The Poetry of Li-Young Lee and Timothy Bewes's Event of Postcolonial Shame

Where for many observers shame provides a grammar with which to speak the wounds of history in order to process them better, for Timothy Bewes shame is rather a formal gap or lack which, in part, emblematizes the impossibility of writing past colonialism and its legacies. This article explores the analytical traction provided by Bewes’s theorization with respect to the poetry of Li-Young Lee. In this light, Bewes’s advocacy of shame as ethical response comes to seem relevant to much more than postcolonial writing, and in this case to Lee’s poetic practice, aware that the quality of its witness must emerge from its acquaintance with gaps, with the dismantled, and with tales told by others.