Li-Young Lee

Long before I arrived at the UC, I was introduced to a very moving poet by the name Li-Young Lee. Something about his approach to his art, something about how he carried himself and how his written work jumped off the page both in my reading of it and in his reciting. He came to De Anza College back in 2005 for an afternoon and for that afternoon I could not think of any place I would rather be than in that conference room listening to him speak.

I won't go into his biography, you can look it up for yourself but I will give you one of my favorite poems from his work Book of My Nights, a collection of poems I bought from him when he came. He signed my book, too. What a nice, unassuming guy. I got his older work, Rose, for Christmas this year because I liked this one so much. Maybe I'll just give you two examples of his work...

Little Round

My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who's there to read them back?

My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.

My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother's sleeping face.

My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.

My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.

And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.

And my mother? She divides
the rice, today's portion from tomorrow's,
tomorrow's from ever after.

And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can't see.

And my God.
What have I done with my God?
-Li-Young Lee, 2001

I like so much the formatting of his work! It is so easily digested and yet so full of profound statements. Lee often writes about his family, about his father and mother, often in reminiscence, and of his wife and his departed brother. So much comes back to the central themes and motifs of the poems, that they could all be one poem but with different names of individual sections.

The second poem, from the other book Rose makes me feel good about my current situation and the hopes for the future.

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
-Li Young Lee, 1986