Riding a Horse That’s a Little Too Wild for You

Tod Marshall

The following conversation took place in Memphis, Tennessee, in Fall 1996. It first appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of Eastern Washington University Press from Range of the Possible: Interviews by Tod Marshall (2002).

Marshall: “The City in Which I Love You” is a very “twentieth-century” poem—a poem of fragmented memories, of exile, a poem that enacts a search for something to shore against one’s ruin. On the other hand, the spiritual longing of the poem seems more of the seventeenth century, closer to the work of Traherne, Vaughan, and Donne. Do you think of your work as marrying these two poetic impulses? Or do you see the modern quest poem—The Waste Land, The Cantos, and others—as being propelled by a spiritual hunger?

Lee: I feel a great affinity toward quest poetry and certainly a lot of affinity with Eliot’s quest, but I feel ultimately that there’s an arc, a trajectory that’s ancient as Homer. Every time someone asks, “Who am I?” that’s the quest, and I’m sure it was asked by many, many people. There’s something else, too. I think the impulse to write that kind of poem arises from the disparity that occurs when we realize who we are, but we think we can’t live it. So for me, it’s the realization of my identity and that identity as the universe. I am perfectly convinced that is what I am, the universe. I can’t live it. Why? So the poetry comes out of that. The poetry comes out of a need to somehow—in language—connect with universe mind, and somehow when I read poetry—and maybe all poetry is quest, a poetry of longing—I feel I’m in the presence of universe mind; that is, a mind that accomplishes a 360-degree seeing; it is manifold in consciousness, so that a line of poetry says one thing, but it also says many other things. That manifold quality of intention and consciousness: that feels to me like universe. So that’s why I read poetry, and that’s why I write it, to hear that voice, which is the voice of the universe.

Marshall: For many twentieth-century poets, that voice only comes through in riffs, fragments, rather than a complete discourse—Eliot’s ability to shape only a fractured answer to his quest. Pound’s Drafts. Is this a fundamental change in poetry?

Lee: The way I read it that fractured quality is bad faith the poet experiences. Say, for instance, religion lets him down. So he turns his back on religion, and he faces the profane life. But there’s a danger in that; in a way, it’s a kind of death. A poet’s dialogue is not with a human audience. Yes, the poem communicates: that’s a by-product. When a poet writes the poem, the dialogue is actually with the universe, and if we don’t realize that, our poetry and our art is in jeopardy. When the dialogue is carried on horizontally, with the culture, that is a lower form of art. When it is a dialogue with the universe, that is the highest realization of art.

Marshall: Would you say, then, that The Waste Land is a dialogue with culture . . .

Lee: Yes.

Marshall: . . . whereas, Four Quartets is a dialogue with the universe?

Lee: Absolutely. We hear big snatches of Four Quartets where it’s a dialogue with the universe. I think he’s most successful when that occurs; I think, though, that every artist goes through a period where our dialogue is with the culture. When we pick our clothes, it’s a dialogue with the culture. We choose our spouse; sometimes, it’s a dialogue with the culture. But ultimately, if we don’t realize that our actions are a dialogue with the universe, then our actions don’t have any power, capacity, because our horizontal dialogue is not as important.

Let’s give the example of two people watering plants. If one person watering the plant realizes that what he’s doing is a dialogue with his highest nature, the value of his watering the plant is very different from someone who’s watering the plant and his mind is distracted. Two identical actions with different values; I am convinced of this. We can see that—well, look at the example of you bathing your child. If you’re bathing your child and you’re in a mind where you’re totally present to what is going on in its temporal meaning and what is going on in its eternal meaning, the quality of your bathing your son is very different than if you’re doing it distractedly. The value of those two actions are very different, just like when a poet writes poetry and realizes, when he’s writing these poems, that he’s having a dialogue with his highest nature, his true self, which is the universe, or he’s just trying to write his poems in order to get into the Paris Review. The value of those two actions is very different, and the poem that comes out of them is different. So I would say that, yes, ultimately, all of us when we write poetry go through a period where our dialogue is with the canon—with Eliot, with Dante, with whom—but if a poet doesn’t discover a dialogue that is more urgent than that, that is more personal, that is more anxiety-ridden than that, that has a greater tension and whose goal is a greater harmony: if we don’t realize that, we’re always going to be middle-shelf poets whose dialogue is with the canon.

Marshall: You have reacted very strongly against being pigeonholed as an “Asian-American” writer. One of the reasons such a title angered you was that you felt you are a poet competing with the other great poets—Keats, Milton, Donne, others. Do you think that that was your “culture phase” and you’ve gone beyond that?

Lee: Yes. It’s a progression for me. The fine print of that question—“Where do you stand as an Asian-American writer?”—is a question about one’s dialogue with cultural significance. I would say the answer is nil; I have no dialogue with cultural existence. Culture made that up—Asian-American, African-American, whatever. I have no interest in that. I had an interest in spiritual lineage connected to poetry—through Eliot, Donne, Lorca, Tu Fu, Neruda, David the Psalmist. But I’ve realized that there is still the culture. Somehow an artist has to discover a dialogue that is so essential to his being, to his self, that it is no longer cultural or canonical, but a dialogue with your truest self. Your most naked spirit.

Marshall: That makes me think of Keats who, in his earlier odes—particularly “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—wrote with incredible attention to the cultural, through allusions and such. Even in the poignant nightingale ode, one eye is on the canon. But this isn’t so in “To Autumn” where he changes the dialogue from a concern about being one of “the great English Poets” to something larger and more poignant. He moves past his obsession.

Lee: Yes, and, of course, in order to be one of the great poets, you have to move past it. You have to discover a dialogue that is essential to you so that you can sing the songs, sing the poems, that only you can sing.

Marshall: What other poets would you point to as having achieved that progression?

Lee: I see it in Roethke. Many of Frost’s great poems. The instances where knowledge is the way and he’s speaking from a state of unknowing—or, I suppose, a state of knowing, because it is a state where you know in a manifold capacity.

Marshall: The poems where Frost is creating a “momentary stay against confusion”—but maybe not the one Frost thinks he’s creating.

Lee: Exactly. In poems like “Directive” there are moments when I’m sure the poem escaped even him, and that’s great, that’s what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It’s like riding a horse that’s a little too wild for you, so there’s this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it’s going to do.

Marshall: So do you return to Frost and Roethke and Eliot frequently?

Lee: And the Epistles.

Marshall: What about Williams?

Lee: I read a lot of Williams earlier, but lately I find that my assumptions differ from Williams’s. I can’t tell why this should be, but I assume the spirit, and the spirit is first. Even the body is spirit.

Marshall: And Williams is a very material poet.

Lee: Correct, and I can’t see it because there’s no ground. For me, apparent materiality has no materiality, especially now that physicists are proving that to us. The spirit for me—there’s a lot of materiality there. I can’t help but live with this constant feeling, this knowledge, that everything is fading away, there is no ground; there is no materiality to any of this, anything we see or touch. So where is ground? What is materiality? I can’t assume the material world. It seems to me then that Williams’s poetry is built on sand; it looks solid, but it isn’t because it speaks from a self that is grounded in things. But things have no materiality; they never have for me. Things don’t have materiality; every time I try to write about a piece of fruit or the body of my father, it disappears under my looking, under my gaze. It literally disappears. There’s nothing there; it’s all sound, all vibration. I’ve been looking for many, many years to find a ground, and I guess mind is the ground I’ve found. Mind is ground. So my and Williams’s assumptions are different.

It seems to me that for Roethke there is an assumption even in his early poems, that spirit is ground. I felt that the voice is ground. The voice of his early poems is present in his later poems, too, except that it is more capacious—there’s more for the voice—but it’s there all along. That voice is ground for Roethke, whereas in Williams, he’s almost pared it down to something where I don’t know if he was listening for a voice. He was so concerned with apparent materiality.

Marshall: And is the poem on the page that is so important to Williams yet another dimension of materiality?

Lee: Yes, yes. I think it has to do with a backward notion of what the past and the present are. The Eastern notion is that the past lies ahead of us, before us, and the future is behind us. We are moving into the future. If we can see it, it is already gone. To get entangled with a phantom. At the quantum level of apparent reality, the most basic level, there is no materiality; it’s sound, song. All of this materiality is the past. We are constantly inhabiting the immediate past. How do we get to a place where that’s not going on? And I might add this: the fractured quality of a lot of twentieth-century writing comes about because frequently we’ve taken our eyes off our homeland, our true place, and we’ve looked at the past. The past looks fractured and confused; we forget when we’re doing mimetic art; we think, Well, our art has to look like this reality, which is broken and confused and discontinuous. We’ve forgotten that this is not where we’re supposed to be looking. We’re not supposed to be looking forward, upward if you will, not back.

Marshall: How can one do this?

Lee: I suppose that through constant remembrance that all of this around us in this room is past; that all of this is fading away. It’s an exercise of the mind to think constantly that this false identity is fading away and my true self or identity is fading away and my true self or identity is universe or God. There are certain assumptions that I secretly carry around, and I don’t know if other poets share these. I assume that my nature is God. I assume that I am God, in my true nature. All of this, everything I see here, keeps me from remembering that. I would say that the way I try to do that is to live in constant remembrance of who I am. That I am not this. I am not this stuff that is fading away.

Marshall: But doesn’t God also inhabit all this stuff that is fading away? Is there some differentiation, some hierarchy between the “hum,” the song as manifest at the quantum level in this table, versus how it finds expression in you or me?

Lee: I think there is. First of all, it’s mysterious but necessary for us to probe this assertion. When we say “All of this is God, too,” we have to distinguish how God resides in all of this. God resides in all of this in law, which is transparent. So I would say, “Yes, all of this is part of God,” because God is the transparent, subtle law that holds all of this up. That holds all of this together. But it’s not this table. There is no this. All of this is an illusion.

Marshall: So logos as shaping force, whereas in human beings, logos finds embodiment?

Lee: In poetry, logos finds embodiment.

Marshall: Just poetry? What of other arts?

Lee: I don’t know other arts that well. I look at them; my brother is a painter. But I don’t want to claim that for other arts, because I don’t practice them. Music, certainly. But everything that reveals for us, law, that’s what logos is. Logos and law and Tao. They’re the same thing. It’s iron, absolute iron; autumn comes at a specific time and spring. It’s iron. The earth goes around the sun. That’s iron, but it’s also soft, transparent. You can’t point to it. So I would say that all art is yogic in that it yokes us to our highest nature; it reminds us of who we are. That’s our true self.

The true self is the one that speaks, and it doesn’t give a damn about the one that walks around in clothes. Sorry, it doesn’t. That true self voice is the only thing that will last. The rest is chaff. But there is a deep, subtle law. We live in the midst of law all the time. You turn on a light switch, and the light comes on because it obeys certain laws. I talk to you from this distance and you can hear me; if I were to talk to you from a greater distance, you can’t. That is governed by laws. We adhere to them whether we like it or not. Now, it seems to me that we can empower ourselves if we line up with it. And I don’t mean by that going to church or not smoking pot or being Republican or whatever. I don’t mean that. Those are human things. I’m saying line up with the voice that is the greatest inside you, that is deepest and smallest.

Marshall: In your vision, is it just that God or logos or law would allow cruelty? How do you account for cruelty?

Lee: I would say that human cruelty comes out of ignorance of who we are. If we realize that there is only one body and one mind—I don’t mean realize it intellectually, but in a more fundamental way—cruelty is only possible when we are ignorant of who we are and who the other person is. It’s God we’re speaking of. Tod, there are not two minds here. This interview is one mind speaking to itself. Do you understand? This is one mind reminding itself, by question and answer and so on, of what it is, of who it is. This is what I believe. I don’t experience this; there is a double experience for me. On one level, there are not two people talking here. There’s one mind trying to figure this out.

Cruelty is when I mistake you for something other than God. Or I mistake myself for someone other than God. If I practice our mutual divinity, there is no way that I could be cruel. It’s all practice. The logos is constantly enforced. All of this is fading away; that’s part of the logos; that’s part of the iron law. The words we spoke five minutes ago are irrevocably gone. Except as recorded here, but they will soon be gone from even this recording, even this text. That’s part of the law. It seems to me that we must align ourselves with that logos, if we don’t realize our true identity that we are the logos, we are the law, we are God. We have to practice mutual divinity.

Marshall: Sure, but there’s that skeptical voice inside of me saying that Li-Young Lee and I can agree about this all day, but if we go out on Central Avenue in Memphis or Michigan Avenue in Chicago, there will be human beings bludgeoning one another, and there is not going to be a revolution in consciousness that will allow for the mutual appreciation of the godhead. And so we enact religious and governmental contracts in order somehow to mimic—maybe even parody—the law you’re speaking of.

Lee: What I am saying is this. If we think of ourselves as separate countries I would have to say, “Well, I can’t govern anybody else; I can’t decide what anybody else should think.” I only know what I feel and intuit. So the only thing that I can do is practice. I can practice mutual divinity. I can’t ask anybody else to do it. It means, of course, the minute I wake up, I say, “Thank you.” While I’m brushing my teeth, I’m saying, “Thank you.” We have sixty thousand thoughts a day. How many times can I say “thank you” every day before my mind becomes blank, empty, nothing, and God can enter it?

Part of the practice of mantra, an Eastern practice, is the practice of emptying the mind, getting those sixty thousand thoughts so that they’re not various thoughts, but all one thought. And when you can make it all one thought, there is no thought, there is something larger coming to inhabit you. So, in a way, I think of poetry as mantra work; you’re trying to hit that one note and keep that note. “Back out all of this now too much for us, / Back in a time made simple by the loss”: That’s a mantra. “Time past and time present”—it’s like a mantra. That’s what it is to my understanding. So the only thing that I know I can do is practice it. I practice it. I’m not saying I’ve accomplished that; I’m saying I can begin again today. Ever since I was a child, that was a practice of living in constant remembrance of—call it whatever you want. Call it what the Sufis did; they picked the word for “fading away.” So they’re thinking it while they’re drinking coffee, “fading away.” “Fading away.” They’re looking out the window, and they’re thinking “fading away.” They get up and go to the bathroom—”fading away”—they look down at the table, and so on. That’s all they’re thinking. Some Buddhists think “thank you” constantly. It seems to me that all of that is yogic. It’s exercise. It’s making the mind.

Marshall: You have a rich ear, and it’s reflected in your poetry. I wonder how those two things fit together: the desire to capture that “one note” that is the God, that is the universe humming, and the desire to write something like your line “the round jubilance of peaches” that is so full of luscious sounds. In earlier work, were you more concerned with creating an aesthetic texture than capturing this mantra quality?

Lee: No. I’ve always felt that aesthetic thinking was the highest form of moral thinking. It is the highest form of ethical and logical thought.

Marshall: The beautiful and the good as one?

Lee: Right. I still believe that. I think it’s bad when poets say, “I don’t believe in the beautiful anymore. Look at the world.” Well, I say, “You’re looking the wrong way. You’re looking at the past. Poets should traffic in the ideal. You don’t traffic only in the past.” For me, as far back as I can remember, I was trying to hear a kind of hum, trying to feel it, and if I could hear or feel that hum, then the words just came and perched on that hum. If I don’t hear the hum, then I have to make the poem out of words. But if I’m hearing the hum and I hear it very clearly, the perfect words like birds will come and perch on that line. They will be the perfect words. But if my hearing is off—if it’s a little broken—and I’m faking it, then I’m putting words in there, making the illusion there is something underneath. No. I’m interested in the frequency under those words.

Is there that humming? And the humming, of course, is not only in the ear; it’s your whole body. I don’t write poems with my mind only. I know there are a lot of poems that when you read them you say, ‘Well, this is a mentality writing,’ and it may be a very great one. But it seems to me that poetry comes from my elbow, the ache in my knee. My hip. The soles of my feet. Literally. And whether or not they ache will determine what kind of language I’m using. The way my scalp feels. Whether or not I’m sexually aroused when I’m writing. I need to feel it with my whole being. You see, language for me isn’t a mental thinking; it’s like your whole body. Lawrence said that every man just writes with his penis, but you don’t just write with your penis; you write with your whole being. Your fingers, your hair. That’s what language is. It isn’t some flaky dandruff; we keep thinking that “there’s the world and there’s language that’s like some flaky dandruff that lands on it.” If that’s the way you think of it, then that’s the way it is for you. But that’s not the way that I experience language. Language feels to me like milk.

Marshall: Nectar.

Lee: Yes, like nectar.

Marshall: What of the formal impulses—you use couplets and other traditional forms, even poems that could be called sonnets?

Lee: The sonnet is a law, a shape of law. We think it’s a literary form. No! It was first a law, and then it became a literary form. But there are certain laws: you can make this move, you can make that move, and you can make this turn in a sonnet. The volta, a turn. But some people treat it like it’s an empty shelf, a shelf of books, and then you add the books and then you’ve got a sonnet. No. It’s whether or not there is a turning in the sonnet, a turning of consciousness.

Marshall: The couplet, the sonnet, the villanelle as Platonic ideals, as aesthetic forms that have worked, that have successfully rendered the beautiful?

Lee: Exactly. And you know, when I did those poems, I wanted to use the word “accident,” but the word “accident” doesn’t have enough fatality to it. It was fatal that “Goodnight” was in couplets, and I have no explanation why it was coming in couplets, but I knew that the minute I tried to understand, the poem would stop, so I didn’t try to understand. I let it come. Or, let’s say I write a version of a poem and something’s missing. I ask myself, “What’s the law here that I don’t see?” And then as I’m walking around one day or looking at the draft, I see “the couplet version,” the actual poem, as though something in front of my eyes disappeared and I saw the law under it. And it was saying “couplets.” So I put the poem in couplets and it works.

We deal in the invisible, not in the visible. That’s what a poet does. It’s not the visible world we’re dealing with. And that’s my argument with Williams, I guess—though I have to tell you that I love him. But he practiced poetry as though it’s a secular art. It is not. It is the practice of the sacred. I would say that all religion is fossilized poetry. Poets are the real practitioners of the sacred. The priests, churches, they come after us. Let them build. They are already the fossilized versions of what poets come up with. That’s the greatest calling for poets. Or we can write ditties. I see Eliot going wrong by putting himself in service to the Church. He should have realized he’s prior to the Church. The Church is for him, the way King David said the Sabbath is for man. He put man ahead of the Sabbath. The Church is for us; we’re not for the Church. When we make poems, that’s what the Church is referring to—the voice that we hear when we write poems or the visions that artists see when they make paintings. Rilke called us “bees of the invisible,” and he was right. It’s not the visible world we’re dealing with, because the law is transparent. You can’t see a transparency, but we put words there so you can feel it.

There is a body prior to the words; words clothe that body. But it’s not arbitrary; it’s not “body” and then “words.” If that body is humming, erect, it will magnetize certain words to it. You can’t see radio waves; you can’t see microwaves, but they’re there. And there are these other waves: the great voice.

Marshall: What is the poet’s responsibility toward the political? What do you understand “poetry of witness” to be? How does it connect to our culture?

Lee: I think that’s complicated. I think it has to do with forgetting the poet’s mission. I think we have a mission. When I first saw “poetry of witness,” I said, “Wow! Now here’s something right up my alley.” And then I looked at it and thought, Oh, they’re not witnessing the invisible. They’re witnessing the visible. I wasn’t interested in that. When I hear “poetry of witness,” I think of the poets witnessing the invisible. The poet shows how the invisible is more real than the visible—that the visible is merely a late outcome of an invisible reality that rules us the way the subconscious rules us. Our dreamscape is larger and rules us more than this waking state. Beyond the dreamscape there is another consciousness that rules us. I thought it meant “poetry of witnessing the invisible,” of witnessing our true nature—like Whitman was doing.

I think the poets of my generation have to make a break. We can’t be poets witnessing the visible; we have to be poets witnessing the invisible. Or else there’s no other hope. We know how the mind works. You keep witnessing the visible, then it will keep happening. In a strange way, a poet comes in cahoots with what it is he or she is putting down. They’re saying, “This is terrible! Look at it! Look at it!” It would be like taking an abused child and replaying in his mind his father abusing him. Would that have a good effect or a bad effect? We know now that that repeated behavior in the mind makes it so he can’t help but act it out. We’ve got to find a new recording for him; you’ve got to put something else in mind or he’ll keep perpetuating it.

The poet becomes a perpetrator of those crimes when he or she reproduces those crimes in his or her work. I know that I have done the same thing, but that was out of ignorance or a fear that the invisible doesn’t exist. In a way, Tod, I feel a kind of acceleration, a need to disillusion myself and stop thinking that the visible world is all that dear and that we can’t lose it. That’s a romanticism. We’re losing it. From our body, three billion cells a minute are going! And it’s faster than that three billion cells a minute rate; I just keep using the body as a point of reference. My words are disappearing faster than the cells in my body are reproducing, so all of this is going away. It’s romantic, stupidly romantic, naïve ignorance. It’s ignorance for us to think that we have to somehow witness all of this. No! That’s not our business; the poet’s business is to witness the spirit, the invisible, the law.

Marshall: What is the poet’s relationship, then, with individual words? What sort of referential connection do you think they have to do with this vanishing world?

Lee: Language’s mystery doesn’t come from the notion that it doesn’t refer to anything. What I find mysterious in language is that it’s involved in a state of infinite referral. A flower isn’t even a flower; it’s a referent for something else. Each animal refers to something else. The whole universe keeps referring infinitely back. That’s the way I experience it.

Marshall: An infinite regression of symbol?

Lee: Of referral. Every word refers infinitely for me. Certain words are more powerful. Because of my limitations—my personality—certain words have higher vibrations than other words. Because words have vibrations to me, I don’t experience sentences as a string of words. This is not a theory. I experience the length of a day, literally, as a sentence. One sentence. Or, I should say more clearly, as a unit of meaning.

Marshall: A measure?

Lee: A measure! I experience it as a measure. A sentence is a measure. But of what? It’s a measure of information; it can carry information; it can carry time. You can write two sentences using different words, and they’ll carry time differently. It can carry consciousness; it can carry different modes of consciousness. Certainly the way Neruda uses sentences is different from the way Frost uses sentences. There is more manifold consciousness in most Neruda sentences.

Marshall: You say a day is a measure—from rise to sleep. But there’s overlap.

Lee: Right. Beautiful. So it’s like sentence within sentence within sentence. A life is a day. In a way, during a day, from waking to sleeping, you get to enact your whole lifetime.

Marshall: The past overlaps into the future, then, in a continuum, and thus it’s very difficult to pinpoint and capture the present, the essence, the eternal moment crystallized.

Lee: Yes, no one is going to capture it. Especially if they’re talking about it. Because as long as you’re talking about it, you’re facing it. Sometimes you write three syntactical units called sentences, but the three of them actually create “a sentence.” I heard somewhere that the word “sentence” used to mean “truth.” If you said to someone, “You spoke sentence,” then you meant that he or she said something that had authority.

Marshall: In many of your poems you use a short line; so a vision of the words stretching across the page is quite a departure from that. Can you talk about your lineation?

Lee: When I wrote those earlier poems, I was actually thinking in lines. So the hesitation you experience at the end of those lines, I experienced. That’s the way I understood those lines.

Marshall: I feel those poems as moving vertically, down the page with a push. The movement in the memoir—we’re pushed along in a similar way, but the pace is much slower.

Lee: Even now, in the poems I’m writing, although they have longer line breaks, I can see now that the sentence is my concern. I like the idea that the line breaks make notation for the mind actually thinking; I like that. But it’s ultimately the sentence that I’m writing. Not the grammatical sentence, the measure.

Marshall: You mentioned earlier that—as you approach forty—the serious literary or cultural work that engaged you when you were younger is not important. And you also mentioned a desperate need for contemporary poets to reorient their work. What best captures the invisible? Do you ever feel that poetry, that language, isn’t up to the task?

Lee: I’m writing more than I ever have. My experience is that everything is discourse; it’s like a big roar, a big hum. Everything is language. Trees are language; birds are language. A bird is a cipher. A bird is a word. Beyond the word for bird, bird is a word. That’s my experience. A tree is a word that refers to something else. The ocean is a word; each wave is a word. Now I need to figure out what I do with this richness. Well, of course, praise. It’s the hardest thing to write, praise. What I’ve been writing, I hope, is just pure praise. I’ve been writing a lot, and I hope when I get a little time and go back to see what I’ve done that it’s praise. The language of praise. I literally feel, Wow! Every leaf is a word. A vibration. A word is a vibration; a leaf is a vibration. Physicists have been telling us that: material reality is vibration.

Marshall: So you don’t see yourself as ultimately despairing that you can’t capture this litany.

Lee: No, no! I feel just the opposite. I feel grateful because there was a period I went through, thinking, It’s all nothing, or something like that. But now, I don’t know what’s going on, I feel like it’s all language. It’s all conversing. Apples on the trees: I look at them and see all these words on the trees. It’s all language. This table is a very bad form of language. This room is language; when you walk into this room, it’s saying something. Your body reads it—whether you’re comfortable or not. You’re reading constantly. You walk into a restaurant: you know whether you’re comfortable or not—by the lighting, the people, etc. You’re reading. We’re walking through the world reading. By the time of day we read, Oh, I should be home now. We’re reading our children’s moods, our wives’ actions. We walk into a place like this, and think, Oh, I don’t mind talking here, but I don’t want to sleep here. Everything is language.

It isn’t a big turning that I experienced, a reorientation from the visible to the invisible. It was a realization that that was what I was always doing, always hearing. I started to entertain some of the “stuff” that’s in the canon; I forgot for a little bit that that was the horizontal, the cultural, and that wasn’t the richest mode for me. If you look at the earliest poems in Rose, you’ll see the vertical assumption. The assumption that the vertical reality was the primary reality and all of this was fading away, just “stuff” spinning off of that more important reality. The change was just in the realization.

Marshall: You haven’t published much poetry for the last few years. Your first two books were quite celebrated, recipients of awards and such. How does the award and prize culture of the literary world affect one’s work? Roethke, Yeats: you can point to numerous examples of poets who clip the articles and invest so much in reception.

Lee: I don’t do that. I’m not patting myself on the back; I’m just saying that I find it boring. I don’t clip reviews and articles and whatever. My wife did for a while, and then she stopped, too. She got bored, too. I think that dialogue is with the culture; I’m not interested in that. Look at it this way: it’s like if you and I are having a serious conversation and someone over there keeps wanting to talk about Laverne and Shirley. We could engage that or we could just say, “No, I realize that this is what we’re here to do.” I see that horizontal dialogue with the canon, with the culture, as a waste of energy. I’m being very practical; it’s a waste of energy.

Marshall: On the other hand, you rely, as someone who doesn’t teach, on people celebrating your work and awarding grants and inviting you to give readings and such.

Lee: I’ll tell you this. Let’s say there’s a man there and he’s carving cork. Little pieces of cork. Someone comes up to him and says, “What are you doing?” “Carving cork.” And not one pays attention to him. And he does whatever he wants: he wants to do a grasshopper, he does a grasshopper; he wants to do a cup and saucer, he does a cup and saucer; he wants to do a toilet, he does a toilet. And then one day, someone comes along and says, “My God! Those are beautiful; I’ll buy them all.” It would be foolish of that man to change what he was doing. Why should he change his orientation? The dialogue for him was with his work, and he should continue that way. Why should he change?

Marshall: I see your point.

Lee: It’s the same mistake as when we think our dialogue is only with the visible. Let’s say the poet keeps telling himself, “I am a good poet, I am a good poet.” And he works and works and works, and his book comes out and he wins the Pulitzer. Suddenly, the temptation is to put everything in front of one, to embrace the cultural dialogue, when the poet should be saying, “Get behind me; I knew I was good. You’re late! Stay behind me! I’m still at the beginning here. I am the master of this dialogue.”

Now that might mean everyone goes away or whatever, but I don’t believe that that’s important. I believe that when we line up with the law, the law wants to be revealed. It wills its own revelation; we’re in service to poetry. Poetry is something greater than us. You see, the whole universe is a poem! It has no rational meaning. It has no reason for being. Yet it is. All of the laws, all of the universe’s laws, are poetic laws. None of them are logical; all of them defy understanding. All of them are great. Everything we say about a great poem is true about the universe. A poem is a little universe. If we line ourselves up with that, the universe—God—can’t help but support that. It supports itself. I don’t mean to sound crazy, but I can’t help but think that. Let’s say I publish a third book of poems, and I think it’s my greatest work. Nobody reads it. That’s too bad. There may be a subpersonality inside of me that says, “Oh, gee, I’m sad.” But the me that works and loves poetry will look at that and say, “Whatever. My dialogue is not with that. I’ll have to be supported some other way. Go back and work at the warehouse. Whatever it is I have to do.” Whatever my life, this huge momentous life of mine that is beyond me, whatever it offers me, that’s what I’ll do.

I don’t like the idea that I depend on that culture. When a poet writes a poem, he or she has already created something better in the universe. By writing it! If he never publishes it, he’s already created more value in the universe than someone else who didn’t write it. That value comes back; it precipitates out into great things. Great things. I don’t believe the writing of poems is unrewarded if you don’t publish them. So it doesn’t get rewarded that way, which is the most direct way we see. It gets rewarded other ways. Your health. The health of your children. Your mental health. The wholeness of you and your children.

There’s nothing more heartbreaking than seeing a child suffer. And we think about the suffering that might be in store for them when we look at this culture. The highest thing we can do is practice art. There is only one mind, and so whatever we do in that mind—when we create more beauty there, more opening, more understanding, more light, when we shed more light in our own mind—affects the great mind. So you’re creating value when you write a poem. And I mean material value! They’ve proven that on the physical scale, that when a butterfly flies across Tianenmen Square, it affects the weather in Florida. In minute and inevitable ways, everything is connected. In the invisible realm—which has more reality than the visible realm because the visible is dying and without materiality—when somebody writes a poem, when they open themselves up to universe mind and that universe mind is suddenly present in the visible world, the poet isn’t the only one that gets the benefits. Universe mind comes down and that whole mind is a little more pure, a little more habitable. That’s why we’re the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I never understood that until recently. We keep the world from falling apart, and they don’t even know this! Not priests. Not ministers. Not rabbis. If we stop writing poems, you’ll see this world go into such darkness. They won’t even know what hit them.

Marshall: Quite an imperative . . .

Lee: Yes, and many poets are giving up that large mantle; they’re saying, “We’re witnesses of the visible.” No. That’s not our original mission. Our mission is witnessing the invisible and making it revealed in the visible so that everybody can line up and know what they’re lining up with. Like Whitman—lining up with the cosmos that they are. They aren’t lining up with the Pope or with “good behavior.” The true self is beyond good and evil, and all poems are the voice of the true self. When you read a poem, you’re hearing your true self. The more true self we uncover, the better for all of us. If you never publish another poem, but you write those poems, you’re already doing work in the spirit world that is absolutely necessary.

Marshall: So what would you say to a pessimist who says, “OK, Li-Young, but what about all this tawdriness—Baywatch, Las Vegas, the O.J. trial—that commands such popular attention? Do you really think that this ‘invisible’ stuff affects that?” What if the skeptic just rejects the Platonic premise of your argument?

Lee: If all the poets in the world stopped publishing, we would still be doing vital work. If no one read poetry, we would still be the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” We are still at the gates winnowing the visible. Publication is secondary; we’re doing it in the spirit realm already. Thoughts are like radio waves. They’re finer than radio waves, higher in vibration; we don’t have an instrument that detects them. Thoughts precipitate into action. If we don’t like what we see, we’re going to have to change our thinking. The mind is the only field of endeavor, the only field of work, that is fruitful to work in. It determines actions, which determine civilization, which determines health care reform, and on and on. But the mind is the first circle. If we work in the second circle, we don’t know the outcome. The poet works in the first circle. All the time. The outcome of invisible things is always visible. But unfortunately, we always want to deal in the realm of the outcome. Visible things are always just a reporting in the visible world; as poets we want to deal with those things at the source. We should want to deal with the cause, not the symptom. The poet is the one saying the best and brightest things to a reader: “You’re God; you’re cosmos; you’re universe.” The poet is walking around saying, “We are the universe. You are the universe; I am the universe.” That’s what Whitman did; that’s what King David did. What the hell are we doing? I see our mission as much larger than witnessing only the material world. And it isn’t to report on a twenty-years war. Twenty years? What is that? The news is that we are the universe. That’s the only news there ever was; that’s the only news that the poet reports that lasts. We want to hear the news. We need to hear the news.