The Pregnant Silence That Opens

Indiana Review

The following conversation between Li-Young Lee and an audience at Indiana University took place early in 1999 and originally appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of Indiana Review. Reprinted by permission of Indiana Review.

Audience Member: How do you feel that your work has been influenced by cultural expectations?

Lee: From the very beginning my own dialogue has never been with the culture. In fact, that’s a problem for me. I don’t feel that my being or my work is a dialogue. It feels like a monologue. Throughout history, if we look at sciences, arts, everything that humankind had done, there’s only been one subject. Only one.

Sometimes that subject is hidden, and a secondary subject comes to the foreground. But the real subject is the self. If you look at the Hudson River Painters, you look at pictures of rivers. But all you have to do is touch the painting. There is no river there. You’re not really getting the river. Or van Gogh’s Irises. All you have to do is touch the painting. There are no irises there. What you’re really getting is van Gogh’s sense of proportion, his sense of line, depth, the medium, color, volume, perspective. What you’re getting is van Gogh’s presence. If you think about it, and it’s pretty amazing, the irises are a picture of him more than anything else. Or Frida Kahlo. Or anybody. The real subject is the presence doing it. I know we say: “Oh, there’s no self.” That’s suspicious to me. When is there not a self?

Scientists used to say that artists were crazy, that artists are too subjective, while scientists believed in an objective field of observation. But they’re revising their position, telling us that there’s no such thing as an objective field of observation. Everything was a projection. So if I look at atoms and say, “That’s order,” or “That’s chaos,” it says more about me. It doesn’t say anything about the atoms. We don’t know anything about the atoms. Even if there’s an apple on the table and I say, “That’s an apple for me to eat,” the word apple names my relationship to the fruit. The apple isn’t saying, “I’m an apple for you to eat.”

We don’t see by the light of what comes into our eyes. We see by the light of who we are. So who we are is the big mystery. Now if I can change that word from self to presence, I would say that the only subject there has ever been is the presence. Our presence, in all its manifold significance. When we look at the irises and paint them, when we look at the Hudson River and paint it, the presence is the subject. It has always been the subject. It’s hard to grasp sometimes, so we need an object, like the river. So it seems to me if the subject is the self, then that becomes a monologue. And if it’s a rich monologue, if it’s a pregnant one, then I would hope there are other people interested. But you don’t think really about that. You’re just trying to make a work that has the most fate in it. It’s a dialogue with the work. When you’re writing a poem, you’re dealing with so many things such as fate, chance, law, lawlessness, your personal will, and there’s this other will going on. Frost called it “braving alien entanglements.” That’s what he said a poem was. It’s a picture of the will braving alien entanglements. It isn’t a dialogue with Buddhism or Christianity, necessarily.

AM: Do you feel like your culture and your heritage are part of your self?

Lee: Yes, in inescapable ways. But I would say that I’m trying to write from an anonymous place. Some place that transcends culture, that is deeper than culture. Deeper than who my parents told me I was or deeper than who the TV tells me I am. And it’s a deeper place than Eliot says I am. Or Whitman. But it’s like we’re all on parallel paths.

Personally, I look at the culture and I don’t see any valid, authentic depiction of personhood. I’m an Asian male, and I look at all the depictions of Asian males, and I don’t identify with those at all. But then I look at males in general, depicted in culture, and I don’t identify with those either. The problem with culture is trying to find an authentic depiction of our personhood. And there’s very few. That’s the popular culture. Then you go to art. And you get more authentic depictions. But even in the art, it’s limited. Eliot’s depiction of what personhood is is very limited to me, as great as he is. I’m just trying to uncover an authentic personhood. That’s probably an impossible enterprise.

AM: Last night you said that you spent two years painting peaches and that you discovered, Wow, there’s so much in there that I don’t see up front. If a peach is so complicated, how complicated is it then to write about personhood?

Lee: Well, when you write about the peach, I think you’re writing about personhood. Whatever I say about it says as much about me as the peach. The object is infinitely ungraspable, which is probably why I’m obsessed with the figure of the lover in my own work. It seems to me that the lover is infinitely escaping me. You could be making love to that person and the essence of that person is not graspable. It’s that ungrasped thing. When I’m eating that peach—eating and making love are very similar to me—the escaping quality of the reality of eating that peach is what I’m trying to catch.

I spent years painting and the early thing you do is outline everything you paint. After a while, you don’t outline any more, and things begin to blur into each other. Our delineations of things have to do with context. It gets a little shaky. We’re used to thinking of the self as something I could draw—a classical version of the self standing like that [poses chin on fist]. That’s not the self. The self is much more fluid, bigger.

AM: How does the Buddhist goal of transcending or escaping the self fit in?

Lee: My small understanding of Buddhism is that they’re trying to transcend the self as object. It was a great Zen Buddhist who said, “In all the ten thousand directions, it’s the self looking back.” You’re never outside of who you are. Even if I said, “I’m going to write a poem in the voice of a rock,” it may help you see things you wouldn’t have seen, but it’s you writing the poem. There’s always this hidden person behind everything. And what I end up doing is projecting personhood out into the universe. I walk outside and it seems the whole world is speaking to me. The trees . . . mountains . . . rivers . . . creeks, rocks, clouds. I keep projecting personhood out there. There’s no bottom to it. I can’t get to a place where there’s no more person here. I would like to.

It’s treacherous and murderous sometimes to be a person. Art is a way to manifest complete presence. Let’s take the word self away. Let’s just talk about presence. That’s better. I don’t like the word self because it’s so object-oriented.

Poetic language is so manifold. Prose means mostly in one direction. It’s talking about that one thing. But poetry means so many things because it’s an instance of total or manifold presence. Our psychology is manifold. We have consciousness, subconsciousness, all of that. It’s not always accounted for in our daily life. But in art it accounts for all of who you are. Your fears, your sexuality, your body, your emotions—all of that comes into play when you’re making a work of art. And for me a work of art is weak when it doesn’t account for as much of who we are as possible.

AM: So what do you find to be the difference between painting and writing?

Lee: Well, there are obvious differences. In painting, the medium is so tactile; you’re squeezing paint, you’re mixing, there’s the smell of the paint. While language has its own qualities. In my own painting, I just love making marks. For a long time, I had a friend and the two of us used to go on rooftops and do graffiti all over the place. I remember doing the graffiti and feeling that mark-making was a really primitive, primal thing. You see a wall and you want to make a mark. So we used to make marks with big brushes. We used to paint with tar. So right now when I’m working, I love mark-making. I love hand script. I love writing on the canvas. I don’t do representation as much anymore. I spent years doing that. I love to make marks. I’m terrible. I see wet cement sidewalks, and I’ve got to write something in it. I’m the idiot who does that. Don’t you love to make marks? I think that influences my writing too. I love writing in pencil on paper because I love to make marks on the page. Writing in a sketchbook is mark-making. I love the brush on the canvas. I love clay. The virgin piece of clay and you just fall on it. I love that.

AM: I wanted to ask you about your theory of prosody. Especially in The City in Which I Love You, the line lengths vary so much, from very long lines to very short lines.

Lee: To be honest with you, I have no idea about line lengths. I’m about as ignorant a poet as you will probably find. I have no theories of prosody. I know that when I’m working, it feels to me I want to find a line or a stanza that has the most fate. The most inevitability. It seems to me that you can say a thing that has been so fateful that it could not have been spoken any other way. Maybe it’s arrogance on my part, but I don’t want to reduce it to a theory of prosody. When we encounter our own work, we find the same principle that makes the leaves fall, that makes the earth go around the sun. There are fateful qualities in the language, and I’m trying to find those. So my line breaks, as long as they have a lot of fate in them . . . and they don’t, always . . . fate and chance, they both come into play when you’re writing a poem.

AM: I’m curious how and why the memoir came about and what you thought prose did that the poetry didn’t.

Lee: Well, I don’t know if it was prose. What I set out to do was write a long prose poem. It drove my editor nuts. I’ll tell you how that came about. I was in New York one day at some function, and an agent came up to me and said, “You know, I think you could write some prose. Ever think about that?’ And I said no. We kind of became friends, and we kept in touch, and one day I lost my job. So she would bring it up occasionally, and one day when she brought it up I said, “Look, I think I might want to do this.” So I sent her a bunch of pages and she took all the prose poetry out of it and said, “I’m going to sell these fifteen pages.” And I said, “Yeah, but they might get the wrong idea.” And she said, “No, no, no.”

So they got me a deal and that kept me afloat for a year. And when the editor saw the other stuff I was writing, poor guy, he went a little nuts. When the book was near completion, I gave it to him, and we had lunch, and he said, “I know what you’re trying to do, Li-Young.” And I said, “What’s that?” “You’re trying to write a prose poem. But you understand it isn’t going to work. How are we going to sell a prose poem?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t think about that.” Because what I really wanted to do was to blacken a page with words. With your hand script. Just start at the upper left-hand corner and blacken that page. Because I love to make marks. I could have just colored it in.

AM: It’s a step up from the graffiti, right?

Lee: Yes, and I do feel that syntax is identity. The way you write a sentence says a lot about you and what you think the values of a sentence are. You write a sentence that’s hollow and sloppy or you write a sentence that’s just informative and there’s no other dimension to it, that says a lot about who you are. So, for me, syntax is identity. I wanted to find out what syntax was. And the sentence was a unit for me.

AM: If your editor said that you could no longer write a prose poem, what did you do to make it an artistically satisfying experience?

Lee: I just kept eating my lunch when he said that. My dialogue isn’t with him. It isn’t with the marketplace. It’s with something else. He said, “Before you get too deep here, let’s publish this now.” It kept getting more and more poetic. Little by little, the prose kept going away.

My feeling is that the closer something is to poetry, the closer it is to authentic complete being. I’m only interested in complete being. I’m not interested in anything else. I probably have ulterior motives in the subconscious, but I don’t think I do. It seems to be an encounter to make a work an instance of manifold presence. I won’t say “total” because that implies there’s an end to the enterprise. It seems to me an infinite enterprise. A manifold presence.

Prose can’t quite do it. Unless you’re writing prose like Faulkner. Which is a little bit different. If you look at his sentences, especially in a book like As I Lay Dying, that’s poetry. Much of As I Lay Dying reads like prose poetry. Much of Moby-Dick reads like prose poetry to me. And you recognize it by the manifold quality of the language. Suddenly the language begins to mean in so many different ways.

AM: You were talking about being as a kind of utterance. I was wondering if you had anything to say about silence in poetry. Is there anything you choose not to write about, either thematically or preferably, talking about words on the page?

Lee: I think I’m trying to use words to inflect the silence so that the silence becomes more palpable. I don’t think silence is just a lack of sound. When I hear silence, there’s a pregnancy in that word. There’s a pregnant kind of silence, the kind of silence I want to inflect. It’s like when sculptors use rock—stone—in order for us to experience space. You know the Gothic cathedrals? When you walk into them, it’s space you experience. The verticality of space, but they achieve it by using rock. Otherwise, you can’t point to it. It’s transparent. Art uncovers space, silence. We’re using words to make the silence palpable. Sitting there not talking isn’t quite it. It’s almost like you do that (bangs fist on table) to hear the silence afterwards. Wallace Stevens says, “I don’t know what I love more, the beauty of inflection or innuendo.” The sound of the blackbird calling or just after. So maybe it’s the thing that happens just after you read the line of poems or the entire poem, there’s a kind of pregnant silence that opens.

I remember reading Emily Dickinson. Sometimes I would read a line of hers and this big quiet would fill me. The Zenists call it a deep “a-ha.” Wordlessness. The Judaic tradition says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The blank page to me is both an illusion and a reality. Ultimately the voice has to embody what’s on the page. And I know we can play around with the blank space on the page, but the proving ground is the voice. When you read it, if you can’t feel the blanknesses of the voice on the page, then just scattering words doesn’t do it.

AM: What role does vanity play in your work?

Lee: My body loves to pick up a brush, dip it in tar, and write on a wall. There’s a physical thing. I don’t think much about it. I realize it’s vanity. And maybe that’s the thing about graffiti I like. It’s like the Tibetan sand paintings. They know that a wind can come and it’s gone. And that’s part of the beauty of the work. That you realize that something’s going to come along and erase it. It makes it exciting and scary. It’s like falling into an abyss.

AM: There seems to be a real strong sense of divinity in your work, and I’m wondering how the projection of the self relates to that kind of relationship?

Lee: The kind of poem I’m interested in is the kind that has manifold presences. Not just the personal self, but another presence. And if you want to say that’s a divine presence, I’m comfortable with that. In a way, there’s a kind of pregnant speech where you realize that there’s a personal self talking. Yet there’s the presence of a divine self. Art is the experience of the divine presence. No . . . art is the experience of an earthly profane presence in the context of a divine presence.

Now I know there’s a lot of art where you don’t experience a divine presence. That isn’t interesting to me. That’s actually a bankrupt enterprise. If you go too far down that road, that’s a horizontal experience. It’s like manifest destiny. Let’s kill some more people. And you keep moving out. The self keeps moving out. I think the self has to move vertically, so that there’s many presences speaking in a poem.

AM: Do you feel that writing requires a certain degree of vanity, an obsession with the self?

Lee: Yes, but that obsession can be really uninformed. If my obsession with the self has to deal with this personal, temporal self, that’s dangerous. There’s an eternal self and that inhabits a temporal self. If this obsession with the self doesn’t lead us to understanding, it’s just narcissism. Narcissism might be just a beginning. I know we live in a culture where someone called it “the heresy of self-love.” We’re not allowed to love ourselves. In a way, there’s no other path. You’ve got to come back to the self. All the problems in the world are because we cannot master ourselves. That’s the problem. All the social ills, all the cultural ills because of the misconception of the self. Artists are at the forefront of social change, not because they are actually involved in social things, but because they are actually changing and redefining what a self is.

AM: I would like to hear your thoughts about death in poetry.

Lee: I would say that death has to be in every poem. Because that’s part of our manifold being. I guess in a way a work is contradictory. I remember my first painting teacher. We were all walking through a field together, and these geese flew over. He looked up and everybody looked up with him to watch the geese fly over. And they were honking. It was lovely. And he said, “The loveliness of that would be wasted on us if we weren’t looking at it through our own death.” Looking at it through your own death, suddenly the geese flying overhead is momentous, mythic. If you just look at it in terms of those are birds with four-foot wingspans, then it becomes nothing. Death is present in everything. But at the same time it has to have eternity. It’s a perfect contradiction. Rilke said, “I’m looking for a contradiction to inhabit.” Who would say such a thing? It’s like saying, “Kill me.” That’s like when Moses says, “God, I want to see you.” And God says, “Well, nobody sees me and lives.” And Moses says, “Yeah, I want to see you.” Who would want that? To inhabit a contradiction. Our death and our eternity. That is very hard. A salient work of art has to do that. We must never have an experience and think we’re not dying.

AM: Do you feel poetry is essential?

Lee: It’s mother’s milk. We’d die without it. Nobody knows that, but it seems right to me. I think everybody’s got it backwards except us because we practice some form of art.

AM: What do you expect from the artist that would make them produce mother’s milk rather than Similac? What’s the difference and where’s the line?

Lee: Find the mother. At first we might like Similac. If you go to New York City, or L.A. or Santa Fe and look at paintings, 90 percent is Similac. I look through my poems all the time and think that 90 percent of that is Similac, and there’s one little strand of real mother’s milk. But find the mother, if we want to stick with that analogy. Contact with the mother. There’s no other way to get mother’s milk. In other words, no more second-hand stuff.