Li-Young Lee on the density of poetic meaning.

Want to keep this.

This is taken from an interview from Bombsite.com from the Spring of 1995.  I’ve been waiting to hear these words from a poet for a long time. * I currently can’t stop reading things by Li-Young Lee.

JL: You subtitled your book as a remembrance and I’m wondering, what are you trying to remember? There is a constant indication of your wife in the book. Was it a personal remembrance for her?

LYL: It was a very personal thing to me. It seemed I was unable to communicate to any human being at all. All my life, I used to attribute it to being an immigrant. The things that are closest to me and dearest to me defy language. It seems to be some sort of ghastly joke. And while writing the book I thought, well, let me address that directly—that inability to communicate to somebody I love very much, somebody very close to me, physically and emotionally. Why can’t I communicate? Part of it is because language itself is both a vehicle of communication and yet an obstacle to communication. And the other thing of course, is my feelings are somehow outsized. They seem to me frequently larger than myself, overwhelming. In that way, they seem to defy language.

—-

LYL:  Honestly? Sometimes I’m not even talking to a human being. I feel as if my ambition is to speak to God, to find a human utterance that makes sense to my God. Half the things I’m saying tonight, I realize will sound lunatic to most people. And yet when I write, I am speaking to a human ‘other’ that is in everybody, not a specific somebody—a kind of greater everybody.

[http://bombsite.com/issues/51/articles/1859]

I was watching this video tonight (or this morning - insomnia is back) of a Li-Young Lee reading at Cal some years ago, and the man who introduces the poet absolutely nails the description of Lee’s writing.  Completely and utterly and totally and all those awful adverbs.

But it made me realize that it was exactly the answer I’ve always struggled to produce when people ask me why I love Mary Cassatt so much. 

“And it was unsentimental.  It was awake and unsentimental, and why it was unsentimental wasn’t clear to me.  …Family intimacy is the most difficult subject, in some way, it moves us so deeply, and yet it surrounds…it doesn’t prove anything, you know?”

Cassatt paints family in ways that is almost unapproachably (not a word, eh?  come on, English, work with me…) honest.  It’s untouchable because it is the absolute truth, without sugarcoating the extremes of emotions.  It’s sort of like writing a thank-you card, and you realize that what you truly want to say is “thank you for your love and support,” despite it being the most cliched thing you can possibly put to paper.  It’s honest and raw and you can avoid over-sentimentalizing it in other ways.

Unsentimental.  Yes, I think this is it.

[via qoscar]:

Wind in a Box

Terrance Hayes

I claim in the last hour of this known hysterical breathing,
that I have nothing to give but a signature of wind,
my typewritten handwriting reconfiguring the past.

To the boy with no news of my bound and bountiful kin,
I offer twelve loaves of bread. Governed by hunger,
he wanted only not to want. What is the future

beyond a premonition? What is the past
beyond desire? To the preacher, I leave a new suit, a tie
made of silk and shoes with unscuffed bottoms.

To the mirror, water; to the water, a book with no pages,
the author’s young face printed on the spine.
I wanted children taller than any man on earth.

If everyone was like me, I said to the mirror.
To my lover, I leave enough stories to fill an evening.
Enough sleep to walk from one coast to another

without pause. I held no counsel with god.
I cut open the fruit of a tree without speaking to the tree.
I ate food prepared by strangers. To the black cashier,

I leave nothing. Her story is the one I was given.
To all the carpenters looking at the ceiling, nothing.
Here in the last moments of my illiterate future,

may the people know I did not matter.
Shoeprints at the door. Shoeprints on the old road.
To the boy with two lights going on and off in his stare,

I leave the riddle of the turtle who had shelter,
but no company. To the black girl, grace. To the black girl,
mirrors; a father blessed with the gift of mind-reading,

men who do not wound her, men she does not wound
herself for, and mother love. Unable to shed the old skin
and stand, I stand here in the hour of my hours alive.

These words want to answer your questions.
These words want to stave off your suffering,
but cannot. I leave them to you. Enough sky

and a trail. Wood and enough metal for machines.
Father in Heaven, what am I going to do when I’m dead?
Let my shadow linger against the earth, protect my children.

Possibly my favorite line in all of poetry (or at least my top three): “I wanted children taller than any man on earth.”

Shake the Dust, by Anis Mojgani

wishes for sons

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn’t believe.  let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

[An effective way to write a wish for empathy, for patience.  There’s a fine line between this and a wish for “bad things upon you.”  It’s a wish for understanding.]

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places.  these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

[Consider the line between empowerment and arrogance.  If a man wrote the same regarding a body part of his own and its power, would it be considered cocksure and assuming?]

[at last we killed the roaches]

at last we killed the roaches.
mama and me. she sprayed,
i swept the ceiling and they fell
dying onto our shoulders, in our hair
covering us with red. the tribe was broken,
the cooking pots were ours again
and we were glad, such cleanliness was grace
when i was twelve. only for a few nights,
and then not much, my dreams were blood
my hands were blades and it was murder murder
all over the place.

[via poetry365]

1

Those who have already been destroyed
recognize its signs: the sky
clouds like a glaucous eye,
the wind muscles over whatever
is weak. Waves swell, engorged
with too much of something.
A lashing, a swimming of tongues
through air. Birds disappear.
The smell of ocean in the wrong place,
of something diseased, lost fish.
The sky bellows, darkens, roars
like a drunk.

Those unacquainted with destruction
ask for wind speeds, amount of rainfall,
degree of movement. A plotting,
a computation of the destruction.

2

For some of us, all seasons are hurricane.
The winds gale up, working us like seed,
moving us like desire.

What lies beyond measurement
is all of beauty and terror.

To understand is to evacuate.

[via letterstodeadpeople]

awritersruminations:

poetry365:

No one tells much about it,
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,
Turkey vultures, to be exact.
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.

WOW.  Holy shit; wasn’t expecting this poem to pop up in my Tumblr feed today.  I adore this.  

I’m on vacation.  A lot of my day this week will be lying on a beach.

I woke up this morning with the windows open and the mountain on my left, the ocean on my right.  I realized that the second I woke up, I was writing poetry in my head.  I wish I had written it down.  But I fell asleep again smiling, pleased with whatever words were popping into my head at that moment.

Anyway, I have no idea who Sheryl St. Germain is.  But I need to read more of her now. 

James Dickey’s poem, The Hospital Window.  With some notes.