By Eddie Tay

Straight from my father’s wrath,
and long from my mother’s womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

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.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

(Li-Young Lee, 'The City in Which I Love You')

This fragment, arriving at the end of Li-Young Lee’s poem, crystallises many of the concerns that haunt his writings. It is representative of a body of poetry that consists of, among other things, lyrical meditations on love, whether familial or erotic.

The city in Lee’s poem is found everywhere and nowhere. It could be the City of God, the same city his father contemplates upon as a Presbyterian minister in a small Pennsylvania town after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno’s jails. It could be the City of America, where Lee’s family arrived at in 1964 after their travels from Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. Or it could be the City of Imagination, where his words found articulation.

As an American of Chinese-Indonesian descent, Lee’s poems have attracted no small amount of recognition even though he is, by American standards, not a prolific writer. His first poetry collection, Rose, was published in 1986 while he was working for a fashion accessories company. His second volume of poetry, The City in Which I Love You, appeared in 1990. 1995 saw the publication of The Wingseed: A Remembrance, a book-length autobiographical prose-poem. His most recent poetry collection, Book of My Nights, appeared in 2001.

In the past fifteen years, Lee was the recipient of several awards and grants from the Illinois Arts Council, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The City in Which I Love You was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Lee was awarded a fellowship in 1989 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1987, he received New York University's Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award for Rose.

Perhaps it is Lee’s confessional honesty, coupled with lines that effortlessly disguise the complexities of his poetic technique, which have won him such accolades. In 'Always a Rose' Lee uses as several starting points of his dreamlike meditations the image of a rose:

What shape floats
in the dark window, what
ragged form?
Mouth, scream, edges
barbed, it balances
on a long, spiked, crooked
stem. I know now,
as if I’d never known, this
black shape within the night’s black shape.

What emerges later from this simple but suggestively nightmarish image is a meditation on the death of his father:

In the procession of summers and the arrivals of days
the roses marched by in a blur: the roses burning
in the coffin between my father’s stiff hands.

The rose, we discover, is also capable of evoking moments of tenderness:

I know moments measured
by a kiss, or a tear, a pass of the hand along a loved one’s face.
I know lips that love me,
that return my kisses
by leaving on my cheek their salt.

It is also capable of invoking scenes from his unhappy childhood days:

And there is one I love, smallest among us–
let there be a rose for him–
who was driven from the foreign schoolyards
by fists and yelling, who trembled in anger in each retelling,
who played alone all the days,
though the afternoon trees were full of children.

Lee’s poems are poems of memory. His confessions remembers as well as dis-members. 'Furious Versions', for example, is a poem that contemplates the fragility of memory and self. “Memory revises me,” says Lee at one moment of the poem. The poem entertains the notion that we wake up every day as a different person. We are different people at different times, depending on different versions of our memory. But the poem is intriguing because it takes this argument to the extreme, to the point that the son wakes up one morning as the father. In this poem, Lee wakes up only to forget who he is; his dis-membered self requires an act of re-membering, and he relives his father’s memories of fleeing from Indonesia:

These days I waken in the used light
of someone’s spent life, to discover
the birds have stripped my various names of meaning
                                                                entire:
the sparrow by quarrel,
the dove by grievance.
I lie
dismantled. I feel
the hours. Do they veer
to dusk? Or dawn?
Will I rise and go
out into an American city?
Or walk down to the wilderness sea?
I might run with wife and children to the docks
to bribe an officer for our lives
and perilous passage.

Lee’s pared-down language is capable of exploring complex notions of self and memory just as it is capable of delivering graphic descriptions. At times, his poems, as in the case of 'The Waiting', are unapologetic in terms of portraying erotic scenes. The following describes a couple in a sexual act while the woman is breastfeeding her baby:

By murmurs and thingless words
the mother answers
her son’s sucking, his
gulping and mewling.
Rolling towards them, the man
reaches around her waist to stroke the boy’s head.
Slowly, she reaches behind
and clasps him, fastens
him to her, while he
half mounts her damp length,
and spills his semen between her knees.

For Lee, a poem is not a vehicle that transmutes personal experience into words. A poem is experience itself. 'Heir to All', for example, is a testament to the notion that it is the poem that brings the poet into being:

What I spill in a dream
runs under my door,
ahead of my arrival
and the year’s wide round,

to meet me in the color of hills
at dawn, or else collected
in a flower’s name
I trace with my finger
in a book.

Ultimately, Lee’s poems fascinate not only because they form a rich study in poetic technique; his poetry bears testimony to his bewilderment with self, place and identity. In his poetry, a personal universe emerges at the tip of a half-formed word. The world is for Lee a poem waiting to be written.

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