Thank you so much.
Thank you all for coming tonight AND the Poetry Center, as
always, for hosting us.
I am so delighted to be able to introduce Li-Young Lee to you.
In 1976, the groundbreaking anthology,
Another Republic came out, offering works in translation
by 17 European and South American writers--
writers who had become influential to contemporary US
poetry--
Francis Ponge, Zbigniew Herbert, Julio Cortazar,
Fernando Pessoa, Yehuda Amichai, Czeslaw Milosz, Nicanor Parra.
Yes, they were all men, but let's not hold
that against them.
[LAUGHTER]
Charles Simic and Mark Strand, the editors,
described the book as a cosmology
of a particular historical period,
nothing more, nothing less.
The poets were split into two categories, the mythological
and the historical.
One concerning itself with the unconscious,
a phenomenological interrogation,
a method for uncovering and using archetypal imagery.
The other concerning itself with the awareness
that, despite our Utopian yearnings,
we live in a world of wars, famine, and faithlessness
and that bearing witness to the social and political events
of our time matters.
It was a book that profoundly influenced and challenged me
as a youngish poet, trying to discern
what this art form was that I had been so profoundly drawn
to.
I hadn't thought of this anthology for decades
until, in the past few weeks, I read and reread
all of Li-Young Lee's poetry and poetry books
in preparation for his visit here.
I see now, to my astonishment and admiration,
that his poems swim in both of these streams, mythic
introspection about what it might mean
to be an ensouled creature and witness
bearing to the suffering of exiles
and the sense of dislocation that defines the refugee
experience.
Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia
in 1957, his parents Chinese political essays.
Lee's great grandfather, I believe, on his mother's side
was the first president of the Republic of China.
And Lee's father had been the personal physician
to Mao Zedong.
There's also some gangsters in there somewhere, I think.
Driven away by political oppression,
the family fled to Indonesia, where
Lee's father became an evangelical pastor
and taught at University.
Lee's father loved the King James Bible,
taught it as literature, and read it often aloud.
Its music comes into Li-Young Lee's poetry
as an unabashed biblical lyricism and the poet's
ongoing relationship with God, who or which
is represented in such stunning metaphors
as God, that old furnace or, I'm the proof God is distilling.
He has said that he considers every poem
to be a descendant of God.
When anti-Chinese sentiment rose under President Sukarno's
nationalism in Indonesia, Lee's father
was arrested, held as a political prisoner
for over a year.
After his release, the family fled from Hong Kong to Macau
to Japan, arriving in the United States in 1964,
where his father became a Presbyterian minister.
Traveling, Li-Young writes, republic to republic, oligarchy
to anarchy, to democracy, we arrive.
And in the 2008 book, Behind My Eyes, he writes in the poem,
"Self-Help For Fellow Refugees," if your name suggests a country
where bells might have been used for entertainment
or to announce the entrances and exits of seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,
it's probably best to dress in plain clothes when you arrive
in the United States and try not to talk too loud.
Li-Young Lee is the author of five books
of poems and a memoir.
His first book, Rose came out in 1986,
selected by Gerald Stern, who celebrated him
for his large vision, deep seriousness, and art,
and who wrote, I think we are in the presence of true spirit.
How true that has proved to be over the subsequent decades.
Among his distinctions, Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award,
Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of Poems,
the William Carlos Williams award,
and the distinguished semester he
spent in our U of A MFA program.
[LAUGHTER]
Throughout HIS books, the subjects
of death, intimacy, family, and exile pervade.
The poems are infused with humility and wisdom.
I did not know that the soul is cleaved so that the soul might
be restored.
Yes, he seems death-haunted, exile-haunted,
and God-haunted, yet, somehow, he
makes of this haunting an affirmation.
To say yes to life is to say yes to death.
To say no to death is to say no to living.
And what do you tell yourself about being and being gone?
The most recent book, The Undressing,
published by Norton in 2018 it seems even more metaphysical,
deeper, though grounded, as always,
in the particularities of the world's unread history
and the conundrums of love and death.
It has an uncanny way of slowing down
time in long, ruminative poems like, "Virtues of the Boring
Husband," in which he helps his wife
go to sleep by talking aloud to her in bed,
an incredibly extended and loving act of patience.
[LAUGHTER]
In the long title poem, "The Undressing,"
an erotic undressing is partnered
with the undressing of the inner life, that intimacy, occasions.
The poem arouses body and mind and the long, quiet, delicious
pas de deux of connection and separation.
But of course, you are here tonight
to let his beautiful poems speak for themselves.
So I am happy to ask you to join me
to welcome back to Tucson the much-beloved poet, Li-Young
Lee.
[APPLAUSE]