Li-Young Lee: Selections

Li-Young Lee (1957–Present) is a poet, translator, and memoirist and the author of poetry collections including The Invention of the Darling (Norton, 2024), The Undressing (Norton, 2018), Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), Book of My Nights (BOA, 2001), The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1990), and Rose (BOA, 1993). His honors include the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Award, among many others. Lee’s poetry is influenced by the mystical, spiritual, and philosophical, and he often uses narrative and memories to investigate these themes. He writes on family, memory, and mortality, and his work’s relationship with these concepts has evolved over the course of his career. Lee has said that he considers every poem to be a “descendant of God.”

Introduction

There is no other writer like Li-Young Lee, whose lyrical explorations mine the limitlessness of the body and the body’s journey to uncover the spirit. For Lee, the sacred and the erotic are never in opposition, and neither are the bonds of material and religion. While Lee’s earlier work focused on the familial ties between father and son, father and partner, and father and mother, Lee’s most recent work focuses its eye on deeper intimacies: what the body reveals in isolation and surrender, stripped of its worldly anchors. All the while, the undercurrent of Lee’s every expression is God, God as father, God as time, God as manifested through the many loves that populate Lee’s collections, and finally God rooted in the self.

While I once studied Lee’s poems for what they understood or uncovered, I have come to Lee’s more recent poems as a literary disciple with head bowed, meditating on the divinity his poems invoke, listening for their reverberation and syncopation, sensing for the stir in the air, and waiting for what may return in song and the Word’s proclamations.

Li-Young Lee’s mysteries have grown in their confidence over these many decades, the journey of a speaker that has come full circle; once the self has been explored in relationship to the known world, there is then only the unknown to seek. When I think of the catalog of Li-Young Lee’s poems, I return to a quote by Stanley Kunitz: “We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.” When I was a young student of poetry in graduate school, this word perfection came to mind often in tandem with the mechanisms that worked to build and dismantle it.

I was never interested in Li-Young Lee’s flawlessness. I was enamored by his poems because their flaws led me to understand the perfect state of humanness. Lee’s poems are born from full-throated odes to the body, mind, and complicated spirit that inhabits the universe; they are able to shape shift, bruise, and regenerate. The perfection of lived experience is the dream itself, and Li-Young Lee, more than any other poet I have ever encountered, has caused me to dream. Kunitz continues on to articulate the work that Lee strives toward: “I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.”

—Tina Chang

Li-Young Lee’s selected poems in order of publication

1980s

“The Gift”

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.

There is no greater introduction to Li-Young Lee’s body of work than his stunning and deeply feeling poem, “The Gift.” Here, Lee reveals characters and themes inherent in his poems, such as the mighty and looming presence of the father, the passage of time, as well as the ways religion and prayer drive much of his vision. In “The Gift,” there are only two figures in the room as the father bends over his son’s hand to remove a splinter. The poem draws on two tendernesses: one of the past where the father shows the son a moment of parental nurturing, and one of the present where the son has grown into a man and removes a splinter from a beloved’s hand. Drawing on the origins of the speaker’s devotion, one can feel both grief and love with the inherited weight and delicacies of survival. Where past and present meet, there is memory; Lee is a master at drawing concentric circles around such remembrance.

Readers are left to contemplate the weight of the title and the gift’s meaning, which can be interpreted in several ways. We can see the father as the ultimate savior, having rescued the boy from something that could have harmed him; or we can view the gift as an evolution of love, from one person to another, one hand to another; or perhaps we might perceive this gift as an offering about the power of storytelling. As in Lee’s poem, “A Story,” the formidable figure of the father is the master of all orators, who in this poem possesses an otherworldly ability to transform a splinter into a lasting flame.

1990s

“The City In Which I Love You”

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I 
enter, without retreat or help from history, 
the days of no day, my earth 
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.

“The City in Which I Love You” is a search for an unattainable beloved, a pilgrimage made manifest in a textured and electric urban landscape. In this long poem, love is unfurling, galloping, and ferocious. There is no distinction between the love of a city and the ache for a lover, in its adoration and worship, fascination, and desire. Through scabbed streets, schoolyards, bus stations, and storefront stoops, between brick walls, and reaching to the farthest gold coast, the city is animated and pulsing as it sets the stage for Lee’s protagonist on a quest to find his beloved. Yet, it is made clear from the start that this is a love out of reach, its intensity having been achieved in the past though its former attainment serves as fuel for the speaker’s spiritual sojourn.

This poem is a haunting, its power derived by what it seeks to find. Along the way, the city shows the speaker the faces of its inhabitants, the various configurations of urban communities that potentially signal alternate versions of a self: “your otherness is perfect as my death. / Your otherness exhausts me.” This practice of mirroring in every wandering and discovery allows the seer to accept or refuse the palimpsests in his midst, “that man was not me; / his wound was his, his death not mine,” and “that woman was not me.” The unexpected visibility of people and their fleeting connections followed by their sudden disappearance reveal that the ghosts of love are perhaps more alive and enduring than what the secular world can sustain.

2000s

“Night Mirror”

Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.

To read a Li-Young Lee poem is to come in contact with deep song, a lyrical instrument so intimate that there is an initial instinct to turn away. In “Night Mirror,” the speaker begins with an epistolary gesture; like a love letter, the poem starts, “Li-Young, don’t feel lonely.” The utterance is undeniably vulnerable and calls the reader to open the door to isolation and potential melancholy, though Lee immediately turns the lens toward a moment that rings with earthly beauty as the speaker finds his own countenance mirrored in the wild, “when you look up / into great night and find / yourself […] peering / hugely out from between / a star and a star.”

The intimacy of “Night Mirror” calls to mind Ocean Vuong’s well-known poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” published 15 years later, where the speaker similarly begins, “Ocean, don’t be afraid. / The end of the road is so far ahead / it is already behind us.” Both poets explore the human condition through attentive viewing of the natural world in a love affair with the practice of seeing and perceiving. One poet is a descendant of the other—two Asian American poets with distinct and notable stories of the refugee experience and their journey to the United States, though neither is limited to these sets of intricate narratives. Both poets are gifted in the art of building lyrical and sonic nuance, never sacrificing vulnerability and meaning, and as if responding to Lee’s plea in the initial line of “Night Mirror,” Vuong replies, “& remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world.” Themes of solitude and the lasting trauma of the refugee’s journey find gentle kinship in witnessing a world in flux, ultimately discovering permanence in the body’s watchful stillness.

“Immigrant Blues”

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

Li-Young Lee’s personal history serves as an essential fodder for “Immigrant Blues.” Lee was born to Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, after his father, who had served as a personal physician to Mao Zedong, moved his family there. In 1959, Lee and family fled Indonesia after his father was detained for a year as a political prisoner to escape anti-Chinese sentiment. Following a five-year journey through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they eventually settled in the United States in 1964. Lee draws on the journey of his family and delves into the texture and deep melancholy of the blues in this poem.

“It’s an old story from the previous century / about my father and me,” Lee writes. The stories of pain, resilience, and survival are passed down from one generation to the next as he paints a portrait of the patriarch of the family, the father, and also draws attention to his own great grandfather, who was the first president of the Republic of China. Lee achieves the complexity of this poem by drawing on multiple personal and political dimensions simultaneously.

Lee refers to the speaker’s father, son, and lover within the scope of a few short stanzas. This bold leaping brings us to a moment between the lovers where the speaker asks, “Am I inside you?” This could be interpreted as a spiritual or physical inquiry, and readers are meant to sit with the many possibilities of these intimacies. We are brought to a series of seeming immigration case studies titled “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora” and “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons.” The diction and tone of these titles illustrates a clinical approach to language, as these case studies are set against the backdrop of two lovers in a moment of sensual vulnerability. This lyrical dance of word choice is painfully and sometimes erotically played out as the speaker states, Practice until you feel / the language inside you, says the man,” demonstrating that language is an extension of the body, made more alive through the human experiences of love and loss, tragedy and ecstasy.

“Big Clock”

Crossing between gain and loss:
learning new words for the world and the things in it.
Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.
And collecting words in a different language
for those three primary colors:
staying, leaving, and returning.

Time is an engine that moves through all of Lee’s work. While time can be seen as a theme or a vehicle, in “Big Clock,” time is alive and a central symbol manifested in a train station. Though the clock stops, travelers continue to move, to speak, and evolve; in short, they never die. The figures of the mother and father are pivotal in many of Lee’s poems, and within this setting of departure and arrival where passengers shuttle from one appointment to another, the mother’s hair “kept growing longer and blacker” and the father’s “body kept filling up with time.” This emotional insistence on their survival through remembrance creates a tension between past and present.

How could it be that time stops but the world keeps moving? Or that a mother and father have left the known world but occupy an imaginary space so real that a son is filled to the brim with their presence? Lee has spoken openly about his interest in opposing states. He speaks in an interview with ecotheo review of

the Taiji Principle, [is the] principle [defined] as the dynamism of opposites. Practitioners of Taiji believe that it is precisely this principle which underlies all manifestations—material, spiritual, mental, and psychological—and that the study and practice of Taiji is the study and practice of the polarities of yin and yang in their different stages of separation and reconciliation.

There exists within the interior of the mind, “crossing between gain and loss,” these two states resting beside one another. Lee’s choice of polar states—strangers and intimacy, movement and stasis, death and memory—reveals a meditative mind at peace with unimaginably unlikely fates.