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Li-Young Lee 1957-

in Title Index

from Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century

Widely respected by critics and admired by audiences, award-winning poet Li-Young Lee's poems evoke emotional complexity through their lyric intensity. Lee's poetry, much of which explores the themes of family, cultural alienation, identity, and memory, has been widely anthologized, and Lee's prose memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995) has been praised for its intricate interweaving of family history and myth as well as for the beauty and depth of Lee's prose.

Such important American poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke, and other American romantic writers have influenced Lee's work. In his introduction to Rose (1986), Lee's first collection of poems, Gerald Stern noted that in Lee's work one can see the influence of writers such as Keats and Rilke and, “among contemporaries, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and Philip Levine.” Writing from the particular, Asian-American experience toward the universal experiences of love, grief, and longing, Lee works both within and beyond the traditions of American lyric and romantic poetry. Throughout his books, Lee employs an inherited lyric tradition as a way of engaging and negotiating the cultural inheritance of his Chinese family.

Lee's compelling personal and family histories figure prominently in both his poetry and his prose. Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee is the son of Chinese immigrants. His father, Richard K.Y. Lee, was personal physician to Mao Zedong in China before moving with his wife and family to Jakarta. In Indonesia, Richard Lee worked as a university professor until representatives of the then anti-Chinese dictator arrested him in 1958. The Lee family escaped Indonesia in 1959 and spent several years traveling throughout Asia before finally emigrating to the United States in 1964. After settling in Pennsylvania, Lee's father became a Presbyterian minister.

Lee's complex relationship to his father is a recurring theme in his writing. Of Rose, Lee's first book of poetry, Roger Mitchell (1989) noted that, although the book is not wholly about Lee's relationship to his father, his father “enters almost all of these poems like a half-bidden ghost.” Indeed, throughout Rose, the father figure present in the poems takes on an increasingly mythic, otherworldly quality. In “Dreaming of Hair,” Lee writes,

Out of the grave

my father's hair

bursts. A strand

pierces my left sole, shoots

up bone, past ribs,

to the broken heart it stitches,

then down,

swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,

through the right foot

Here, it is the father's presence tying the son to the human world, even as he reaches for him from another. In his introduction to Rose, Stern refers to the father in Lee's poems as “godlike” and states that “the poet's job becomes … to withstand him and comprehend him, and variously love and fear him.” Much of Lee's writing exhibits this quality of being caught between wholly different realms of experience. In “The Gift,” Lee tells of a father removing a metal splinter from his son's hand:

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.

As is the case in “The Gift,” Lee's work consistently fuses simple daily activities, such as removing a splinter, carrying a bag of peaches, or washing one's father's feet, with a mythic, even surreal quality.

Lee's work also examines the conflicted space between two cultures: the Chinese culture of his parents and his heritage and the American culture in which he lives. Lee's poem “Persimmons” addresses this conflict by recounting the speaker's memory of a sixth-grade teacher who brings a persimmon, a “Chinese apple,” for the class to sample. The speaker knows, although the teacher does not, that the fruit is not ripe and will not be sweet. In the same poem, Lee recalls teaching his American wife words in Chinese: “Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten / Naked: I've forgotten / Ni, wo: you and me.” Here and elsewhere in Lee's work, the complicated experience of living between two cultures, the experience of exile, is examined and laid bare. In “Rain Diary,” Lee writes that he once asked his father, “Where are we going?”:

My question could have been, In what country

will your pillow finally come to rest

and the rain call you home?

His answer would have been the same,

my father of this America and a divided tongue

Lee's second book, The City in Which I Love You (1990), further explores the themes of exile, memory, and fractured, bicultural experience. In the first poem in the collection, “Furious Versions,” Lee recounts his family's flight into exile in the United States, “republic to republic, / oligarchy to anarchy to democracy, we arrived.” Lee is compelled to tell and retell his family's story because “the characters survive through the telling, / the teller survives / by his telling … But, no one / can tell without cease / our human / story, and so we / lose, lose.” Loss is a consistent theme in The City in Which I Love You; the poet contends here with the loss through death of a father and brother, the loss of memory, and even the loss of self. In “This Room and Everything in It,” Lee writes, “My body is estrangement.”

The long title poem of Lee's second collection is a sort of re-imagining of the biblical poem The Song of Songs, from which Lee's poem takes an epigraph. Poet-critic Judith Kitchen (1991) wrote that the poem is informed by “a dense language, thick with urgent rhythms and relentless desire—as though language itself were the other, the body of the beloved.” This is, however, not merely a love poem but an exploration into the redemptive qualities of love. Lee's is a complicated desire for the beloved and for the city itself, the “city I call home, in which I am a guest.” Later in the poem, he writes,

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

The scope and depth of “The City in Which I Love You” characterizes the ambitious reach of the poems in Lee's second collection. The urgency of language and rhythm that Kitchen identifies in the title poem can also be found in many other poems in the collection, such as “My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading,” “This Hour and What Is Dead,” and “The Cleaving.”

Lee's most recent work continues to explore themes of family and identity, as these lines from “Hurry toward Beginning,” a poem recently published in the Kenyon Review, attest:

I can't tell what my father said

about the sea we crossed together

from the sea itself, or the rose's noon

from my mother's crying

on the stairs, lost

between a country and a country.

Although he is among the most widely acclaimed poets of his generation as well as one of the most popular, Lee is still a young writer near the beginning of his career. He will no doubt be a significant force in contemporary American poetry for years to come.