“A
flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture…it’s just me in
the gowns of the wind.” Li-Young Lee, fr. ‘Have You Prayed’
It may have seemed de
rigeur to hear Li-Young Lee advise a host of young prize-winning Long Island
schoolkids at the Walt Whitman
Birthplace to emulate the Good Gray Poet’s capacity to ‘see the all’ and
communicate that vision through poetry.
But the life trajectory
by which Lee has found himself in the position to offer that bit of advice to
would-be next generation bards, at the annual Whitman birthday celebration in
West Hills, LI has not been de rigeur at all. In fact, it’s been decidedly
un-Whitmanlike.
“I struggled with
Whitman at first,” said Lee, a man whose family story in China – unlike
Whitman and his 19th century Dutch-English yeoman farmer origins --
is peppered with warlords, generals, gangsters and a short-lived 20th
century emperor. “But I grew up practicing Taoism, and was blown away by how
Eastern Walt sounded to me -- his expansiveness, his largeness, his vision of
the multitudity of the human soul. I wanted that in my work but I didn’t know
how he pulled it off. “
Struggle no more. Reconciling
Whitman’s ‘shirtsleeve transcendentalist’ conception to his own world view,
emergent from cultural traditions to which Whitman and other American romantics
could only allude, is well within the cognizance of this year’s poet in
residence at the Whitman birthplace.
Particularly when it
comes to yin and yang -- the concept of
duality forming a whole.
“Whitman’s expansive voice is part of his
picture – that’s his yang,” said Lee. “But to understand Whitman is to
understand that real power doesn’t come from expanding your ego, it comes from
practicing great emptiness, great isolation. That’s what Whitman did – his
expansive voice, his yang, exists in the context of his yin. You have to shave
your ego to do that. That’s what makes his work different from a slam poet.”
And that’s what makes
it possible for a writer like Lee, known for his capacity to ‘craft the
atmosphere of silence,’ to find common ground with Walt Whitman and his
nominative penchant for exhaustive cataloguing of particularities.
“I’ve thought a lot
about how Taoist Whitman really is,” said Lee. “In a sense, many of the Taoist
classics, translated into English, sound like Whitman. They’re concerned about
the all, the inflected all.”
“Lee reminds me of the
saying ‘walking into the river we turn not one ripple; walking into a forest we
turn not one leaf,’” noted Gladys Henderson, 2010 Long Island
Poet of the Year honoree at the Whitman Birthplace.
Ripples and leaves
aside, Lee’s voice has been turning heads, hearts and minds since he emerged in
the world of American poetry in the 1980s.
Li-Young Lee is the 34th
poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, a list of distinguished
figures that includes William Heyen,
Billy Collins, William Stafford, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Adrienne Rich, Allen
Ginsberg, Martin Espada, Sharon Olds and Robert Bly. Influenced by the
classical Chinese poets Li Bo and Tu Fu, his poetry is noted for its use of
silence and, according to Alex Lemon in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, its “near mysticism” which is nonetheless “fully
engaged in life and memory while building and shaping the self from words.”
“When
I write, I’m trying to make that which is visible—this face, this body,
this person—invisible, and at the same time, make what is invisible—that
which exists at the level of pure being—completely visible,” Lee explained at a recorded lecture and
reading at UC Berkeley.
The goal? To be one
with the cosmos. “I want to get there for real -- not just as a literary
experience, but a personal one.”
In a sense, everything
a person does can be a way to that goal, from sweeping a floor to mending a
shirt.
“But poetry is a way,”
he added quickly. “What you feel in a great poem is this pressure to see the
all. If you do your homework as a poet, if you try to account for things
rigorously, you will be practicing this vision.”
Those who would see the
American poetic voice incorporate the ‘great emptiness of yin’ into its
well-known capacity for big, expansive utterance may well hope that a few
students at this year’s Walt Whitman
birthday celebration in West Hills LI were paying attention to the advice of
Li-Young Lee – and are doing their homework.
