Poems of Li Young-Lee - Essay Example

Gregory A Nelson Comp/Final draft Blue and White Li Young Lee is an American poet of Chinese descent born in Indonesia. Like all his poems seem to emanate from his past experiences. He was born to a family of different classes where his mother was the daughter of the Chinese President and his father was a son of a gangster. His father would serve as a doctor to the Great Mao and would at some point in time be exiled to Indonesia. The family moved to Hong Kong when Li’s father became an evangelist pastor. The next step his father took was to move to the USA to become a Presbyterian pastor1. Such vague experiences drastically influenced little Li Young Lee and in the future he would use biblical themes in his poems. An examination into the major experiences that shaped Li Young Lee’s life will help develop an understanding of the unique poet he has become as it is demonstrated in the explication of four of his poems - "Pillow", "Nativity", "My Fathers House" and "Our River Now". Of particular importance in developing Li Young-Lee’s love for writing poems was his experience at the University of Pittsburgh. In the university he studied Chinese poets such as Tu Fu or Li Bo, known for their amazing simplicity and ease of writing. As a result Lee’s poems were also filled with simplicity, homoeroticism and suspense. Li Young Lee was influenced by his father’s passion for the Bible and the works of other Chinese poets2. In addition to his own sexual preferences, childhood experiences and family history of migration, he adopted the western tools for making poems. As a result of such backgrounds, Lee’s poems are known for their ability to get the reader into a deep trance, urging him/her to use as much imagination as possible to understand and interpret each line of text. Just about every poem of Li Young Lee possesses some rebellious spirit hidden by the veil of enigma, passion and silence3. As he recognized his talent he started to spread it where he could. Li Young Lee also attended the University of Arizona, the New York State University as well as taught in Stanford, Northwestern and UOI (University of Iowa). His talent helped him alter the image of eastern poetry in the minds of Americans and break the stereotypes that Asian poetry is always humble or submissively passive4. What needs to be noted is that Li Young Lee writes about his own experiences, dreams and wishes, yet when these concepts are placed in the words of his poems, these different themes are actively accepted and enjoyed by the readers. Such an ability to compose poetry that speaks to the masses makes Li Young Lee an extremely valuable poet5. These themes can be traced through four of his poems - "Pillow", "Nativity", "My Fathers House" and "Our River Now" – which were selected among others for their vivid style and interesting treatment of the environment. The poem “Our River Now” is rather transcendental in its style and approach. It uses metaphors throughout the text. For instance the night is related to a house one inherits while the room represents the personal experience during sleep related to a little death, when a person is neither conscious nor awake. The second stanza relates the deepest childhood memories to the harvest and honey (pleasant moments) with the parents being those busy bees that create such experiences for the child. Regardless of the age, a person would always set their clocks by that harvest implying that there is no adult who would not want to become a child at least for a day again. The third stanza notes that a child views the world from a point of view which is completely different from that of adults. A child believes that she/he knows everything about the world and has his/her own explanation for things deemed as correct. The rest of “the dumb throng of you, that never answered to a word” states that there still exist numerous things to which one cannot find the answer. The questions, inspirations, ideas and expectations that a child has get carried away by the water of time to the present time when childhood can be experienced only in memories and dreams. Another poem titled “Pillow” starts with the author’s inability to sleep. Here, it is presented as the author being unable to find sleep under the pillow yet can find just about anything else. The night is related to a river, a flowing experience of sounds and speeches, which one cannot personally control. Just like the night comes even if one might not want it to come (uncontrollably) so do experiences come to the author “fountains clogged with mud and leaves, the houses of my childhood”. The author reminisces and completely plunges deep into his childhood by recalling his mother’s folk craft of weaving threads/fabric and at the same time getting the child to sleep. It is typical to many cultures that mothers who take care of their children and sing them lullabies at the same time knit or do other routine work. The child had associated his childhood memories with his mother so “my mother’s fingers” is nothing else but a gateway to sleep and new dream experiences. At the same time, night is also associated with his father who would set the clock each night to wake up when needed in the morning. The clock set for resurrection is nothing else but the clock to return the author from the dreams and new experiences he related to death. Again he recalls just about anything he experienced in life which he says have “found home there”, yet such active thinking prevents him from falling asleep and experiencing an ever-new feeling similar to death which nonetheless has an aroma of jasmine and no burial clothes. The poem called “Naivety” is something that personally draws most of my attention because of the interesting metaphors used by Li-Young Lee. Just like the previous two the verse is very transcendental and metaphysical and again it is about the night, sleep, dreaming and the memories of the past. The verse starts with the child asking a question of what the world is and getting different responses from different family members who can only explain the world from their subjective and experiential points of view. Their explanation is related to a “house inside a house” to “wings of heaven” and “one more song then you go to sleep”. The last quote also shows the ephemeral nature of the world, which goes before a person like a song before a person dies. The life is short and flowing like a song. The author proceeds to philosophizing as to why such questions appear in his head and whether the answer is “long growing” in the minds of others and whether or not everyone has to go through the same process of asking the same questions. The author then notes that life goes in cycles and now a grownup man asks himself the same questions he posed as a child and still cannot find the right answers. The only answer is the silence and a sleepless night which “every reaching-out-to overreaches” to remind people of “what little earth and [human] duration” on it. The next part of the verse reveals the author’s evangelical background when he notes that one should make his/her life a safer place before god approaches. Here it appears that Li Young Lee views sleep like other followers of different churches view it: a time when a person leaves the earth and approaches god or other deities. The last poem to be considered in this essay is titled “The Father’s House”, the poem the author managed to effectively dedicate to God, the creator and his father. The poem despite lacking any rhyme certainly deserves praise for an outstanding view of the world as perceived by a person who sees the world as a house he/she is put into by God. At first it looks like a randomly generated sequence of sentences and phrases, yet after carefully reading it several times one can indeed grasp the profound meaning of this poem. While there is not direct appeal to a higher deity, the poem certainly hints that it is about god and the human’s short stay on earth. At the same time one finds parallels to an earthly father who notes “No one can tell how long it takes a seed to declare what death and lightning told it while it slept” implying that he can foresee that his offspring at some point in time will grow into an independent individual whose role would also become a ‘father’ or creator of life. The author does a great job quickly changing the subject and skipping from one topic to another to let the reader enter some sort of poetic trance. For instance right after speaking about the father he notes that the night is a gateway to the future because “you may some night hear a secret youll tomorrow, parallel to the morning, tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman like a sown ledge of wheat.” What amazes the author the most is that “Someone has died. Someone is not yet born”, the circle of life that most people are not surprised at and take for granted, is viewed by Li Young Lee as the greatest mystery of religious faith which can be understood only when one sweeps “all three floors of our fathers house” and not counting the broom strokes. The woman is also described in the poem as an indispensable part of the Father and living whose name is never disclosed and her appearance is never described. Those things are not necessary because of their unimportance and because she may not “own a face” at all. After all, people are guests on the earth and they cannot really own anything. The only thing that an individual can own is their thoughts and actions, yet their ownership is again relative just like the opposite direction in which that very woman combs her hair with respect to the direction of the author’s departure. After all, the whole process of departure is also relative with respect to the Father’s house. The novel as a whole makes readers like me think that leaving one floor of the house is a greater departure than getting on the third floor. Certainly, physical separation from the woman or Mother Nature can be achieved by abandoning her despite physically being close to her. After all, there are more than one woman and one can “hear the voices of women telling a story in the round” and at the same time continue folding the laundry of everyday life. In conclusion, I would like to note that Li Young Lee is a poet whose talent is probably divinely inspired. Unfortunately we are not required to analyze some of his masterpieces, which would make the reader to get immersed in the illusory world created in each poem by Li Young Lee. I draw the reader’s attention to the fact that such different experiences that ranged from moving from one country to another, listening to the stories of his mother and his father as well as attending many colleges/universities, learning Chinese poetry and traveling around the USA is what helped Li Young Lee to form his unique style which distinguishes him from other poets and helps the readers to exercise their imagination and learn how to dream. In just a few sentences that lack rhyme and look like they have been randomly generated by a computer, he can create a unique brand new world of ideas, thoughts and experiences that attract many. The four poems of Li Young Lee explicated in the paper above only briefly touch on the multitude of themes the author incorporated and programmed in his verses. I have no doubts that these interesting masterpieces of Li Young Lee are currently underestimated by society (otherwise his name would be in the news) yet his time will come and a new movement of “Li-Yong-Leeists” will be born and teem the earth. Bibliography: Dunn, Jeffrey, Through Our Eyes: Poems and Pictures About Growing Up, Barrons Books, 2004. Gale Reference Team, “Biography - Lee, Li-Young (1957-)”, Contemporary Authors, Prentice Hall, 2006. Haynes, David, Welcome to Your Life: Writings for the Heart of Young America, McGraw Hill, 2004. Li Young-Lee, "Pillow", "Nativity", "My Fathers House" and "Our River Now". Name of book the poems are in, publisher name, published year. Roethke, Theodore, FAMILY MATTERS: Poems of Our Families (Harmony), NY Random House, 2005. Rosenberg, Liz, The Invisible Ladder: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poems for Young Readers, Wiley and Sons Press, 2005. Read More