[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, friends.
That's beautiful.
Thank you all the powers that be for this.
It seemed impossible.
And thank you for coming home all the people.
I guess I'll read for about 30 or 40 minutes
and then take some questions.
I actually have a program I'm going to try to stick to.
If I get in trouble I'll switch.
This is called the "Echo and shadow."
Echo and shadow.
A room and a room.
And between them, she leans in the doorway to sing something.
Lentil right above her face, threshold dark
beneath her feet.
Her hands behind her head, gathering her hair
to tie and tuck at the name.
A world and a world.
Her face, her voice, dying and not dying.
And between them the curtains blowing.
And the shadows they make on her body, a shadow
of birds, a single flock.
A myriad and body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells or the shadow of the sound bells
make in the air mornings, evenings.
Everywhere I wait for her as even now
her voice seems a lasting echo of my heart calling me home.
Its story, an ocean beyond my human beginning.
Each wave tolling the whole note of my outcome and belonging.
Dwelling.
And so touching her might make him known to himself.
As though his hand moving over her body might find who he is.
As though he lay inside her a country,
his hands traveling uncovered.
As though such a country arose continually up out of her
to meet his hands setting forth and setting forth.
And the places on her body have no names
and she is what's immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged for forgetfulness.
The more time I spend writing the more dawns on me that
poetry I think distinguishes itself
from other forms of language because it's a double medium.
One of the mediums is speech or language.
I think the other medium and it's
an important one is silence.
And I think as time goes on that other medium begins
to assert itself more and more so that language becomes a way
to inflect the silence so that we can make it palpable
and an experience or something like greater interiority.
I don't know if that's what's going on in these things
but it's what--
This is called "Cloudy Mirror."
Cloudy mirror.
For all I know, a boy pressing flowers into a book
every morning growing older alone.
At his parents' dining room table,
eats each evening with living and the dead.
Eats out of the hands of the living
drinks from the eyes and mouths of the dead.
For who can name the world's behind any face,
take the nights on peering down.
I'll let someone else count the stars.
They post dawn so far behind my eyes
I'd have to sleep for years to say what
birds raise my ceiling there.
Each of us asked to remember what brought us to this day.
One might recall how she followed
a dog's path of fallen notes only
to arrive at her heart's shut house.
Another might answer God should never
have stood under his mother's window
and whispered unto you is born on with you.
What he meant from you shall be torn
and the child counting petals will
have to speak for himself while my own cloudy mirror
tells my story and never said a word.
When I was a young boy I would come downstairs every morning
and my father would be sitting on the kitchen table
and he would ask me have you prayed.
And I would lie all the time and say yes.
And I never felt a thing.
I never felt any guilt or anything.
And he's been dead for 21 years and about a year and a half
ago I was sitting in a hotel room and I heard his voice.
He said have you prayed and I was suddenly
overwhelmed with guilt.
[LAUGHTER]
So I told him yes.
And actually after I wrote this the guilt got worse.
[LAUGHTER]
You have to try again.
This is called "Have you Prayed."
When the wind turns and asks in my father's voice
have you prayed I know three things.
One, I'm not finished answering to the dead.
Two, a man is four winds and three fires.
And the four winds are his father's voice
his mother's voice or maybe he's seven winds and 10 fires.
And the fires are seeing, hearing,
touching dreaming, thinking.
Or is it the breath of God?
When the wind turns traveler and asks in my father's voice
have you prayed?
I remember three things.
One, a father's love is milk and sugar, two thirds worry,
two thirds grief.
And once left over is trimmed and leavened
to make the bread the dead and the living share.
And patience, that's to endure the terrible leavening
and kneading.
And wisdom, that's my father's face in sleep.
When the wind asks have you prayed, I know it's only me
reminding myself a flower is one station between Earth's wish
and Earth's rapture.
And blood was fire, salt, and breath
long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that
woke speaking.
It's just me in the gardens of the wind or my father
through me asking have you found your refuge yet.
Asking are you happy?
Funny, a troubled father, a happy son,
the wind with a voice and me without one.
Nativity.
In the dark a child might ask, what is the world just
to hear his sister promise an unfinished wing of heaven.
Just to hear his brother say a house inside a house.
But most of all to hear his mother
answer one more song then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess the question
finds its beginning in the answer
long growing inside the one who asked.
That restless boy, the night's darling.
Later, a man lying awake he might ask it again just
to hear the silence charge him, this night arching
over your sleepless wondering.
This night the near ground every reaching out to overreaches.
Just to remind himself out of what little Earth and duration.
Out of want immense goodbye each must
make a safe place of his heart before so strange
and wild against as God approaches.
In this poem, the poem ends with the names
of flowers that don't exist.
I just got stuck in the poem so I just started making up names.
[LAUGHTER]
People have actually told me I went out and looked
for this flowers in the poem
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm sorry I'll need to make that, what we'll just
call a disclaimer.
[LAUGHTER]
That's part of the way I solve problems.
I go into complete unreality imagination.
Difficult my life has been.
[LAUGHTER]
So here we go.
Actually a couple of them are real flowers I've been told.
[LAUGHTER]
Most of them aren't.
So this is called "The Shortcut Home".
In my sister's story my mother swears we were born
but God can't find us in any of his coat pockets.
Not in the empty and not in the filled.
We are in none of his hands, the fine or the terrible.
None of his shoes, the giant or the minute.
And neither are we hiding inside his apples,
neither in the perfect nor the ruined.
Not in the first mouthful and not in the last.
In my brother's story our death seems to us
from the highest branch of the oldest tree
the birds remember in song.
And we wander our father's house in search
of the origin of the hours.
In my story, but I don't have a story.
All I have are a few names of the flowers.
Morning glory, 7 o'clock, mother of wings, dreaming undone,
dreaming shouldered, story carrying backward up a stairs.
All I have is a sullen path I follow back to sleep.
Painted face, clouded pain, song in a jar.
Burning threshhold, bloody scrimmage,
voice strewn on the rocks.
First world.
Sister, we died in childhood remember?
Into birds we died and they're flying.
Toward all of sky we perished so completely
our mother cried where are my little ones.
Into her voice we died that wild singing dispersed
in days greater sentence.
And the days, we disappeared into them
and what they confided coming and going but where.
Of noon we died and of midnight our longings the bridges we
flung toward the future, longings we
wove in secret out of worry, wonder, and expectancy.
And we died of the future of colony and mission
only we could keep leaping into faces, trees, toys, houses,
seasons, sinking into roots, dreams, and books.
Nights beyond the house we looked up
and fell into the known configurations of stars.
Nights housed and in bed we closed our eyes
and dived into the unknown constellations.
The empty basket, the Jewel stair,
the table set for a guest.
Into our names we died then passed their precincts
and would not be persuaded.
Every world they kept in other bigger hands.
we who were haunted by suspicions that where we
stood there stood all worlds.
We died and I've been sowing grass and flowers ever since.
We died and we go on dying.
So where would I look for us except in everything I see.
This next poem comes out of an experience I had with my son.
He was very young.
He was taking piano lessons from my sister
and she was teaching him the scales you know.
Every good boy does fine you know this.
E, G, D, whatever.
And he asked me one day when he was about nine or 10.
He said baba is that true?
Every good boy does fine.
[LAUGHTER]
And I thought about that and I said no, I
think every wise child is sad.
[LAUGHTER]
My sister was very upset with me.
When he told her that at the next lesson they had.
And so I wrote this poem.
So it's an ongoing argument I have with my sister.
It might be true.
I don't know.
Gandhi was known of calling it as it is.
Einstein, Dickinson.
I don't know so it might be true.
I don't know what that's about because.
Because if wisdom makes you sad why would you go after wisdom?
Maybe that's a lower form of wisdom.
Maybe there's an intermediate form of wisdom
where you experience the sadness of disillusionment
and then later on you experience the freedom disillusionment,
free of bigotry in your illusions.
I don't know.
I know nothing about wisdom but this is--
I guess that's why I wrote this poem trying
to figure out what it means.
It's called "Tearing the Page."
"Tearing the Page."
And I mention in here the 20th Century.
That's an actual train that used to run East and West.
And I would go downtown Chicago on my way
to work and have my coffee in the morning.
I would hear the announcements, the 20th Century
is about to arrive.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called "Tearing the Page."
Every wise child is sad.
Every prince is a member of the grass.
Each bud opening opens on the unforeseen.
Every wind strewn flower is God tearing God.
And the stars are leaves blown across my grandmother's lap.
For the dew multiply.
And of times many hands who can tell the bloody
from the perfumed, the one that stitches from the one
that rips.
Every laughing child is forgetful.
Every solitary child rules the universe.
And the child who can't sleep learns
to count, a patient child.
And the child who comes negotiates
between limit and longing, infinity and subtraction.
Every child who listens all night to the wind
eventually knows.
His breathing turns a wheel pouring time and dream
to leave no trace.
Though he can't tell what a minute
weighs or is an hour too little or too long.
As old as night itself, he's not old enough in the morning
to heat his milk on the stove.
He knows about the goodbyes though, some of them anyway.
The goodbye at the door each day, a kiss for kiss.
The goodbye at bedtime.
Stories and songs until it's safe to close his eyes.
And maybe he's even heard about the waiting room
at Union Station where dust and echoes
climb to the great skylights accompanied by farewells
of the now going to join the distant farewells of the long
gone while the voice announces the departure
of the 20th Century for all points West.
Yes, every wise child is heartbroken.
A sorrowing pimp, he knows the play
he's called away from each evening
is the beginning and end of order in a human household.
He's sure his humming to himself and his rising and falling ball
are appointed by ancient laws his own heart tides obey.
But he can't tell anybody what he knows.
Old enough to knock his shoelaces but not old enough to
unlock them.
Old enough to pray, he doesn't always know who to pray to.
Old enough to know to close the window when it's storms.
Old enough to know the rain given the chance
would fall on him and darken him, and darken him.
The way he himself colors the figures
he draws pressing so hard he tears the page.
I'll read two more poems.
If you have questions, you can ask them.
This is another poem about the train station.
I just wrote this.
I don't even know if it's finished or if it's a poem.
I'll take a chance.
This is called "Station".
"Station".
Your attention please.
Train number nine, the Northern Zephyr destined for Rivers end
is now boarding.
All ticketed passengers please proceed to the gate
marked Evening.
Your attention please.
Train number seven leaves blown by bound
for the color of thinking and renovated time
is now departing.
All ticketed passengers may board behind my eyes.
Your attention please.
Train number four the 20th Century has joined the wind
undisguised to become the written word.
Those who never heard their names may inquire
at the uneven margin of the story or else
consult the Ivy lying awake under our open window.
Your attention please.
The music arriving out of hidden ground and endlessly beginning
is now the flower, now the flute,
now our cup and cheer under branches more ancient
than our grandmother's hair.
Passengers with memories of the sea
may board leisurely at any unmarked gate.
Faithful members of the phone may proceed to Azalea.
Your attention please.
Under falling petals, never think about home.
Seeing begins in the dark.
Listening stills us.
Yesterday has gone ahead to meet you
and the place in a book a man stops reading and marks
with a feather is the place a girl escaped
through her mother's garden.
And between paired notes of the owl a boy disappeared.
Search for him goes on in the growing shadow of the plot.
And the face behind the clock's face is not his father's face.
And the hands behind fox hands are not his mother's hands.
All light bearing tears may be exchanged
for the accomplished wine
Your attention please train number
66 unbidden song soon to be the full hearts
quiet takes no passengers.
Please leave your baggage with the attendant
at the window marked your name sprung from hiding.
An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue.
You may board at either end of childhood.
This is called "Breathe".
Thank you very much for your generous attention.
"Breathe".
After the wind stopped I started thinking about it,
wondering if it was left handed, what if quickened or averted.
And did it heard the newly dead.
Through the gate my listening raised.
You could say thinking comes after experience.
You might figure knowledge is always late or else
conclude that as long as I'm talking
I'll never hear the name fire and air tell
to each bowed head of grass.
And where my arithmetic fails, an ancient memory of the future
shapes even the finished stars, even the seeds of apples
dying lovers overlook.
What a faithful playmate we've made
of death who incites our games by withholding and spurs
our delicious cries by keeping the home in jeopardy.
How sweetly it murmurs late, late.
And yes, it's true.
Evening deepened the color of our glass of wine and trees
amassing dark seemed what, a country?
A gathering voice?
Another room?
Death's been so long a guest at our table we forget alone
means being alone of even that, dear nurse.
Breathing, we are breathed.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
You have about 15, 20 minutes max for questions
and then Li-Young will sign books out in the lobby.
If you're shy you can write the question down
on a sheet of paper and pass it up.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
I have a question about like your process I guess.
Like when you know a poem is finished.
A lot of times you think of or at least I think of a poem
as a sort of personal work of something written.
But it becomes more like when it's shared with other people.
When do you know that your poem is ready
or you're ready to share it where
it goes from sort of your personal experiences
translating into something that you can share.
That's a perennial question I think.
Even writers who write a long time may be--
the simple answer is this.
Li-Young, could you paraphrase the question for the audience
so they can hear.
I guess a rough paraphrase of the question
is how do you know when a poem is ready to be shared.
Was that?
Yeah.
First of all, I'll tell you about a couple
of assumptions maybe write this sideways.
I think a poem participates in a kind
of a triaxial relationship.
There's the poet, the writer, and then
there is his or her demon or angel or master
or whatever you know.
Dickinson was a master, Whitman was the cosmic self and Lorca
of the duende and so on.
It's some sort of demonization that occurs,
which is the second axes of that.
And then the audience is the third axis
in which the audience is a kind of witness to that.
So I suppose when the demon has had enough of you
and spit you out and that's one way to look at it.
But then another way and may be it's
an oversimplification too is I think a poem is ultimately
a negotiation between probability and randomness.
But informal poetry you see it's very obvious.
The formal considerations that's the probability, right?
I mean if you have a villanelle now the repeated line that's
the probability quotient.
If the line is awake to sleep and take my waking
slow probably that will be the repetitive line.
And if it's a rhyme scheme that's
your probability quotient.
And what makes it interesting is you have to up the random
quotient you know so that it doesn't get too overdetermined.
And I think what you're trying to win in
that kind of negotiation is ultimately freedom.
The thing to remember I think is over determination
and over probability is a kind of tyranny.
But then randomness, complete randomness
is its own form of tyranny.
I mean sometimes we think well the only escape--
freedom would be an escape from probability.
But imagine what your life would be
like if it was just random from beginning to end,
it would just be terrible.
So I think freedom is some sort of-- the only possible freedom
we have is some sort of negotiation between those two
poles you know.
And I think that's the limitation of automatic writing
is that it's its own form of tyranny.
And so I guess a poem is finished
or ready to be shared when it's a perfect negotiation,
a happy living dance between those two poles of mind.
And it seems to me that those are
psychic poles you know that the mind tends
toward probability on one hand and the pattern
making rigidity.
And it tends toward randomness and chance on the other hand.
Does that make any sense?
So it seems to me that then it would be ready--
that the poem would be ready then I think.
Yes.
I'm really intrigued by your idea
that every wise child is sad and I just
wanted to know, how do you personally define wisdom.
[LAUGHTER]
You know I don't know.
And I don't even know if that poem--
I mean I keep knocking on that poem.
I can't tell-- you know like I can't tell whether
there's a personal agenda on that poem trying to prove
my sister wrong or--
[LAUGHTER]
But it does seem to me that--
I'm guessing now.
And it seems to me that if I were wise I probably
wouldn't be talking about it.
It's because I'm not and you're going to see it.
But it seems to me it has something to do
with disillusionment, right?
Freedom from illusion.
And one nobody wants-- you know I actually
had a poet say to me Li-Young I don't want to be disillusioned.
I said what do you want to be?
Illusioned?
So it seems to me that art is apocalyptic, you
know this word apocalypse, revealed, to reveal?
Eclipse is the cover?
So all art is apocalyptic.
It reveals.
It frees us of illusions in order
to uncover what I would call a condition of saturated meaning.
We would understand, we would experience
that everything is saturated with presence and being.
I mean, I think Dallas knew that, the Christian mystics
knew that, Plato knew that or Socrates knew that.
So where am I?
[LAUGHTER]
Wisdom.
I think there's an ini--
I think there's an initial kind of melancholy
that when you experience disillusionment
when you're bereft of your illusions
you know you initially experience something
like sadness, right?
But I think if we hang on long enough,
it becomes kind of ecstatic, it becomes ecstasy
because we want to be disillusioned I think, right?
You know I think other forms of media like TV, magazines,
they're all in the business of illusionment.
I think art and poetry is in the forefront--
its mission is to disillusion us in order
to uncover the sacred condition of our being here.
By sacred I mean things being saturated with presence.
Yes.
Not really a question just an observation
regarding your comments on it.
Again and again in your reading, I
heard you come to the point in the poem
that I thought, oh, this is the end.
But then you keep going, and it seems
like you did that unerringly.
It seems like pretty daring though, from as a writer--
like, oh, this is the end of the poem, but no, it keeps going,
and it doesn't stop.
It keeps going.
It's probably because I don't know when to shut up.
[LAUGHTER]
You know what happens is you when you're writing that thing
and it starts happening and you're riding along
and it wants to end you said no, no, no, don't go.
You attack on all these stanzas.
For all I know that's the last thing
are dribble you know I mean, for all I know.
But I mean it's hard.
But I think also it's a kind of--
I believe in some sort of like unbroken discourse going on,
which is the universe.
It's like everything is discoursing with each other,
everything is breathing each other in and out.
And somehow, my own hunger or obsession
to try to mine that and make an unbroken thing sometimes
makes the poem go on longer than maybe it should, I don't know.
Bad craftsmanship.
[LAUGHTER]
When did you know that you will be a poet
and who inspires you to write poems.
When did I know I was going to be a poet.
To this day I don't know if I'm a poet.
I feel as if--
I don't even know if what I read--
tonight I feel like a poser, I feel like a pretender.
I'm not sure if they were poems.
Yeah, I know they were some sort of writing and there were lines
but you know I don't--
I knew I had--
I had some really great teachers who, one of them was here,
who impressed upon me that somehow poem making and person
making they are the same thing you know.
And that started me thinking about
that poetry was a viable yoga.
It was a yoga that you do.
The opus, the work, the grail isn't even the poem.
It isn't the book of poems, it isn't a prize.
It's self-knowledge something like that.
And so I suppose when I began to understand that I
dedicated myself to that yoga.
I think everybody can do it.
And so I don't think it's a particular moment.
Yes.
What was your experience when you were speaking here about--
Well, it was baffling on the one hand
but I was rescued by some very fine teachers I had too.
It went from everything-- but you
know I was a terrible student.
I mean I flunked out here then I tried--
I thought the problem is with the school
so I went to another school and I flunked out there
and it dawned on me it isn't the school it's me.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I was just--
I think I was--
my prejudice is that-- my belief is that poetry is a yoga.
You know this word yoga, Y-O-G-A?
It's Sanskrit.
It means yoke, link, connection, bond,
the exact equivalent in Latin is the word religio R-E-L-I-G-I-O.
We get the word religion, religious from that.
In Latin means link, connection, bond.
It dawns on me whether it's or not something is yogic
or religious doesn't have to do with whether you're doing it
in a temple or a church.
You know it has to do with the quality of attention
you bring to it.
So I suppose pouring a glass of water
or sweeping the floor could be yogic or religious
to the attention you bring to it, you know what I mean.
I had on the one hand a teacher who
was kind of intimating those kinds of things.
Like I said that poetry making and person making were the same
you know.
And then I had other experiences where I had the feeling
that poetry was the making of I don't know
doilies or knickknacks or--
[LAUGHED]
It baffled me but I guess that's the way maybe it is.
I don't know, I should stop there.
[LAUGHTER]
We have time for one more question.
One more.
Yes.
One of my favorite poems is the woman has a mine.
Tell me a story about that.
Can you talk about that poem and the background of the poem
and how that poem came to be.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Maybe I'll say a few things and then
maybe I'll finish with that poem because I think
we should finish with poetry.
But that poem I mean is just very autobiographical.
You know is my--
I would tell my son stories all the time.
And I felt at the time that that was
one of the rich things I could give them because I was never
in a loss for story until one day I really
was at a loss for a story.
I could not think of a story you know.
And he didn't want to be read one he wanted one made up.
He demanded it and I panicked.
You know I just started thinking, boy this is--
what a disappointing father I am because--
yeah, so that was--
I'll read the poem.
Thank you again everybody for coming out and--
This is called "A story".
"A story."
Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story baba, a new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books and a world of stories
he can recall not one.
And soon he thinks the boy will give up on his father.
Already the man lives far ahead.
He sees the day this boy will go.
Don't go.
Here the alligator story, the angel story once more.
You love the spider story.
You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it.
But the boy is packing his shirts.
He is looking for his keys.
Are you a God?
The man screams that I sit mute before you.
Am I a God that I should never disappoint?
But the boy is here.
Please, baba a story.
It's an emotional rather than logical equation.
And earthly rather than heavenly one
which posits that a boy's supplications and a father's
love add up to silence.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]