The More Poetry, the More Eternity

Patricia Kirkpatrick

The following conversation was originally published in the first issue of Water-Stone, Hamline University, 1998. Reprinted by permission.

Kirkpatrick: Li-Young, you’ve said that in writing poetry, the poet turns all of his or her attention to an inner voice. And certainly in the poem you just read we heard many of the voices that we have come to know when we read your work. How do you turn yourself to that inner voice? Do you wait for it, do you pursue it, do you know when it’s coming?

Lee: I guess all of the above. I do a lot of begging and sweating. That’s a hard question—it’s a good one. There’s a long foreground to the poem. If you live your life in a certain way, it makes you more fit to receive the voice. I have to be paying a certain kind of attention, or a very special kind of inattention, for it to arrive, for me to hear it, because it comes from such a far place.

Kirkpatrick: How does a poem present itself to you? It sounds like you’re not necessarily one of those get-up-at-five-o’clock-in-the-morning-every-day kind of writers. How does the poem get your attention?

Lee: I come to the desk every day and write, but sometimes I just sit there and stare at a blank page for two hours and nothing happens. It’s about the soul for me. A lot of times you’re walking along, and the soul visits you, and you put everything down, and you take notes or write a line, write the poem. Or sometimes you come to the desk, and you’re rewarded for months and months of discipline and sitting there. I’m kind of superstitious. I feel like I have to be there. It’s a little pact: if the soul doesn’t visit me, it’s not my fault—I was there.

Kirkpatrick: This is a related question. One of my favorite parts of The Winged Seed is when you talk about the native women in Indonesia telling you stories in which there were a lot of supernatural powers and spirits. How does superstition show itself in your life?

Lee: On the one hand, I’m very superstitious; on the other hand, I’m not. I do feel as if aesthetic consciousness is the highest form of human consciousness that we can achieve. That’s the consciousness that art, religion, and the sciences came out of. So when we practice art—any kind of art, the writing of poetry or the making of paintings or music—we’re practicing the closest thing to wholeness in consciousness. Although it is mysterious—what worked for one poem won’t necessarily work for the next one, and you don’t know what rituals will make it work—I try to ritualize it. But it’s always a surprise to me. On the other hand, I know that it is a state of consciousness that can be achieved.

Kirkpatrick: Let me pursue this a little bit. You’ve talked about how the poet uses personal material as a doorway into more nonpersonal material. I’m quoting now: “We recognize poetic speech by its strangeness due to the presence of an unnamed speaker, a hidden subject. I recognize poetry by how ‘other’ it sounds.” Could you talk about those qualities of otherness you like to capture in poetry? Are they technical things, or are they more along the lines of consciousness you were just talking about?

Lee: We know that not a lot of people read poetry because it’s too dense. Poetry is dense because we, as people, are manifold in being. We have a physical body, an emotional body, a thought body, a soul, a spirit, and so on. At any moment in time we are all those things, so we are manifold in being. Often when we express ourselves—like when we buy bread—not all of ourselves is speaking. But poetic language is very dense because it is all of those levels speaking simultaneously, and it’s manifold in reference. That’s how I recognize poetic speech. It doesn’t sound the way we’re talking now. We’re talking very linearly, and it’s clear that one person is speaking to the other people. But it feels to me that when a poem is very successful, the center of it keeps shifting, and the audience isn’t always clear. Sometimes it’s the stars you’re talking to. Sometimes it’s a woman or a man or a child; sometimes it’s a man, woman, and child—it’s all of those speaking simultaneously. That’s what I’m a junkie for: that feeling, or that manifold quality of speech.

Kirkpatrick: Despite what you’ve just said, I know that you love plain speech in poetry, too. What are the dangers of following the path that you’ve just described? How do you avoid going overboard, or don’t you worry about getting carried away with those voices?

Lee: I don’t worry about it. I want to go overboard. What it’s all about for me is passion. Desire and passion. The sun, moon, trees, rain—they’re all made of passion. Passion holds the table up; it holds that flower together. The whole universe seems to me to be made of passion. That’s part of the danger and beauty of being an artist: you’re dealing with very ancient, elemental laws, material, and urges: the passion to speak, the passion to be quiet, the passion of inflection, the passion for innuendo. A sentence is a unit of passion. A line of a poem is a unit of passion. A poem is embodied passion. I like plain speech because I want the poems to be neighborly. It’s like hearing from a passionate neighbor.

Kirkpatrick: In addition to those passionate neighbors, people associate your poetry with the sublime, with having qualities of high moral and spiritual purpose. I certainly feel that in your work and am deeply moved by it. But what do you do for fun? What do you do to work against the sublime?

Lee: Fun? Fun is sublime! Everything is sublime.

Kirkpatrick: Are there aspects of Chinese or American popular culture, for instance, that you’re particularly attracted to? I’m thinking of you growing up in a household where a father spoke seven languages, and poetry was recited. That’s not really the experience of most Americans; at least it wasn’t where I grew up. So I’m wondering if there’s any part of low culture that speaks to you as well as the high culture that you’ve been privileged to know in an intimate way.

Lee: I love low culture, the lower the better for me. And I love all kinds of bad culture.

Kirkpatrick: I don’t mean it has to be bad!

Lee: I take in as much garbage as possible. Is that the question? Should I be specific about what bars I go to?

Kirkpatrick: Sure. And did your kids watch Disney movies? Do you listen to popular stations on the radio? Does any of that come into your consciousness?

Lee: It does come into my mind, not as an interesting subject to meditate on, to write poems about. It all just washes over.

Kirkpatrick: What part of your Chinese heritage takes place in your daily life?

Lee: I eat Chinese food every day. I eat with chopsticks. I’ve practiced a Taoist alchemy most of my life. I was involved in a small meditation and Taoist school. We went into the projects in Chicago and worked with gangs, and we went into senior citizen homes, and we worked with invalids. I love Bruce Lee movies. I used to go to New York Chinatown and see all the Hong Kong movies. And I have an older brother who doesn’t speak any English—I use Chinese with him. But I’m losing a lot of it.

Kirkpatrick: Do you live in an extended family still? I know you did.

Lee: Yes, we live in an extended family. There are thirteen of us in a big building. We all eat together. And every morning the children go downstairs and say good morning to their grandmother, and on New Year’s they have to do the three bows to the floor—the whole thing. And as they get older they get a little more and more shy about that, but we keep enforcing it and other little things, too. For example, if my mother is sitting on my left, I don’t cross my legs so that the bottom of my feet faces her. You don’t do that with your parents. I make my kids pay attention to that, but they don’t get it. I tell them and they go, “Which way aren’t I allowed to cross my leg?” “You just don’t put the bottom of your foot facing toward your grandmother.” It’s that simple.

Kirkpatrick: There are certainly some images in your work that recur to become symbols. I’m thinking of the rose in your first book, or the cleaver that the Chinese butcher chops with at the end of The City in Which I Love You. How do images emerge for you and accrue meaning?

Lee: If an image comes to me, I don’t write it down immediately. I do this little trick in my head: it floats up to the top of my brain, and I look at it with my inner eye, and then I let it go down again. Then it bathes in the back part of my brain, picking up more and more association. And the more association the image picks up, the better for me, because then when it comes out, it radiates everything that it talks about. It feels like I’m looking into a pond or a lake and I’m waiting for the image to come, and when it comes I sometimes snatch it too quickly. Part of my own discipline is to see if it goes back down or not. If it goes back down, let it go. But then if I haven’t written something that I like in a week, it’s hard to say, “Go back, I’ll let you go.” You have to keep letting it go back, and so it keeps bathing itself in all those associations and resonances.

Kirkpatrick: It sounds like your material is being worked internally a lot before it even comes to the page.

Lee: Each poem does its own thing, and demands different things of me. I’m a complete slave—that’s what I feel like. I’m just a servant. When it speaks, I listen. When it doesn’t speak, I’m bereft. I’m not the master at all. Some drafts are just a mess, like hundreds of pages, and some are one or two pages and I’m finished.

Kirkpatrick: I’m curious about your notion of the poetic line, and if the line comes into the work early on or later. And maybe this will be one of the questions that will start to make a transition from talking about poetry to prose.

Lee: I know this isn’t going to inspire a lot of confidence, but I haven’t a clue. If you learn carpentry, you do it and you get better. With poetry, I know less and less what I’m doing. But part of it is related to my own ideal to go toward unknowing. I want to write about what I don’t know. The poem is basically the body of my thought/feeling, right there on the page. It’s very different than speaking in complete sentences. Speaking in lines, there’s more tenuousness and kinetic energy, there’s more room for surprise.

Kirkpatrick: I’m wondering how you see the poet’s role emerging at this time in America, given the particular point of view you bring to that question?

Lee: The poet’s mission is to accomplish this whole mind and whole being in a poem. We have this poet in Chinese. His name is Li-po. He used to write his poems, read them to his washerwoman, then fold them up into little boats and send them down the river. He never showed them to anybody except this washerwoman. His poems feel very Taoist to me, and there’s a belief among the Taoists that if you write a poem of whole mind, you don’t have to show it to anybody. The poem is in the world already. Because a poem is a field of energy. And words are vibrations. And when we’re dealing with words, we’re dealing with very elemental things. When you make a sentence, you’re putting vibrations next to vibrations. So when you write a poem, you have already manifested in the world this field of vibration. And it’s a field of carefully negotiated harmonies and disharmonies and tensions and resolutions; it’s in the world, whether or not it gets published or seen. You’re bettering all the body of humanity. Because we are one and many. That’s how I see the role of the poet: bring those vibrations, those fields of energy together and make them manifest.

Kirkpatrick: Thank you. Would you read a little prose [from The Winged Seed]?

Lee: This is about birds. I wish I were a big duck. I feel like a duck. I love ducks. I love to eat them, too. That would make me, I guess, a cannibal. I don’t know what kind of bird I have in mind here. I used to go out with my father, and he would sketch figures of birds and I would watch, so this is about that. This is the place in the book where I’ve been going on at some length about my history, my ancestors. And then I end up asking, “But what do such stories have to do with me now?”

My love—this is basically a long love poem—but what do such stories have to do with me now? My love, this is a story about dying. A story I tell myself, when, in a darkened room whose one window looks out to a brick wall, I can’t sleep. This is not, however, a story about death. But dying. Dying is all. The earth filling to fill the sky with news of it. But only birds can reveal to us dying by flying. And so our eyes open to transparencies, hollow bones. The flight is nothing. The pattern. Aren’t the turns and dives overhead shed as well as fled? Husk. Merely what’s left behind by the dying. Isn’t dying what we’re doing? For dying occurs exactly at the bird. Did I say bird? I meant word. This is a story about a word. One word. Dying occurs exactly at the word. Neither before, nor after. Neither in anticipation of its saying nor in the silence afterward. To read such dying as it occurs in the field of the air, to divine meaning is to stay with the body of the bird at every moment of its newness, every instant of the turn, the glance, the bird, its gestures. The word is itself and gathers into itself pure turn. Sheer glance. True bird opening in violence at the very brink of the dying bird who is nothing if not the assembly of glance, thrust, and turn. The way the bird fills the dying out. The way it is equal to the dying at every place. There, there and there. Cannot disappoint the flying. For it dies, and such dying is saying. Such saying must be possible so saying might achieve a here and now. There is no horizon in this saying. Only the dying without remainder. There is no horizontal groping from here to there, no allegorical grasping after that from this. And a word as it is saying is the very ground. Not the saying as the word as it was said. Only the word saying is both present and actual. When the bird is dying, the bird is not dead. The word dead is altogether another thing than the bird dying. And when the birds stand at rest, no flying is disclosed, though the sky remains filled with news of our passing.

Littleford: Thank you for reading that passage. To begin with, I should probably say that I wrote a paper about the use of the riddle in Li-Young Lee’s memoir, The Winged Seed, and that’s why I’m entrusted to talk about this with you. The passage that you were reading is that kind of very allegorical and poetic speech that is interspersed throughout the book. It takes up major parts of the memoir, along with the more narrative parts of your story. That is a new convention of the literary riddle: to combine poetry with prose, yet to write the poetry as if it were prose and in continuing sentences rather than with line breaks. I’d just like to hear you talk more about your choice of the riddle for The Winged Seed.

Lee: My own love comes out of this phrase in Chinese which means “big empty.” In Taoist philosophy, there’s this state that they call “don’t know mind.” It’s the state of mind in which you don’t know anything. They call it “the big empty.” When you hear a haiku, the experience is “the big empty.” Say something like, “Such a moon the thief stops in the night to sing.” Wow, you know? You just feel a kind of spaciousness. Dickinson says it’s like the top of your head being taken off. So you’re not thinking anymore. You’re just suddenly empty, but full. It was that kind of don’t-know-ness that really interested me. There’s the fascination, of course, and the satisfaction when you figure riddles out, but I like the state when you can’t quite figure it out. Who is it—one of the poets, one of the old guys—said something like, “A poem has to escape the intelligence successfully.” I take that to mean the same thing: a poem has to impart don’t-know-mind. René Char said, “I leave you nothing to think.” I think the poem isn’t successful unless it imparts this don’t-know-mind. That’s why I love the riddle: it’s so beyond you. It gives you that.

Littleford: The facts of your story are very dramatic, and you can see them as an epic, like Homer’s Odyssey or a Hollywood movie, if you just presented the facts. Why did you choose not to write a movie?

Lee: I love the Old Testament and the New Testament. After I read those books, I felt the injunction that each of us is supposed to write a current testament, a gospel. The injunction isn’t just to study the Old and New Testaments; you’ve got to write your own. When I read the New Testament and the Old Testament, too—it’s broken down into two tendencies. One is a narrative tendency to reveal the presence of unaccountable forces. The other tendency I’d call “saying.” Those are things Christ speaks. He says things like “The last should be first, the first should be last,” and all of those things defy our intelligence. I don’t think that’s what they were meant to do. I think the figure of Christ is first and foremost a poet. What he was trying to impart by his parabolic speech was don’t-know-mind. Big empty. I don’t think we were meant to go in there and say, “Oh, this means I’m not supposed to eat fruit on Wednesday; I’m not supposed to wash my feet on Thursday.” I wanted to write a book that had both the narrative and that saying quality. That sounds like arrogance now that I’m saying it, because who could speak that way? A lot of Buddha’s sayings, too, are beyond comprehension. And the Upanishads. I wanted to write a sacred text.

Littleford: I love terrible things. With ferocity. There’s something else about the telling of one of your father’s stories. There’s the story of your father’s wonderful, miraculous escape while at sea in Indonesia, which is like Paul in the book of Acts, being miraculously saved from a shipwreck on the way to Italy. Anyway, you write that story, then you write about hearing that same story told by a friend of your father’s, and you feel some sense of annoyance when the story is told. I have two parts to this question. First, is there a way that the drama of the family story could be overpowering? And second, is there a way that a meaning has to be pondered that makes it yours?

Lee: That’s a great question, Laura. I had the feeling when I was little—and maybe we all do when we’re very little—that our lives are mythic in significance. I think my father felt that, too. To this day, I’ve been trying to dismantle him and to see him as a man, but every time I try to do that, another thing comes up, and he’s this mythic being again. Everything he went through is so mythic, it’s so huge, it’s perfect. His escape was miraculous: he almost died and came back to life. They had him in a suit, in a coffin—they were about to bury him—and he gasped and woke up, and he was like, What is this about? He gave his life over to serving the God he believed in and searching for that God at the same time. All of that stuff felt mythical to me when I was little, but I thought that was my secret. I thought, Well, I’m crazy, because everything feels big to me. Everything feels like it’s here, and it’s occurring somewhere else, too. I always held that as a kind of secret. I thought, Nobody would understand that. That’s why when I started hearing poetry. I thought, That’s talk that is double, small and large.

But that one place you’re talking about, where I felt something like shame. I live in Chicago now, but before I lived there I was visiting my sister, and we went to a restaurant, and in talking to this waiter we discovered he knew my father; he attended my father’s church in Hong Kong. My father was this evangelical minister, this big, big popular minister. He used to fill theaters like Billy Graham. He started telling us all this stuff about my father, and I felt ashamed. I thought that was my secret.

Littleford: That’s a mystery to me, too, and has stayed with me. We’ll just keep it in the riddle category. Throughout The Winged Seed, A Remembrance, your memoir, the word remembrance is important. In one way, the whole memoir is about memory and remembering. There is a ferocity, or intensity, where remembering is actually connected to creating the soul. There’s almost a creational soul—if you don’t remember, some of the soul is erased.

Lee: I do believe that. I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant or mean or anything. I’m not sure if everybody has a soul. But I am sure that we have to work toward it. It’s work to incubate a soul. I firmly believe there is a layer of memory that’s personal memory. Behind that, there’s something like race memory. I’m interested in getting through the personal memories to experience that bigger memory, that memory of the race. That’s the job of an artist, to find personal significance but also the huge collective significance. And a lot of that is remembering—remembering what we are. That we’re not just our personal history. We’re not just who we are in this life span. We’re something older. It’s in ourselves, our bones.

Littleford: Another riddle! I’m interested also in The Winged Seed where you write about the physical act of writing Chinese characters. Can you talk about that process of forming those gorgeous ideographs versus writing phonetically in English?

Lee: When I was little, we used to take these sheets of paper, with grids, and we had to write a word a hundred times, over and over again. That’s the way we learned to write. And my mother, when we came to this country, kept that up with us for a long time. We had these flash cards. She would flip the card up, and there’d be a picture, and we had to say the word. Sometimes she’d flash it the other way: it would be the character, and we’d have to say what it meant. When you’re looking at Chinese characters, it’s sad, because now they are very shorthand. They don’t have all the strokes anymore. Like a seventeen-stroke character, now they’ve whittled it down to three or seven strokes. But I like the real packed characters. They are like little pictures.

For instance, my father’s name had the word country in it. And one day I was writing the word country over and over again, and I realized, Oh, it’s a spear enclosed in a heart. Suddenly I felt like that really explained him. He had a barb inside of him that wounded him and hurt him all the time. And that reminded me of my father. So it’s like pictorial associations, not phonetic associations, though I’m sure that’s there, too. But the picture-making mind is very important to poetic writing and making. Because the picture-making mind is an idea. An image is an idea in its most pristine form. And then you can break it down. If you say—this is a haiku—“I look into a dragonfly’s eye and see the mountains over my shoulder,” that’s an image. It’s full. It’s also an idea. But if you say, “OK, the idea is, a large and a small and a small and a large” that’s not interesting, you see? The image itself is the pristine idea. Some of my writer friends tell me, “Oh no, no, an idea is one thing, an image isn’t an idea.” No, an image is the first idea. An idea is like a denatured image. So those little pictures are ideas, you know? Like a country, or a spear: that’s an idea. The picture of ‘good’ is a woman and a child. You know that’s an idea.

Littleford: Also, the poems look really beautiful because the characters are so precise. It is wonderful. This will be my last question before we open it up. As a writer of both prose and poetry, can you speak about your experience in both genres: what are the challenges, differences, that kind of thing?

Lee: I know we have some prose writers in the audience. I hope I don’t offend anybody, but I do feel that poetry is like a mother of all. I love prose, but I feel that what I want to hear is that manifold being speaking simultaneously, and one gets that in poetry. The best of Faulkner reads like poetry to me. I read As I Lay Dying like a long poem. The best of Melville reads like poetry to me. It’s a chorus of intentions and everything being resolved in a sentence. There’s that myriad, manifold thickness to it. When I wrote The Winged Seed, I went to New York to see my editor, and we were eating lunch and he said to me, “Li-Young, I think I know what you are doing.” I thought, Oh, no, he found me out! and he said, “You’re not going to get away with it. We didn’t pay you to write a prose poem.” And I said, “I’m sorry, but that’s my ambition.” I knew I wanted to write a long prose poem. The more poetry, the more eternity in it. That’s the way I see it.

Rockcastle: “The more poetry, the more eternity”—I’m going to take that back to the novelist’s desk and cry. As we promised, though, we are now going to turn the evening over to the audience for questions.

Question: How do you balance the demands of your everyday life with the demands of your art? Making a living, your family, doing your art—is there even a separation for you?

Lee: My first reaction is, I don’t balance it—I’m always out of balance. One moment I feel like I’m not spending enough time with the family; the other moment I feel like I’m not spending enough time thinking about the poems. But the older I get, the more I realize that they have something to do with each other. If I allow it, when I’m cooking, aesthetic consciousness becomes part of it, and the meal is better. If I’m playing with my kids, if I get into aesthetic consciousness, the game is better. I really do believe in the yogic quality of art, so that it isn’t something you do in that room, and when you come out you’re a totally different person. It does go into the life, and the life goes into the studio; they feed each other. It’s all yogic. That is, it all links us to our whole mind, our whole being.

Question: Do you meditate every day?

Lee: I do. But I don’t think everybody has to do it. I think writing poetry is the highest form of meditation. I meditate every day in remembrance of what my father taught me. Otherwise, I’d be this raging maniac, I’m sure. But when I come upon those ancient Taoist manuals, when they describe what they call the highest state of mind a person can achieve, it’s like they’re describing what goes into making a poem. They say, “Oh, your mind becomes very precise but very open. It’s very keen. The peripheral vision is very acute; even at the same time, you’re centered.” And I’m thinking, That’s what I feel like when I’m writing a poem. Writing a poem must be the highest state; I’ve never felt anything like that meditating.

Question: In one of your reflections tonight, there were strong references to religious passion. You spoke about creating one’s own testament as a very conscious reference to Biblical text. And you’re probably aware that in many religious traditions there is a very vocal expressive quality alongside a very silent, passive quality. Poetry, of course, thrives on the oblique, and there has been a sense that poets have to use words, and they have to sound, they have to say things. But very often when they are at their very best, they’re leading their readers and themselves toward a kind of silence that’s beyond the noise of regular day-to-day speech. Do you practice any of these, this form of language toward silence, in your work?

Lee: I think I do. I love reading Eckhart. And when I read him I have the feeling that’s what’s going on. But I love that question because there’s two kinds of silences: there’s the silence when there’s no noise, and there’s the kind of pregnant silence. That’s the one I’m looking for. That’s when you know you’re in the presence of sacredness. I do have the feeling that one writes toward it. It’s that big empty again. When you read a great poem, it leaves you dumbfounded. You have nothing to say, nothing even to think. Your mind is just swept clean.

Question: I have a couple of questions about The Winged Seed. After your father died, you said your family burned its belongings. Did that really happen, and why?

Lee: It did happen, and I don’t know why. When my father died, I remember I walked into the house. I said hello to my mother and walked into his room where he slept. My father slept like a rock, literally. And I lay down on his bed and fell asleep. When I woke up I heard a party or something going on. And all the relatives were there, and we were in the stage of hysteria. We were laughing constantly, for four days straight. We dragged huge garbage cans out into the yard under these apple trees, and we dumped everything in them and poured a bunch of gasoline in and just lit the whole thing up. And we stood under those trees for days watching the burning. With no bathing. Nothing. We took turns standing there, and our faces and bodies covered with soot. And part of the wood that we were burning, a huge splinter came flying out of the fire and shot right into my youngest brother’s thigh. It went through his jeans and burned him. I don’t know what that was about. But the whole time we were there drinking sour mash and laughing. We were hysterical. And we didn’t know how to express it, so we just laughed constantly. It was almost crazy. There was no mourning, no crying. And when it was over, everybody kind of woke up and said, ‘Wasn’t that weird?’ And we all went our separate ways.

Question: In The Winged Seed you mention that you kissed your father. Why?

Lee: You know, we weren’t allowed to kiss him. I was real smart, though; I watched my father like the weather. So I knew there were moments I could sneak a kiss in, and it was OK. But other times you couldn’t even get near his face. It was just part of the Chinese tradition, like not crossing your legs with the bottom of your foot facing one of your parents. If my father were sitting here in the middle, and if my brother were sitting on either side of him, we could not talk across him or behind him. Wherever he was, he divided the space. And we were never allowed to stand above his head, we were never allowed to touch his hat or anything having to do with his hat, and we were never allowed to kiss him. It was really special when he was really sick and I would wash his hair. I’d be washing his head and thinking, I’m touching his head!

Question: I’m curious about the dynamic of your family when in your book your father was cutting out pieces to make a paper temple.

Lee: We would help him cut things out, or he would draw little patterns and he would say, “You cut this one out.” We were all involved. It was amazing to watch. My mother was there, and she would peel oranges for us while we were cutting.

Question: I wanted to know how your family reacted to your memoir. Were they receptive to it?

Lee: They didn’t react at all.

Question: Did they read it? I assume they read it.

Lee: I don’t know if they read it. I know my mother didn’t; she doesn’t read English. But I don’t know if anyone else read it.

Question: When you were writing, did you come to a point when you thought, I can’t write about this specific event for fear of dishonoring my family? Did that ever stop you from putting something in the memoir?

Lee: No. My feeling is, when you’re writing about it, you’re honoring it. I have a kind of law for my writing: I have to praise. If you can praise, then you can grieve. You’re not allowed to just bitch and moan. You have to praise first. I end up praising even though I write some very unseemly, ignoble things about my father. The other thing is that I’m very shameless, almost wanton. I just don’t care.

Question: Do you feel you have to have that attitude in order to be a writer?

Lee: Probably.

Question: How long did it take you to reach the point where you could have that attitude?

Lee: I was born with it. I’m shameless.

Question: Do you have a strong sense of self?

Lee: No. I’ve had people tell me before, “You have no sense of self, Li-Young.” And I say, “Well, thank you.” I’m not interested in my personal identity too much. I feel myself sometimes clinging to it. I get terrified because I’m getting older, I’m dying, or something like that. But I try not to cling to that. It doesn’t interest me. Maybe my sense of having no identity has to do with my experience of being Asian in this country. Sometimes I look at the culture and I think, I don’t see anything that resembles me. I guess it’s a struggle with the personal identity that I experience. But there is a “nobody-hood.” I like being nobody. It’s like Emily Dickinson’s thing: “I’m Nobody!” There’s a richness to it. Of course, oftentimes, it’s terrifying. You look around the culture and you think, I really am nobody.

Question: So you feel like you’re defining yourself in a poem?

Lee: I feel as if I’m trying to unearth a self or discover a self. I don’t feel like I’m actively defining.

Question: You lived in Indonesia as a child. Did you ever find Lami, the nanny you write about in your book, and whom you went back to Indonesia to find?

Lee: I went back to her village, but I couldn’t find her. I went to the Red Cross. I had no address. I had a picture. The Red Cross woman looked at the picture and said, “Well, if you don’t have an address, you’re going to have to do this mystically.” So I went to this mystic woman in a little shack, and she looked like she was eight thousand years old. Wow, I thought, the great mother, right? And she’s smoking this huge cigar, and she has eight speakers behind her and a little receiver there with a tape deck. She takes the photo, looks at it, puts the photo down in the table, drips some wax around it and goes through the ceremony. And then she puts on the Rolling Stones. She cranks that thing up full-blast. I was going like this (puts hands over ears). My sister was with me. And the old woman is sitting in front of these eight speakers, smoking her stogie for about ten minutes. Then she turned the tape off and she said, “I can give you a couple of villages you might want to try, but I think you’re going to be heartbroken on this trip.” So she gave me a couple of villages and we went there. And I was heartbroken.

Question: I have a question about process. I’ve been thinking about the noting of vibrations, about words as vibrations. When you are writing poetry, do you speak the poems before you write them on the page, or is it an internal process, like an internal speaking?

Lee: It’s both. Sometimes a phrase will come to me, and something will just tell me, “Don’t write it down. Just let it rattle around in your head and pick up associations.” And sometimes something will come to me, just a voice or something, and an edict inside me will say, “Write that down, see what it looks like.” And I’ll write it down. So it’s all different; there’s no one way to do it. You know what it’s like? A poem is a lamp, and it’s got just enough oil to last for you to write the poem down. And when that oil is gone, the lamp disappears, and you can’t translate it to the next poem. There’s just enough oil there to guide your way through that poem—that’s it. The next one you start from scratch.

Rockcastle: And a novel is a big lamp.

Lee: It’s a power station!