RATTLE Conversations

Li-Young Lee

148 rattle conversations Li-Young Lee is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001). His earlier collections are Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University, The City in Which I Love You (1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A new volume, Behind My Eyes, is forthcoming by W.W. Norton in January 2008. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Born in1957 of Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee learned early about loss and exile. His great grandfather was China’s first republican resident, and his father, a deeply religious Christian, was physician to Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Lee’s parents escaped to Indonesia. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno’s jails, fled Indonesia with his family to escape anti-Chinese sentiment. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Through the observation and translation of often unassuming and silent moments, the poetry of Li-Young Lee gives clear voice to the solemn and extraordinary beauty found within humanity. By employing hauntingly lyrical skill, and astute poetic awareness, Lee allows silence, sound, form, and spirit to emerge brilliantly onto the page. His poetry reveals a dialogue between the eternal and the temporal, and accentuates the joys and sorrows of family, home, loss, exile, and love. In “The City In Which I Love You,” the central long poem in his second collection, Li-Young Lee asks, “Is prayer, then, the proper attitude/for the mind that longs to be freely blown,/but which gets snagged on the barb/called world, that/tooth-ache, the actual?” Anyone who has seen him read will add that Lee is also one of the finest poetry readers alive. He lives in Chicago with his wife Donna, and their two sons. Li-Young Lee March 10, 2003 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. I don’t know how that works, Alan, I don’t know if you forget it, or is it 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? 149 150 rattle conversations Lee: No, no, I used to write letters in Chinese to my...