, modes of behavior. I’m talking about adhering to the same things the leaves adhere to, earth, the sun—something so elemental. The rest is chatter. An image is an idea, a true idea, an earlier idea than concept. Conceptual language feels like a later thing, and I want to get earlier and earlier and earlier. So images become more and more important to me. I would like to speak like cloud, moon, earth. Images are ideas. Concepts are late images.
Interviewer: How do you feel about the role of workshops as encouraging or discouraging different perspectives and voices in poetry? And what are your views on the creative process? Is writing mystical or is writing a learned skill?
Lee: I’m nervous about the word “mystical,” because for me this chair is mystical, our being here is mystical. Is writing beyond temporal knowing? Yes, absolutely. Is writing a learned skill? Yes, certain kinds of writing, if you want to write a grocery list or the weather report. But not poetry. There are things you can do to orient the mind to make it available to poetry, make us more available to reading poetry and experiencing art. We’re not always available to experiencing art. Just because we stand in front of a painting doesn’t mean we’re available to it.
Interviewer: In the past your subject matter dealt with family relationships. Are you still mining this seemingly inexhaustible source, or are you exploring different perspectives of the same relationships, or are you exploring different subjects altogether?
Lee: It feels to me that it’s the same material, but it’s at a different level. Because of the feelings that I have for my family, the feelings that have become big primary blocks, it’s as if I’m going backward in time. Somehow I’m now a child. My feelings for my mother are like a big square block. I used to say, “OK, I have this feeling for my father, which is him standing in the tree, and I thought I saw him this morning,” that kind of stuff. My feelings for my mother and father are bigger than me now. I can’t tell about them anymore; they’re like big shapes in my mind. My feeling for my child feels like a big shape. It has a definite body to it. That’s the way it inhabits me. I’m stupider now than I used to be about my feelings, which is a good sign. I used to understand them. I thought I did.
Interviewer: You speak Chinese with your mother, but you don’t write poems in Chinese nor read the old Chinese in its original text. Can you comment on a language learned but never committed to the page?
Lee: It haunts the way I am in the world. When I went to China I was amazed; first of all, we were there about eight hours and my kids were speaking Chinese, perfectly with their cousins. After a week, I was naturally speaking Chinese to my wife. She would ask me in English and I would answer in Chinese. And I was dreaming in Chinese. I would wake up, and my wife would be in the bathroom, and I would start talking to her in Chinese. It must influence the way I grasp the world.
In Hawaii, you have the island where the mouth comes out and lava is made. You see this hot lava pouring out and a few miles down the road you see the patterns and swirls that have hardened. That hardened stuff is culture. Worse, it’s religion. Religion is fossilized art. Culture is fossilized poetry. I have no dialogue with culture. An artist ultimately cannot maintain a dialogue with culture. Art on the horizontal plane is not the full expression of that artist. Every great artist has to have a dialogue with something much more personal, urgent, and true than this dialogue with culture.
Interviewer: Your volcano reference seems very Blakean. What do you think of Blake’s trying to systematize?
Lee: It is very dangerous. I find Blake a little too imaginative for me. This is my problem. When a haiku poet experiences what we call a haiku moment, that’s not imagination. If he imagined it, it’s not important to me. What he experienced was an actual moment of the eternal within the temporal, existing simultaneously, the earthly and the heavenly. I have to believe the haiku poet experienced something of the actual world. I know the poet weighs his words a lot. But I don’t think that makes it less true. The imagination is the last thing we have to let go of. It’s a scary place for me. It’s a big mother. If we don’t know the difference we will always be living in the inauthentic. We will always be duped. The purpose of art is to realize the authentic body, which is not this body. The East calls it Buddha mind; the West calls it Christ mind. That’s too small. It’s universe mind.
Interviewer: Did your father find some amusement in how your imagination worked all of that medieval technology and theology into a really hip take on the world?
Lee: I know he found me amusing. I know my mother finds me amusing. I talk to her and she puts her hand on my face and says, “Oh, poor child.” I never read my poems to my father. He loved reading theology. And I used to love reading theology until I realized so much of it was elegant chatter. It’s very seductive. It’s not the practice of universe mind. I’m falling in love with the practice.
Interviewer: What role does revision play in your writing?
Lee: The poem comes out in an unsatisfactory version, because it was not equal to my experience. I take the whole poem, read it, put it into my mouth again, and let it stew there. My mind has its own digestive track. Then it will come out again in another version. And I don’t know what will bring that version on. I might be walking down the street, and I’ll pick up a leaf. The smell of that leaf might trigger that poem. And it comes out in this other version. Closer to something. When I envisioned writing memoir, The Winged Seed, I envisioned it as a long poem. Very stupidly, I thought, I am not going to revise a word. Because I had to see how really far I could go, whatever I said that minute I had to be nakedly honest to that impulse, so I did not revise a word. If anybody reads that book they’ll see all kinds of problems, and my editor said we can get rid of these, but I said no, because I want to live with what I did. But now I feel a little differently. I wish I could stick the whole book in there and let it come out the other side revised.
All I was thinking was that I was going to blacken the page from the upper left-hand corner to the bottom right-hand corner. Literally, as if I had a black crayon I would just go like that. I said, “Now, go.” And I wasn’t allowed to think. A lot of those things were narrative, a lot were lyrical. I started thinking about the birds, and there it was. The self in The Winged Seed is the truest, most naked self I could manage. Now that’s not valuable to anyone else except me. It’s not worth two cents, two dead flies.