A Conversation With Li-Young Lee—Ben Palpant

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 14

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

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.

—from "From Blossoms" by Li-Young Lee

---

by Ben Palpant

Many years ago, Li-Young Lee met me in a dream. It was a first for me; no other author had made such a visitation. In the dream, I lived in one of Indonesia's crowded cities. It was after midnight, and the city's neon lights flickered and glowed outside my high-rise apartment window. I heard a knock at the door and opened it to find him standing there, smiling, his long black hair pulled back. I welcomed him in. He sat in my favorite chair while I boiled water for tea.

I couldn't believe my good fortune. Now I could tell him thank you for writing some of my favorite poems. I told him how elated I was to see him. I told him that I first read one of his books while stuck in traffic and it opened my eyes to beauty and joy. Tears welled up in my eyes. I turned my back.

"You must be used to effusive fans," I said.

I heard him reply, "Thank you, that means so much."

While I prepared his tea, I told him about the season in my life when I carried one of his books around with me. It was a hard time of life for me, but working through his poems, one line at a time, helped.

"I didn't always know what you were saying, but somehow I understood,” I told him. “I didn't comprehend it in my mind, but I got it in my heart. Does that make sense?"

I turned around. The room was empty, the front door ajar. Still holding the tea cup, I stepped outside hoping to find him on the front porch, but he was gone. All I had wanted to do was serve him a little tea to say thank you. Now, the tears flowed unhindered. I openly sobbed. "I have your tea," I called into the night,” but the city's throbbing drowned out my feeble voice.

That's when I woke up, grief-stricken.

You can understand, then, why it felt dreamlike to see him walking toward me in real life. He wore black, and though it was a sunny day, he carried a brightly colored umbrella. My travel plans brought me to Chicago, so we decided to meet at a little park near his home. We had exchanged many emails over the previous month—rearranging schedules, considering what we might discuss—and both of us were excited to finally spend a couple of hours together.

He greets me with a wide grin. "You know, like an idiot, I let my expectations for this meeting get too high," he says. "I'm sorry, but there's nowhere to go from here but down."

I laugh. "Well, we might as well enjoy the ride, then," I reply. "Do you remember the story about Augustine walking the beach? He sees a little boy carrying ocean water in a shell to dump into a little hole he has dug in the sand. Augustine says, 'Hey kid, what are you doing?' The boy replies, 'I'm trying to catch the ocean.'"

"What a story."

"Isn't that what we are attempting? We're just two kids trying to capture the ocean?"

"I hope so. I really do. I just returned from Toronto, where I witnessed some heavy-duty ocean scooping. It agitated and troubled me so much that it's all I can think about right now. I'm not even sure I'm capable of conversation; I'm just so distracted."

"Tell me more."

"I visited the Ontario Museum of Art. There's a 17th-century painting by Mattia Preti called 'Saint Paul the Hermit.' It unseated me. The painting might be life-size, I don't know. In it, there's so much darkness descending on Paul. So much darkness, Ben. I mean, his robe is falling away from his frail body. At the top, there's a raven's head with a morsel of bread in its beak, and Paul is straining up to that bread straining into that darkness. It's a darkness full of news."

"What kind of news?"

"I don't know," he says. "Ultimately, news that's profound and great, news we've forgotten, news we can barely believe. When I saw that painting, I just had to stand beneath it. I thought: it is finished. I don't know why that phrase came to me, but that's all I could think about. It is finished. I felt this ecstatic thing, this realization that it really is finished. I'm just standing in the wake."

"Those are the words Christ spoke at his darkest point. Is that the darkness you're talking about?"

"I don't know. I'm still wrestling with it. There's a darkness that's pregnant with meaning, you know. It's a different kind of darkness. It's not merely dark; it's something more."

"You're reminding me of that passage in Isaiah 50 where God calls his people to trust in the name of the Lord, even when they walk in darkness. He says that if we encircle ourselves with the light of our own making—some kind of artificial and temporary reprieve from the darkness—then we will lie down in torment. Such a profound confrontation can happen, but we're afraid of it. We don't feel strong enough to sit in it, so we distract ourselves."

"Yes, that's the darkness I'm talking about. That's exactly what I'm feeling. It's absolutely uncomfortable. While in Toronto, I attended an art exhibit for a young artist I know personally. I love him deeply. His pieces were so stirring that I couldn't get them out of my head. They were full of the same darkness. A darkness full of yearning, full of good news, but it was so dark. I mean, can you imagine the courage it takes for an artist to enter that darkness with each new project?"

"Courage and attentiveness."

"Yes, it was so beautiful. As long as he can do the work, he's going to be okay. Without the art, I don't know. Maybe the work keeps us from losing our minds in the darkness. But I think of that painting by Preti and those words it is finished. Everything has changed for me. You catch me at a moment of crisis, Ben. I don't know that I can write the poems I've been writing all these years. In fact, I know I can't. I've been writing poems as if I was living before it is finished. It's hard to catch up, to awaken to the reality that it is finished. I've been lagging behind. What do I write now?"

"What makes your work, even the book you just released, a pre-it is finished book?"

"It's as if the book didn't hear the news. None of my previous poems had heard the news. Maybe they heard whispers of it, but only whispers."

The two of us sit together silently. By now, the tiny park has filled with playing children. An errant volleyball rolls toward us, and I toss it back.

"I suppose the news was there," he says, "but my poems lagged behind somehow. That's the thing: the news is Christ. It's all Christ. There's no other name, no other word for it. All of creation is shouting the news. That tree over there is Christic; that fountain is Christic. Every one of us is in the wake of the good news that it is finished. The world is changed. No, it's bigger than that, something much bigger. Everything has changed. It's all true."

"When Christ said, "It is finished" on the cross, it was, in some way, not the end, but the beginning. It was a declaration of a new beginning. His work was complete, but the work we do—the post it is finished work—has just begun."

"Yes! What is that work, Ben?"

"Isn't it all praise? Isn't it simply adoration and gratitude in all its forms?"

"Yes, yes! But how? What does that look like for the poet? You know, the paintings I saw were so full of praise—pure, uncensored praise, but it's a praise that's rooted in the darkness. And the painting by Mattia Preti was so full of black paint. It's so black under Paul's chin and black behind him. There's black beside him, but these are not the same intensity of black that you would find in an abstract painting. There are so many variations. Each one is important when it comes to depicting the male figure in agony. I was talking to my son about the history of this figure in art: Milton's Samson Agonistes, the crucified Christ, Blake's work, and all these paintings I saw at the exhibit. I don't know what to call it except maybe the agony of an ecstatic experience or the agony of a revelation."

"It's not the same agony that accompanies those who die without hope."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Maybe not all deaths are equal. The agony of those without hope is not the same as the agony you saw in the painting of Paul. His agony had meaning."

"Yes, that's it. There's meaning in that darkness. Much of life isn't that way, you know. There is so much that lacks meaning. This young painter whom I love, whose work was so magnificently charged with presence, went through a very dark void when he was younger. He had a great job; he was making a large amount of money, but he felt empty. He said, 'None of this means anything. None of this is Christic. ' I told him, 'What you see is true. None of it counts.' I feared for him at the time. I mean, how do you deal with that sudden realization of bankruptcy? It's a difficult and dangerous endeavor to live in a world so oppressed by meaninglessness."

"But," I say, "it is finished."

"Yes, that's right. I have come to a realization, Ben. It's Christmas every day and the devil all the time. Both are true. That's what that painting of Paul told me. That's the Christic—all the light accounted for, all the polarities accounted for, everything accounted for."

"How do we work that revelation into our poetry?"

"That's the difficult place I find myself today. I'm not sure. I'm trying to work it out. I'm playing with a formula in my head."

"Do you have it worked out enough to share?"

"Maybe, maybe not. It's quite simple. Poetry, in its essence, is the voice of Being itself divided by a being or Little Being. Like this." He uses his hands to show the division in the air.

Absolute Being, or God
___________________

Little Being, the poet

"I'm not sure what to do with that," I say.

"I'm not sure, either," he replies. "Maybe I have it upside down, I don't know. I'm not offering much clarity. I'm not really answering any questions."

"Sounds to me like we're doing exactly what we set out to do," I reply. "We're just trying to capture the ocean."

"That's a relief," he says. And after a moment, "It's also very humbling. Look, Ben, I made a bargain with God, and I need to deliver on that bargain. And when it comes to interviews, I need to cover some things about poetry, and then we can talk about whatever else comes up."

"Let's do that."

We sit quietly for a moment, watching the games around us, listening to the children shout and squeal.

"I guess what I want to say is that I'm always in the throws of trying to understand the tension between stillness and motion. I sometimes call stillness 'silence', but people don't understand. They see white space around a poem on the page and call the white space silence, but it's not silent. The white space is full of noise. The craft, the magic, the Christic imagination that uses words to make a reader feel silence requires a stillness in the poet. Stillness is the mind being still. All language in a chain—one word linked to the next word—is motion. We study that motion. We notice that it is stressed and unstressed. The great poets see that it consists of weak forces and strong forces. They really boiled things down for us in a way that can be useful, but it's not enough. It's the stillness inside the poet that makes the poem. It's the stillness that returns the poet to the source."

"What do you mean?"

"Look, when you read a poem on the page, the line keeps pulling you back to the left margin, to the beginning. There used to be a convention of capitalizing the first letter of each line to tell the reader that we're starting over. I don't like capitalizing the first letter because it feels cluttered to me, noisy. It makes me feel anxious and forget what I'm doing. What am I doing? Robert Frost called it 'the tribute of the current to the source.' Each line is a tribute of the current to the source, to the beginning of the poem."

"He's talking about the poetic line."

"Yes," he says, "but he's also talking about something much bigger than that. He's saying that our motions and words have to pay tribute to The Source."

"What does that look like? How does a poet do that?"

"We do that by ransoming each poetic line with as much meaning as possible—by infusing it with the news we were talking about earlier. You know, the incredible news that I felt in the darkness of those paintings and in the agony of their subjects. All these years, I thought I knew what the news was—that life is beautiful despite everything, or something—and maybe that's still the news, but it's so much more than that, and I'm grappling with what the expression of that news looks like."

The park has gradually filled—more children, more games—and we realize that we have been shouting over the clamor. "We have so much more to explore," he says, "but maybe we can find another location."

I gather my things. He holds his umbrella in one hand and a small paper cup nearly emptied of coffee. We walk along the sidewalk and continue talking.

"I keep coming back to this Christic imagination. Everything depends on it. Everything exists by virtue of the Christic. Christ was at the very beginning of the world, and everything participates in Christ, whether we know it or not. As a pastor's son, I grew up hearing this news, but it means much more than I ever realized. If people knew it and could remember it, there would be far less suffering, I think."

"Are you hyper-aware of human suffering?"

"Oh my, yes. Absolutely. I live in Chicago. My neighborhood is like a parade of suffering."

The sun breaks out from behind a cloud, its heat is beating down upon us. Li-Young opens his umbrella and lifts it high to shade me as we walk.

"This is a thing we do in China," he says.

Feeling more than a little uncomfortable, feeling like I should be the one holding the umbrella over him, I say, "Thank you. That's very kind."

By now, we've come to another park, a larger one flanked by eight lanes of traffic on Lake Shore Drive, but it's welcoming and, aside from a few homeless shelters, relatively empty. We sit down in the shade, clover all around us.

"Going back to your obligation to God, have you said everything you need to say about poetry?"

"I think so. I guess I just wanted to say all glory be to God. There's no poetry without God. I mean, there's nothing without God. That's all I wanted to say."

"In God's timing, I'm meeting you just a couple of days after your encounter with it is finished. I don't want to call it a personal crisis, but it is a kind of revelation."

"Absolutely. I mean, it is a crisis. I have to start over, but I don't know how. That's not easy at my age."

"Does it create anxiety in you? Excitement?"

"Both. I'm terrified."

"One of my favorite books is The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker. For about half a year, he tracked the daily activities of a pair of peregrine falcons in England. It’s beautifully written. At one point, he says, 'The hunter must become the thing he hunts.' Maybe you need to imitate Baker. Maybe you must hunt this vision, to become it is finished."

"That's so beautiful, so moving. Yes, to become it is finished without being finished, without completion. To hunt that fact every day means to remind myself every moment that it has been accomplished, it is finished. It's here. Now what?"

"Yes, now what? Do you have an answer to that question?"

After a pause, he says, "Ben, I'm telling you, all that is left are love songs to God. With all the world's conflict, motion, and noise, none of these things are as important as love for the one who accomplished everything. I'm going to write love song after love song to God."

"You're in your 60s, you have accomplished more than most, and yet you're still willing to start over."

"I don't feel like I have a choice. I'm compelled."

"The world is full of artists who have chosen poorly, who have tasted success and don't stay hungry."

"What do you mean by that word hungry?" he asks.

"I mean that they feel like they've arrived. The craft, the self-critique, the rigor—it all takes a backseat to their ego. Their work becomes derivative. They start listening to their own press."

"Yes, it's true. I fear that," he says.

"Tennyson’s Ulysses said, 'I am become a name.' How awful to become a name, to become nothing more than your public persona."

He nods. "What did Rilke say about that? Something like, 'fame is just misunderstandings gathered about a name."

"How do you keep from letting those misunderstandings gather around your name?" I ask.

"O Ben, it terrifies me." He lifts his hands to shield himself and closes his eyes. "Keep it away from me. I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me that stuff. Don't do it." After a moment's reflection, he adds, "At the same time, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I'm very fortunate. Poetic fame, I mean, it's not much, but I feel lucky. What matters is the work."

"People tend to imagine that published poets are surrounded by many friends and a thousand demands. Is that accurate?"

"It's really scary and lonely out here. It's terrifying. And it's year after year of that kind of work."

"What do you mean by 'out here'?"

"I mean that place where the work can get done, that place inside me where I enter the pregnant darkness. Maybe I just don't like large groups of people. I don't know what I'm saying." He pauses again. "I just keep coming back to those three words—it is finished. If it's true it is finished, then I'm free to live in those three words. The prayer of my life and my work has that much more meaning: It is finished makes me cry, O my God. O my love. Holy, holy, holy. Those are the attitudes of all great lyric poetry. All great poetry is some variation on those three themes. There are so many ways, so many inflections you can use to praise."

"Your prayer is interesting because many people fixate on one of those three. Some people are in awe of God, but they never come to love him. Some people love him but miss his holiness. Your prayer begins in awe and comes full circle. It forces me to pass from awe, to love, to reverence, and back to awe in a never-ending cycle."

"That's right. I want to hold onto this state of mind now that it is finished. It's the only thing that matters now.

"This revelation changes everything for you," I say.

"Everything."

"Even how you see your father? You’ve written extensively about your conflicted relationship with him."

"It was." He pauses and gazes out over the park. "My father was a big personality."

"He became a minister when your family came to the United States."

"Yes, a Presbyterian minister. People flocked to hear him. He used to fill the sanctuary like Billy Graham."

"I imagine he cast quite a shadow," I say, "metaphorically speaking."

"I loved him. I remember he wanted me to learn to sing the song, 'God Bless The Child.' The Blood, Sweat, and Tears version. He played the organ. I would sit there next to him and tell him it was hard, and he would say, 'You'll get it.' Do you know that song? It's a hard song to sing. He would get so mad sometimes when I didn't sing it right. Every Friday night, my brothers would rush out the door to play, and he would call me to practice with him. I didn't want to practice! Are you kidding me? But I would practice. And then it dawned on me that if I got too good at singing this song, he would take it on the road. No way was I going to do that. I remember telling my brothers that they were abandoning me. I was really mad. But they would say, 'Hey man, we love you for taking it! Thank you! He loves you best.' And they were right. I knew it, but man, it was hard."

"If he was Jacob, you were his Joseph. That song was his coat of many colors."

"O Ben, what a picture. It brings tears to my eyes. I think back, and I know that he loved me. Sometimes, when we got it right, when I was seated on the bench next to him and we were in rhythm, he would lean on me ever so gently."

"He could be quite tender at times."

"Tender, but volatile. It was hard to be his son. Certain afternoons, he would say, 'Get your notebook.' We would go on long drives, and he would dictate his sermon to me. But if I didn't have that notebook open and ready before he started talking, or if he saw me open that notebook after he had started talking, I was in trouble. He would get so mad. But if I did it right, he would talk, and I would copy it down. When he was onto something, he knew it and I knew it. Something beautiful happened. I didn't know you could read or encounter God at that level. When he was on like that, the whole world opened. When he was on, he would look at me and smile as if to say, 'You see it, right? You see what's happening, right?' After those times, he would be good for days. He was so happy. But there were other days when the revelation didn't come, and he couldn't find his way. He would stalk the vision like a hunting cat on those days, and nobody talked to him. He was scary, really scary. If you got in his way, watch out." Li-Young pauses, lost in thought. Then he says, "Poor man, poor man. He suffered."

"But you longed for his blessing."

"Yes, I really did."

"It's almost as if God has wired us with a longing to hear our fathers bless us. When we don't receive that blessing, there's a great heartache. When we do hear it, we feel at peace."

"I think that's right," he says.

"Your father hungered for revelation much like his son."

"That's true. He gave me a great gift."

"One of my favorite books is Wisdom of the Sands, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It's written from the point of view of a young king remembering his father's advice. Once, his father told him, 'Build a house within yourself. . .Keep your house clean and bright. You cannot know the hour of that blissful visitation, but this you know, that come it will, and nothing else can satisfy your heart's desire.' Is that what your father wanted for you?"

"Yes, I think so. This is the vision: it is finished. God is present. The Christic is all that matters. There's a sense of relief, but it doesn't eliminate the terror. The darkness is still dark, but it's infused with meaning now. It will be okay as long as God is at the center, but it's still a fearful thing."

"Like the disciples when the sea was in turmoil and Jesus was sleeping in the boat's hull. They were afraid for their lives, so they woke Jesus so he would do something about it. When he told the sea to quiet down and the water immediately calmed, the disciples were terrified. They were afraid before, but now they were terrified because God was in the boat with them."

"So true. It's a terrible awe that's full of hope."

"Can we revisit something you said earlier? You said that once we realize it is finished, all that's left are love songs to God. What about poems that comment on issues in the world? Political poems? What about poems that rage against the way things are, or at least try to resolve those issues?"

"Those poems are just litigations against the world. Yeats called them arguments with the world. I love that stuff sometimes, but I also think there's another mode. All of that comes from a pre it is finished mentality. Post it is finished, none of those arguments with the world, arguments with the community, arguments with God, none of them matter."

"A few years ago, you said that many American poets come at their work as a complaint, not as praise, and so their poetry lacks richness, it lacks depth. You said, 'We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich and ecstatic. But grievance is not—it’s a complaint, it’s whining.’ That problem has only worsened over the last few years. Now we are catechizing our children in the doctrines of complaint, training them to care more about symptoms than the real dis-ease?"

"We have forgotten how to praise anything but ourselves or our agendas," he says. "No wonder there are so many problems in the world. Forget yourself. Stop looking at yourself. Forget all of the grievance. The only thing left is love-talk to God."

"This is what Mary Magdalene understood when she broke the jar of expensive nard and anointed Christ's feet with it, while everyone else was talking politics."

"Yes. That's it! My father preached a sermon on that story. She washes Christ's feet with her hair, right? That image—the image itself—is so powerful. The stillness embodied there. Christ is there, yes, but the entire scene is Christic. I suppose that every picture Christ enters becomes Christic. It becomes organized around the most spectacular, the greatest Good. That's what matters now. That's the only thing that matters, Ben. All that's left for me is to break the oil over his feet. All that's left are love songs to God."

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

Li-Young Lee is the author of four collections of poetry, winner of a William Carlos Williams Award, a Lamont Poetry Selection, and a Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee, a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, a memoir that received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.