Saying Goodbye to the 999 Other Poems

Alan Fox

The following conversation took place 10 March 2003 in Los Angeles. It originally appeared in Rattle in 2004. Reprinted by permission.

Fox: Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?

Lee: Yeah, I guess I do. It was, “Here is a fish, make nice dish,” or something like that. I caught a little fish for my mother and I wrote that, I was just learning English, and I was just so amazed that words rhymed.

Fox: So your first poem was in English!

Lee: Right.

Fox: And how do you find writing in English? I assume it’s not your first language.

Lee: No, it isn’t. It’s like my third language. But I keep forgetting languages. My first language is Bahasa Indonesian, and I learned that from my nursemaid. My mother was absent a lot in the beginning because she was trying to get my father out of jail, and so after we left Indonesia I started learning Chinese and I lost all the Bahasa. Then I began to lose a lot of my Chinese when I was about fourteen so English became much more comfortable. I guess it’s buried under there. I don’t know how that works, Alan. I don’t know if you forget it, or it’s a buried language.

Fox: It’s probably different for different people. I assume you don’t use the other languages now, or do you?

Lee: Oh, I do. My mother only speaks Chinese, so I only speak Chinese with her. And I had a brother who recently died, and he didn’t speak any English, so I used Chinese with him. But after he died, it dawned on me that the people that I use Chinese with, there’s less and less of them. So I feel as if that language, my use of it, is getting less and less.

Fox: Have you written poetry in Chinese?

Lee: No, no, I used to write letters in Chinese to my mother. Up until college, I was still writing letters, but they got more and more elementary and so I don’t even write, I can’t even read, Chinese any more. But I was back in China about ten years ago, and within a week I was dreaming in Chinese. My wife is Italian-American, and I was answering her in Chinese, so it must have been just natural for me. And I was suddenly able to read a little bit more every day, signs and things, so I think it’s under there somewhere probably.

Fox: How is the process of writing poetry for you? Do you write every day, or when you feel like it, or what?

Lee: I don’t know, Alan. I feel like I actually am on the job 24 hours a day. I’m always listening for or trying to feel, just to get a sense of that field of mind that you’re in when you write, when a poem happens, so I’m always feeling around for that. I’m doing that 24 hours a day, and I’m ready to put everything down to write the poem. I got up this morning about 4:00 because I thought there was something happening. I wanted to sleep in because I went to bed late last night, but I thought, No, no, no, because it doesn’t always happen. So I got up and started writing—nothing came of it, a couple of lines. It’s so haphazard for me. I don’t have a system. I just feel like I’m doing it all the time. It’s really inefficient. I’ve tried to sit down and do it, but it doesn’t always work.

Fox: Do you have an idea of what tends to inspire you or the spark that starts the process?

Lee: I don’t know, Alan. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Lately I’ve been noticing that any situation I’m in—for instance, this interview—I’m more and more aware that so many things had to happen in order to make this meeting possible. Not only the phone calls and the invitation to the interview and my flying here in the airplane. Somebody had to invent the airplane, right? And then I think, Well, Rattle had to have happened for this interview to happen, which means, Stellasue, your life had to have a certain trajectory. Alan, your life had to have a certain trajectory to make all of this happen, right? And I think about the cab driver who took me to the airport and somebody—I just think it’s almost too much to disentangle, the myriad things that have to happen to make any situation occur. So I came to the conclusion that everything makes everything happen, and it dawned on me: that’s the way a poem happens. So I don’t know if there’s a particular cause. But a poem somehow is a version of that condition. And I think that’s part of the joy of reading poems. When we read a poem, we start to notice how words refer to each other from the beginning of the poem to the end. There’s this kind of manifold or myriad field of reference going on, of connections. So I don’t know what it is that ever makes me write a poem, you know, the sound of a bird or the smell of leaf mold, my hand, the coffee I had or the coffee I didn’t have, or the ache in my left knee. That’s part of the frustration because I feel as if at any moment a poem could occur because that condition of allness, of everythingness, is occurring all the time. And so what is so special about when it yields itself or manifests itself in language? I don’t know what that is, but I’ve been thinking about that. So I guess I don’t know what inspires me would be the answer.

Fox: Do you ever have an idea or a wish for what will happen to a poem, how it will be received, or what impact it might have?

Lee: I do. I wish the poem would last forever. I hope that it contributes to the evolution of humanity. That sounds arrogant or claiming too much, doesn’t it?

Fox: No, I wouldn’t think so, if that’s a wish. For me, I would have an idea of where I want it to go, what I want to have happen, perhaps unconsciously.

Lee: And I guess it’s happened to me, Alan. Reading poetry has helped me in my own evolving as a human being, so I want to return the favor.

Fox: When you read poetry, what has the greatest impact on you?

Lee: The doorway for me is the emotional: if there’s authentic feeling. If there isn’t, the poem can be intellectually really wonderful, but I’m not interested. I can appreciate it, I can respect it, I can stand in awe of it even, but if I’m not stirred, I don’t take it to my heart.

Fox: And what emotions do you like the best in a poem?

Lee: Maybe it’s not even emotions. Maybe what I really love when I read a poem is the visceral experience of a sense of wholeness, that somehow the poem I’ve encountered is a reflection of a psychic wholeness. It dawns on me, Alan, that every poem is a portrait of a speaker, right? So if my experience of that speaker is a deeply integrated but at the same time a highly differentiated psyche, then I get a real sense of satisfaction, a sense somehow that in the poem the emotional function is well informed of the intellectual function and the intellectual function is informed of the emotional function and they are both informed of the erotic function and the erotic function is informed of the spiritual function. Sometimes I have a problem when I read a poem that’s just the mental function; it seems uninformed of the physical functions or the emotional functions or the spiritual functions. Or even a poem that is just the spiritual function working overtime, but uninformed of the other functions. So what I love is a poem that somehow posits, proposes, a condition of wholeness.

Fox: Do you find the emotional part often when you read, or is it rare?

Lee: I think it’s very rare. I can’t tell, Alan, if it’s rare because it’s really difficult, or whether for the most part we don’t allow it into our lives. It may be disallowed in the culture at large. But maybe we haven’t evolved enough. Maybe our emotional function is retarded.

Fox: Maybe poetry is an acceptable way of conveying emotions.

Lee: But then you think about all the poets who we consider great—Eliot or Pound, I don’t think they’re particularly emotional poets. I see on your shelf there, Yehuda Amachai. I love him because there’s a lot of emotion in those poems. That’s really rare, and it’s emotion that feels to me that it’s not uninformed, that it’s of his intellect, but the intellect is very informed of the emotions, and they’re both informed of their temporality and their eternity. Amachai, I would say, is a poet that really gives me that. But that’s rare in English.

Fox: I agree. When we read submissions to Rattle, I have one rule: when I read the poem if I’m almost in tears or if I’m laughing, it’s in. And that doesn’t happen too often, either one.

Lee: Right, right. Why do think that is, Alan?

Fox: I think we look for emotional connection, and I think poetry is a way of doing that.

Lee: But then why are the people who are writing not doing that?

Fox: Ah! I think you’ve put your finger on it. I think it’s tough to do.

Lee: Yes, it’s tough to do.

Fox: Do you find that you’re inhibited in what you write? Do you ever censor, because you might reveal too much of yourself? Is that an issue for you?

Lee: No. Maybe it is an issue, but it’s kind of a backward issue because what I’m trying to do is reveal more and more. And I do recognize that there’s something inside of me that resists it. For instance, Stellasue has given me this new strategy into a poem. But there’s something that resists being revealed, so for me the problem isn’t that I’m revealing too much and I’m trying not to. No, the problem for me is that I’m trying to know myself, to self-reveal, to uncover. In this way poetry is apocalyptic, uncovering, as opposed to ecliptic, covering. And in the same way poetry is disillusioning in the best way—it frees us of our illusions. But there must be something inside of me that resists disillusionment, that wants to hold onto all my illusions, all my narrow definitions of what my self might be.

Fox: What have you written which is successful in conveying emotion in your own work?

Lee: I wrote something just recently that has a lot of emotion in it. I haven’t shown it to anybody yet, but I feel like it has a lot of emotion.

Fox: Do you typically show your work to anybody before you send it off for publication?

Lee: I show it to my wife.

Fox: Is she helpful?

Lee: She’s very helpful because she has a really good bullshit detector. I just read something to her over the phone. She said, “No, no, no, no, Li-Young, you don’t mean that.” And I tried to convince her; you know, I’m so defensive. “I did mean it.” And she said, “Now think about that. Did you really mean that?” I thought, All right, I didn’t mean it. It was just a device or something. She’s tough, she doesn’t mince any words.

Fox: Is that a good thing for you as a writer?

Lee: I think it is good to have somebody who’s not a writer. She comes from a coal-mining background, and she doesn’t particularly value literature. But it’s also valuable to have fellow poets reading. Which at the moment I don’t have.

Fox: It’s an interesting issue, the impulse to reveal and yet the contrary impulse to protect.

Lee: I don’t know what that’s about. It’s part of the whole difficulty in writing. When I’m sitting in front of an empty page, part of my problem is I feel like the poem could start anywhere. The page is almost a symbol of pure potential. I could start with the window or the bird or my feet or my shoes or my socks or my nose, my thumb—anywhere. But the minute I put the pencil down on the paper, the minute I start it, then the potential closes down. Then it starts to be about this particular poem. And even though you try to move that poem into a kind of spaciousness, you try to say as much as possible, but even so, it does feel as if you’re closing down into this particular poem. And so for me, the experience of writing one poem is saying goodbye to the 999 other poems that want to get written. So sometimes I do have the sense as if I’m like a little doorway and there are 10,000 poems that want to get through. So for me to pick one poem is to say goodbye to 9,999 other poems and that grief just makes me crazy, because I have to pick one. And so sometimes, it doesn’t make sense, because what I do is end up closing the door and saying “no” to all of them. The whole thing about revealing is so interesting because I do believe that the practice of poetry is a viable path to self-knowledge. If we study the things that human beings have made, it’s a way to study human beings. A poem is a product of the psyche, and it’s a way to study the psyche. When we write the poem, we can say, “Well, here’s where I am today.” So it’s a form of divination. We don’t even need to do the I Ching to find out what’s going on: we can just write a poem and say, “This is where I am.”

Fox: What reward do you get from writing poetry?

Lee: The experience of the all. Which is so strange to me because that’s our perennial condition. We’re always in the all. I don’t know why we need a piece of art or the writing of poem to remind us. When you’re in that trance state, if you’re writing the poem, it’s almost as if you’re omniscient. You know things you didn’t know you knew, and you see connections you didn’t think were there. And that condition of seeing all those myriad connections at once, it’s just that experience of the all.

Fox: How would you compare poetry as an art form with other art forms, music or sculpture or painting?

Lee: I think of poetry as a score for the human voice. All art forms reveal us to ourselves so all art forms are viable paths to self-knowledge, to knowledge of our primordial condition, our interconnectedness and interpenetratingness with everything else.

Fox: Do you do many poetry readings?

Lee: I’ve been doing a lot lately, well, for the last ten years I guess I’ve been doing a lot.

Fox: Is that something you enjoy?

Lee: I do, I do enjoy it when I remember what it is I would like to do. Because it seems to me that the most a poetry reading can be is the imparting of a kind of inner richness. The worst it can be when the audience feels, Boy, he’s really smart, or he’s really deep, or he’s really interesting. I feel like I’ve failed. But if I do a reading and the audience goes home and thinks, Wow, inner life is really rich, my inner solitude is really spacious, and maybe as a second or even a third or fourth thought, they think, Hey, he’s pretty good, then I succeeded. Again, I’m just returning the favor, because I’ve gone to readings where that’s exactly what I felt after hearing the reading: an inner richness or richness about life, or just being alive, and only almost as an afterthought, that person gave that feeling to me. God bless him, or her. I can’t tell whether this is my problem as a listener or the poet’s problem when I’m listening, but if I feel, Boy, that person’s really smart, or that person really knows how to use language, I feel as if psychic energy has been drained from me but not given back. Then I feel that’s not different from TV. I mean, the TV just drains your psychic energy and doesn’t give you anything back. In real art, the more psychic energy you put into it, the more you get back. You get it back tenfold.

Fox: Showing off is not helpful, but self-revelation on a deep, true level is.

Lee: That’s exactly how I would say it.

Fox: I would think that’s one of the most important benefits of poetry, to allow the reader to reveal him- or herself to him- or herself.

Lee: Right. It’s a real mysterious and wonderful thing that happens between the reader and the poem.

Fox: Do you find that audiences differ a great deal at your readings?

Lee: They do, in age or gender or class or race, but ultimately I’m trying to hit something that is the same. We’re all mortal human beings, part spirit, part matter, dying and eternal, male and female, dark and light, good and bad, so I guess I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the surface quality of the audience. I’m just trying to pay attention to the heart that’s afraid, that’s jubilant, sad, happy, clapping, singing, grieving. It seems to me that it’s all the same heart. It’s inflected differently with races and gender, but I never try to tailor the reading, because that could be my downfall, too.

Fox: How do you mean?

Lee: I just read to a high school audience and maybe I walked in there thinking, Well, I don’t care, they’re 18 or 17 or 16, they’re human beings and I’m a human being, so there must be some common ground here, but maybe I was wrong. They were so quiet I thought maybe, Did they all go to sleep, man, or what? Maybe they were just listening well. But maybe I should have tailored it a little more to a 17-year-old, 18-year-old audience. That seems like a bankrupt thing to do, to try to guess your audience. I believe in a common ground.

Fox: Do you ever teach writing?

Lee: I tried it a number of times, just enough times to come to the conclusion I can’t do it. It’s like sainthood, and I don’t even have a little bit of a saint in me. You go in, you open a vein and sometimes the student catches it in a bucket or a cup or a thimble, or they don’t catch it at all, and you’re bleeding all over the floor. That’s what it felt like. It is an incredible service that one is doing, and I wasn’t. What am I admitting? That I’m too stingy of spirit to do it? Not everybody is meant to be a teacher, right?

Fox: Absolutely, but look at it from the other point of view: What has helped you the most in terms of learning from others?

Lee: Being around poets helped me a lot. Being around them, seeing how they function in the world. For the most part, I would say how they somehow embody the condition of that “all” in a world that isn’t completely friendly to that condition. So the poets that I have always loved, who are living poets that I’ve loved and been around, their presence has taught me so much about poetry. The way they react to things, the way they see things, they way they are.

Fox: Who are some of your favorite poets?

Lee: I guess ones that come to mind, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, John Logan, Hayden Carruth, there are so many of them. Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Li-po, Tu Fu, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Michael Palmer, Alan Grossman. There are so many great poets. I think we’re living in a really special time. Somebody told me that there are more poets now in North America than there ever has been in the whole world. And I thought, Wow, that’s a lot. That’s really wonderful.

Fox: Do you find that there are cultural differences in the writing or response to poetry in the United States in comparison with other cultures, other countries?

Lee: I was in Indonesia and I saw this crazy poet. Boy, their idea of a poetry reading was very different. He had an ax hanging from the ceiling, and the ax was swinging back and forth, just missing him. He was ducking and chanting and shouting these poems. And I thought, Wow, that is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was an ax head, and it would sometimes stop, and he would swing it again, and it was just swinging around. He was drinking, had a bottle of beer that he broke, and he was lacerating himself with the broken bottle, and chanting poems, and he was in some sort of weird trance. I couldn’t tell whether it was theatrics or real, but the other people seemed in this trance with him. They were really into it, and shouting, and clapping, and responding gutturally, grunting when he was. But there must be some sort of cultural background for that, right? If we did that in this country, it would be just sensationalism?

Fox: Probably.

Lee: I’ve noticed in Indonesia the possessed quality of poetry had not gone out of favor yet. In North America or in Eurocentric countries we are suspicious of somebody who believes that poetry is a form of possession by higher powers.

Fox: Do you think that over the past 20 or 30 or 40 years poetry in the United States has become more popular, less popular?

Lee: More popular. There are more poets writing, more books published, more magazines, more MFA programs. The downside could be when we forget that it’s ultimately about spirit. The upside would be it’s a sign of our evolution.

Fox: Do you think that the writing of poetry can be taught?

Lee: I hope so. I feel as if I’m teaching myself. Maybe, not taught from the outside. It can be taught as a road to the interior. It can be taught that way, but I don’t think it can be taught like this writing scheme or this meter, or something like that.

Fox: What suggestions do you have for a new poetry writer?

Lee: Boy, I feel like a new poetry writer, Alan. Just keep doing it, believe in yourself, remind yourself. It’s the deepest thing you’re probably doing. Well, that’s not true: there are deeper things, such as raising children. Just keep believing in what you’re doing.

Fox: Do you like to hang out with poets?

Lee: I do. Some of the poets I mentioned, I love being in their presence. They always teach me to be more expansive, more welcoming, more accepting, compassionate. Maybe I’ve been lucky because I’ve heard poets are terrible, they’re stingy and self-aggrandizing, but that hasn’t been my experience. The poets I’ve known have all been extremely capacious in their emotional range, in their acceptance, in what they love and what they’ll tolerate. Maybe I’m just lucky. I don’t get to be around them all the time because of my conditions of work and family and where I’m at. There aren’t that many in Chicago.

Fox: You mentioned compassion. What’s the role of compassion in poetry?

Lee: I’m almost embarrassed to talk about this stuff because it’s so murky. If it weren’t for poetry I would be a worse human being. I can remember the day when I discovered the idea of writing poetry. I started to think, Wait a minute, I have to change. In order to write these poems I love so much, in order to write like, for instance, Emily Dickinson, I have to change. What she’s doing isn’t a technical issue at all; it’s about her being. And for me to write like that, I would have to get to that place, that complete openness and self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. I know there’s a lot of pain in those poems, but she’s willing to forgive what she’s doing in those poems, that is, be irrational, defy probability, all that stuff. I thought, OK, how do I reach that place in order to write like that? In order to earn the authority to say that? So I thought, I have to change.

Fox: Wonderful insight. So what did you do when you had this realization?

Lee: I just started thinking about why. It made me more self-reflective, noticing how I’m not consistent with what it is I’m saying. The poems somehow live ahead of me because they’re a paradigm for what I want to be, a paradigm for the consciousness or the love or the compassion or the tenderness that I want to embody. If I read Roethke with the tenderness he has for the natural world, I would have to ask myself, How do I get to that place, to be that tender? Or John Logan. I was just reading his poems, and I know a lot of people think he’s sentimental and overwrought, but I don’t. He’s tender and a master of the line. I just ask myself, How do I get to that place, to be able to say those things with authority? And I don’t know how. I guess maybe making the poem is self-making. Yeats said about revising poems: “It is myself I’m making.”

Fox: I think that to be a really good writer you have to access yourself in a true way.

Lee: Yes. I think ultimately, Alan, what I’ve been trying to say so clumsily for this past hour is I don’t think the poem or the poetry is the final opus. I don’t think the work is the poem or book of poems or the novel or the painting. It’s the self and that the making of the art is a way toward that total presence that one is trying to achieve. You can’t just go through the world and try to be. I think art is a viable path toward total presence.

Fox: Yes.

Lee: That took, what, three seconds to say. I should have said it in the beginning. The total presence is the grail. The poem is not the grail. The poem is a kind of divination. You write a poem, and you look at it and you go, Wow, I’m really dark today. And you say, Why? That’s a really incomplete, unfair view of existence. And then you realize you have to work through something. I look at the poem as looking into the mirror. How do I look today? How does my soul look today? But then, of course, you have to have some sort of ideal as to what a poem that manifests total presence would look like. And I think we do have models of that.

Fox: Such as?

Lee: I would say certain great poems by Robert Frost, like “Directive,” “West-Running Brook”—boy, that poem just breaks my heart every time I read it. That poem, “West-Running Brook,” is just amazing. The need of being versed in country things, poems like that, that give you an experience of total presence. Or even in Neruda’s poems, in Residence on Earth, even in their translations, somehow the presence gets translated. The work is not even the poem; the work is the self.

Fox: Poetry is—you used a good word—the mysterious.

Lee: It really is.

Fox: The process, the result, it’s very mysterious. I think it calls upon the poet to really look at himself or herself.

Lee: Yes, and it’s ultimately a kind of alchemy, Alan. Even a metaphor. We could think of it as a literary device, but that’s just so bankrupt to me, it just feels nauseating to me. But ultimately a metaphor marries two seemingly incompatible psychic contents. It marries them in an image that’s a metaphor, so it’s alchemical, right? You’re trying to happily integrate parts of your psyche that resist integration, maybe it’s feeling and thinking, but then you find an image, and image is like a perfect marriage of thinking and feeling. Whereas a statement would be all thinking. But an image or a metaphor is that composite of thinking, feeling, everything married together.

Fox: Why do you write poetry instead of novels or short stories or something else?

Lee: I have this theory, Alan. I notice, for instance, a poem is the scored human voice. Voice is speech, and all speech is done with the exhaled breath. You can’t inhale and speak so you have to breathe out. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the exhaled breath is the dying breath. When we breathe in, our bodies are full of life, our muscles have real tone, our blood is full of oxygen, our bones actually get very compacted, they actually get harder. There’s some proof for this, and we feel full of life and very comfortable. And when we exhale, our bones get softer, our muscles lose their tone and it’s the dying breath. Now when we speak, we’re using that dying breath. I think that gives writing a particularly tragic color, because you’re using the dying breath, inflecting or figuring your dying breath. But meaning gets born. The more you speak, the more meaning gets revealed so that meaning grows in opposite ratio to the vitality of the dying breath. As meaning gets bigger, the breath gets less and less. Which seems to me a paradigm of life—that as we die the meaning of our lives gets born, and that seems tragic to me. Because one feels so sharply that one is engaging in one’s own dying, when you’re scoring the human speech, you try to ransom that breath, you try to make it count as much as possible by packing it with as much psychic content as possible. The language that most approaches that state is poetry. A sentence of poetry is more packed than any other form of speech with psychic content, emotional content, intellectual content, spiritual content, visceral content. You’re more aware you have to spend this breath to give birth to meaning. Robert Frost knew that. He said, “Well spent is kept.” To keep the meaning you have to spend the breath.

Fox: I think what you’re doing now is like the process of writing a poem.

Lee: I’m also thinking there’s all these weird trajectories of force that go on when we write a sentence of speech. While vitality decreases, meaning gets born, and yet potential decreases. The beginning of the line is pure potential. Before you even put a word down you’re in a state of pure potential, but as the line proceeds, the potential is closed down. But then the poem keeps bringing your hand or your thinking back to the beginning of the line so it enacts this desire to return to pure potential all the time. You’re actually enacting in the writing of a poem the deepest laws that govern the universe. I don’t know why that should be a surprise, because ultimately if a poem is a paradigm of psyche and if psyche is a paradigm of cosmos, then, it’s obvious that a poem would be a paradigm of the all. Why is it every time I think about it it seems surprising or novel? You’re trying to ransom that dying breath. You just can’t stand the thought of death, so you try to pack everything in as much as possible.

Fox: Is that why many people have an aversion to poetry?

Lee: Yes! Of course! They can’t stand that density, the total presence. It is too much. Why is it too much?

Fox: Ah.

Lee: I think this is a weird time we’re living in, Alan, because I’ve noticed, for instance, people’s reactions to certain words. We’re living in a time where the word sincere is suddenly a bad thing. I don’t get it. I heard a poet say to me, “Oh, I hate sincerity.” And I thought, Oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I was talking to a poet and I said to her, “Well, for me, poetry as a form is disillusionment, right? It frees you of your illusions in order to uncover the condition of the all which we are constantly in the midst of.” And she said, ‘Well, I don’t like to be disillusioned.’ “Why? You want to be illusioned?” Hollywood gives us illusions. People Magazine gives us illusions. TV gives us illusions. But I think art gives us reality. And the reality that’s uncovered is so rich. Maybe that’s what it is—it’s not only rich and beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Because it’s so limitless it’s overwhelming. We can’t stand abundance and so we keep making models of scarcity. Horizontal models are all based on scarcity, but vertical models are based on abundance. We can’t stand the fact that ultimately this condition of the allness is what is our real condition. And so we don’t want to be disillusioned. I want to be disillusioned. When I first read the poets that I love, I thought, Wow, you mean, this is real existence, this is somebody speaking truthfully about my own experience of the all? And I just don’t want to live in illusion. And yet I’m my own worst enemy. I do recognize that I keep creating little illusions I can function inside of.

Fox: How would you say your work has evolved in the past ten or twenty years?

Lee: Well, I hope it’s gotten better, deeper, truer.

Fox: What would you consider to be better?

Lee: Fuller, fuller, more—the word that comes to mind is—naked, less, less dressing, more the thing, the true speaking directly, what it is, is exactly my experience, less dressing, fuller, more differentiated and at the same time integrating more psychic contents. I hope the presence that those poems impart is fuller, deeper.

Fox: And what would you like your work to be remembered for?

Lee: Oh, man, I don’t know. I just want to write a good poem.