Disobedient Methods: On Li-Young Lee

Historically, we’ve often asked our poets to interrogate the “big” questions, using the lyric as a dexterous and capacious inquiry into love, death, heaven and hell, redemption, and eternity. The tradition is replete with writers questioning the immutable and vast unknowns, wherein verse becomes a means toward ecclesiastical questing. But after WWI, readers became skeptical of the lyric’s ambition to both enact and hold these larger questions, and perhaps rightfully so. The twentieth century, after all, had seen language once again corrupted by dictatorships, fascism, and military power, and had even seen advertising agencies deploy the lyric to sell everything from jeans to cars to laptops.

In the midst of such man-made destruction, spiritual gravitas—or even the poet’s search for it—felt fraught. For some, the thought of the lyric amplifying a “soul” was to careen backward to that embarrassingly baroque and naïvely passé idea that the poem might merge with the act of prayer. And yet this seems to be exactly Li-Young Lee’s ambition and achievement, and it is why Lee’s body of work, now spanning four decades, is so substantive to his many readers—myself included. His poems are often marked by bold, profound questions that most contemporary poets are told in writing workshops to avoid, lest they risk succumbing to the death blow of “sentimentality.” And while Lee’s nearly half-century commitment to this mode can be considered courageous—especially as an Asian American man, a signifier so often emasculated by connotations of quietude, lethargy, and deference—it would be a mistake to see his work as merely a reaction to the tastes and tendencies du jour.

Looking back at his six volumes, what becomes clear is a deliberate and calculated disobedience. Lee’s obsessions—love, family, faith, the divine, food, the body and its myriad mirages—return without apology. They in fact proliferate as his work evolves and develops. In his first four books, the material, historical, and political particulars are written as armature for what some might call more “universal” themes. Like his inspirations, Dickinson and Dante, Lee’s historical specificity does not overwhelm the lyric’s more abstract ideas, but rather they work in concert, amplifying each other. Indeed, Lee’s early work is adorned with the detritus of modern life, much like T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets or Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville, the language becoming inextricable from its subject.

In Lee’s work, we also witness a poet who has intimate knowledge of the Western canon but is not trapped by it; he is just as satisfied to consider it as yet another archive, one of many. A lack of categorical allegiance also marks his formal maneuvers. His gnomic syntax is often inspired by sage-poets like Rumi, Tu Fu, Li Bai, and Lao Tzu, as well as books of knowledge—secret codes of occult and religious edification. This, in turn, reveals a central motif in Lee’s poems: the desire to know while respecting the potency of mystery that extends beyond human scale—both resisting and acknowledging the Anthropocene. In this way Lee’s poetry achieves the rare elocution of being at once contemporary and archaic.

As Lee’s books progress, a marked turn is felt in his fifth effort, The Undressing. Gone are the catalogs of objects and subjects vernacular to a locale: the plastic shopping bag slapping along a fence on the city outskirts, the Chinese butchers and the grit of urban sidewalks, the soldiers on the Indonesian streets who persecuted the ethnic Chinese in the sixties—the cause for the Lee family’s forced migration to the United States. The newer poems make way for a more ethereal, unadorned voice, as if the trajectory of a poet, or at least this poet, is to undress language down to its bones, to an utterance so immediate that historical tags are felt as gravitational contextual forces, rather than narrative scaffolding. Lee moves from the articulation of idiosyncratic pleasure and suffering to the preoccupation that life itself is already inherently full of pleasure and suffering, both in personal and global contexts. As such, Lee does not see his family’s history as “material” to be mined endlessly after being written. While a biography, for Lee, is finite, perception is limitless—and perception is this poet’s ultimate quest.

Such an arc, for any poet, can only be known now, after forty years of consistent, steady work. In these decades, Lee has become one of the most influential lyric practitioners of our time, not only for Asian Americans like myself, but for poets all across the globe who have rendered his poems in translation. What a triumph, then, to celebrate this work by recognizing with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize one of our most—alas, I’ll say it—courageous technicians. Never once succumbing to the trends and fashions, and always insisting on how elusive, malleable, and unknowable the self truly is, Lee’s poems call to mind the Buddhist concept of learning, wherein knowledge is seen not as mental acquisition, but as a space-making endeavor, akin to clearing dust from a great mirror. Lee’s poems remind us that what we know, we have always already possessed, and that reading is simply the hand wiping clear a tiny corner of that mirror. The poems here are not objects—made or unmade—but methods. Used well, they reveal more of ourselves, to ourselves, as Lee aptly writes: “You are awake/inside a larger sleep inside/a greater waking.” Rare is the writer so influential as to hold multiple generations under the wide and swift wingspan of one voice. I count myself lucky to be one of many in its midst.