Poet of the Interior Life: Li-Young Lee

he Chinese poet Du Fu (712-770 A.D.) in a poem called "The Man With No Family To Take Care Of" tells the story of a young soldier who, being both an orphan and unmarried, feels rootless. As he heads back to war, he laments: "A living man, but with no family to take leave of - /how can I be called a true human being?"

Li-Young Lee's award-winning poetry is about becoming a "true human being." He charts this process in three books: Rose (1986), The City In Which I Love You (1990), and his most recent Book 0f My Nights (Boa Editions, 2001). A poet of the interior life, he describes its origins and follows its passage through daily events and towards death. His family, especially the father, is a recurring presence. (Lee was born in 1957 into a Chinese family in Indonesia. After his father spent time in Sukarno's jail, the family fled to Hong Kong, then to Macau and Japan, and finally to the U.S. when he was seven years old.)

In the poem "Braiding" (Rose), the poet, brushing and braiding his wife's hair, remembers his father doing the same for his mother and thinks of the future when he or his wife will be dead, and the braiding will be just a memory. Delicacy and gentleness are the signature virtues: "...my whole body/rocking in a rower's rhythm, a lover's/ even time, as the tangles are undone... ." Simple everyday actions are valued and used as objects of meditation; past, present and future mingle - these are the Lee trademarks.

"Eating Alone" (Rose) is about the preparation for a meal, beginning with harvesting the vegetables. Lee remembers his father showing him a rotten pear in which "a hornet/ spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice." He senses the presence of his father out in the garden, but no, it is only the shovel leaning against a tree. "White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas/fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame oil and garlic. And my own loneliness./What more could I, a young man, want." A sense of completeness is interwoven with aloneness, fantasy, meditation, and Chinese food. "What more..." indeed!

In the poem "Little Father" (Book of My Nights), when the father dies, "all the earth has become a house/whose rooms are the hours... ." The poem goes on to recount how, in this expanded house (the earth as well as the poet's heart) the poet metaphorically gives birth, in his heart, to his son; and, since his father has also been buried in his heart, the poet thus brings about the rebirth of his father. This poem, by no means an easy read, represents the concept of the circle, the perfect geometric and spiritual form in which the end lies in the beginning and the beginning lies in the end - in an unbroken round.

The difficulty of becoming a "true human being" is the focus of "The Cleaving" (The City In Which I Love You). The setting is a butcher shop presided over by a Chinese butcher who lops the heads off ducks efficiently and precisely; inside, the "gray brain grainy/ to eat."

As we shall see, the poem joins Christian (Lee's father was a Christian minister), Buddhist, and Chinese Taoist (pre-Buddhist) elements. The poet wonders if the duck shrank from its own death, as he himself might do "when judgment is passed" and "crimes are tallied." Other self-lacerating questions follow. The butcher offers the raw brain delicacy to the poet. He eats it and as he swallows it, he has a vision of disintegration and reintegration. A passage of strenuous physicality and sensuality, which affirms the body as necessary for producing spirit, pours out a gentler vision of immigrants crossing salt water, and the smells and sounds of a loved family - "thirteen gathered around the redwood/happy, talkative, voracious." With a cry of joy and pain, the poet lists the various shapes and "unique corruptions" of the faces and bodies around him, "beautiful by variety." The table scene is surreal, but real. The poet, accepting physical imperfection, recognizes the soul as also imperfect, yet still a device for remembering our wholeness. "God is the text" (perhaps God is the perfect wholeness) for the poet, a God centered in the body - immanent, not "out there," - more Taoist than Christian. Desiring to understand and explain the world, the poet "consumes" the world as a kind of symbolic feast (like Christians who eat the symbolic wafer representing the body and blood of Christ): he "eats" the butcher, the fish in the tank, all the "deaths at the sink, ...the-death-from-home...these Chinatown/ deaths, these American deaths."

He also "eats" the racist words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who pronounced the ugliness of the Chinese race. The cry of joy and pain becomes a howl of anger now, not without its humorous aspects because the poet serves up Emerson as a Chinese dish: "I would eat this head,/ glazed in pepper-speckled sauce,/the cooked eyes opaque in their sockets." He would "with a stiff tongue lick out/ the cheek-meat" from the Emerson dish in order to sing about his people.

But what does all the "eating" add up to? The poet is now confronted with the unceasing wheel of life, which reduces his anger and his "eating" to nothing: "we are nothing eating nothing" and "We gang the doors of death./That is, our deaths are fed that we may continue our daily dying... ."


The terror the butcher
scripts in the unhealed
air, the sorrow of his Shang
dynasty face,
African face with slit eyes.  He is
my sister, this
beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite,
keeper of sabbaths, diviner
of holy texts, this dark
dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one
with the Cambodian face, the Vietnamese face, this Chinese
I daily face,
this immigrant,
this man with my own face.

So what is it that the poet has learned? He has learned that the soul can be cleaved and that he can accept the cut, and kiss the knife and the wielder of the knife (a Taoist/Buddhist/Christian conclusion) and find wholeness again - and that in this realm of spiritual wholeness neither race nor gender nor any of the other usual divisions is relevant.

(I kept waiting for a brief mention here of Bruce Lee, the martial artist, man of body and spirit. After Bruce Lee - no relation to our poet as far as I know - the pervasive western stereotype of the Chinese man ceased to exist!)

But we may also become "true human beings" by understanding our place in the natural world. "Out of Hiding" (Book of My Nights) reverts to the naturalistic tradition of Chinese poetry: the poet, in experiencing the relative nature of the self and the awareness of the strangeness of the self, becomes another part of the garden:


Someone said my name in the garden,

while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,

grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient

under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.

When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,

while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.

Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.

The Chinese painter and writer of the sixth century, Hsieh Ho, observed that a painting - and we are talking here about roll paintings that unwind as one meanders through the painter's meditation - should have a spiritual movement of its own, the painter's meditation becoming the viewer's meditation. As we read Lee's poems, we are invited into the meditation that produced the poem and from there to continue with our own meditations. The danger, of course, is that the poet may become too abstract and private for the reader to follow.

Why are we here? What is the relationship between body and soul? Is God immanence or eminence? Do we need to call the Life Force or "the tao" or the centering principle "God," as do organized religions? How can we live our lives with reverence and care? How can we resolve conflicting feelings? How should we approach everyday objects and tasks? How should we make our peace with parents? What is the role of gender in life? To become whole, do we need to incorporate into our being the traditional male and female characteristics? How do we fit into nature? What does it mean to be a man? These are some of the questions, implicit and explicit, in Li-Young Lee's unique, frequently extraordinary, poetry of the interior person. The answers, when there are answers, may well be pointing to the perspectives we will encounter more and more, as mainstream American literature comes to represent the great variety of the American ethos.