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.
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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.
