Li-Young Lee Quotes & Sayings

Memory revises me.
Even now a letter
comes from a place
I don't know, from someone
with my name
and postmarked years ago,
while I await
injunctions from the light
or the dark;
I wait for shapeliness
limned, or dissolution.
Is paradise due or narrowly missed
until another thousand years?
I wait
in a blue hour
and faraway noise of hammering,
and on a page a poem begun, something
about to be dispersed,
something about to come into being. — Li-Young Lee

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won't drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life — Li-Young Lee

The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not. — Li-Young Lee

Dwelling

As though 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 hand's traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand's 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. — Li-Young Lee

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice. — Li-Young Lee

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do. — Li-Young Lee

Memory revises me. — Li-Young Lee

I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other. — Li-Young Lee

The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making. — Li-Young Lee

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page. — Li-Young Lee

Echo and Shadow

A room
and a room. And between them

she leans in the doorway
to say something,

lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,

her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.

A world and a world.

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 body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,

or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,

as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart's calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,

each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging. — Li-Young Lee

Could it be in longing we are most ourselves? — Li-Young Lee

Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet. — Li-Young Lee

N the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not
it's a complaint, it's whining. — Li-Young Lee

You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your old father's breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf
you've torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade
it all depends
on the course of your memory.
It's a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It's mine.
It's all yours. — Li-Young Lee

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening, — Li-Young Lee

In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you. — Li-Young Lee

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not. — Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face. — Li-Young Lee

Every time you write a poem it's apocalyptic. You're revealing who you really are to yourself. — Li-Young Lee

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil. — Li-Young Lee

I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other. — Li-Young Lee

We suffer each other to have each other a while. — Li-Young Lee

I want the rain to follow me, to mark me with a stripe down my chest and belly, to darken my skin, and blacken my hair. I want to be broken, to be eaten by the anonymous mouths, to be eroded like minutes and seconds, to be reduced to water and a little light. I want to rise, the doors of the rain to open, I will enter, rain alive among my fingers, embroidered on my tongue, and brilliant in my eyes, I want to carry it in my shirt pocket, devote my life to the discovery of its secret, the one blessing it whispers. Rain — Li-Young Lee

And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain. — Li-Young Lee

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming. — Li-Young Lee

But, no one
can tell without cease
our human
story, and so we
lose, lose — Li-Young Lee

And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty. — Li-Young Lee

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity. — Li-Young Lee

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem. — Li-Young Lee

The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I — Li-Young Lee

A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me. — Li-Young Lee

Water has invaded my father's heart, swollen, heavy, twice as large. Bloated liver. Bloated legs. The feet have become balloons. A respirator mask makes him look like a diver. When I lay my face against his - the sound of water returning. The — Li-Young Lee

A poem is like a score for the human voice. — Li-Young Lee

Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but theres no thingness to them. — Li-Young Lee

A door jumps
out from shadows,
then jumps away. This
is what I've come to find:
the back door, unlatched.
Tooled by insular wind, it
slams and slams
without meaning
to and without meaning. — Li-Young Lee

But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden — Li-Young Lee

Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?

How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?

How is he going to explain the branches
beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,
the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?

And now that ancient sorrow between his hips,
his body's ripe listening;
the planet
knowing itself at last. — Li-Young Lee

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. — Li-Young Lee

Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight. — Li-Young Lee

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush. — Li-Young Lee

Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea. — Li-Young Lee