An Interview with Li-Young Lee

AN INTERVIEW WITH LI-YOUNG LEE LI-YOUNG LEE Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents, Li-Young Lee came to the United States in 1964. He is the author of two books of poetry: Rose, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, and The City in Which I Love You, an Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection. His other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent book is The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. This interview was conducted by Matthew Fluharty in the fall of 1998, at Union Station in Chicago and by telephone. An Interview with Li-Young Lee/Matthew Fluharty Interviewer: We know from reading your work of your journey from Indonesia, through numerous countries and finally to Chicago. If someone asked you where you were from, what would you say? Lee: That is a hard question. I think that all of my work is about destiny and interrogates that very question. I suppose I would say I don't know. There is something in me that is absolutelyAmerican, absolutely assimilated, and there is something in me that is very resistant to assimilation. So is that Chinese? I have no idea. Interviewer: How does this question of identity work its way into your poetry? How does it shape your view of poetry's essential purpose? Lee: I feel that the work of poetry is like making potato latkes. Every poem is like a potato latke, that's all it is. On the other hand, it's the most important thing a person can do. I suppose it's because I believe poetry's work is to uncover a genuine or authentic human identity, an identity even prior to childhood. It's like the Zen question: What was your face before you were born? I think poetry tries to answer that, to come to terms with an identity that's ancient and eternally fresh because it is so ancient. If you think about it, poetic speech is so dense because it accounts for the manifold quality of our being. There are many selves in me. As I am speaking to you now, I am speaking out of one self, the self that is in conversation. But there is a self that was dreaming last night. Poetry means one thing, but it means a hundred other things too, because we are as humans manifold in being. Poetry accounts for the many-ness of who we are, and I think that is why its voice is so dense. Interviewer: Can you put a finger on some of the voices you are projecting into your work? Are they the voices of you, your family, your father? The Missouri Review · 83 Lee: I think the voice is a concerted voice, although we recognize that the richer a poem, the more manifold its voice. In my early poems, when I am talking about my father, he is the occasion for me to engage a certain kind of consciousness about him. There is something charged about his presence in my life, so that every time I emotionally encounter him this consciousness becomes present. Anymore I have given up distinguishing between my voice and my father's. The question for me is: When I say "me," what do I mean by "me"? Am I my mother, my father, my brother, my friends, my wife, my children, am I what I watched on TV? In the past scientists deluded themselves by saying there was an objective field of observation. It's like the Taoists say: In the ten thousand directions, where can I look and not look by the light of the self? Physicists are now telling us that what they observe is themselves. The observer changes the field of observation, so what you observe is you. We are the lamp that we see by. Interviewer: How do you deal with this when writing poetry? How do you channel this inner lamp? Lee: I am listening for the voice all the time. It's so simple to me that I am almost embarrassed because I don't have any fancy theories. I just sit and wait...