Four weeks into my MA-in-Creative-Writing life, I began to experience joy I hadn't known before, and it took me by surprise.
Though, as a writer, a joy is not a complete joy if I couldn’t pin down its source and express it rationally. Simply running around exclaiming, "I’m happy! I’m happy!" couldn’t make you feel me, therefore, doesn’t satisfy me. Naturally, I felt a bit down about my inability to articulate until I watched a video clip that changed the situation.
We were reading Li-Young Lee’s poems when our professor showed us a few minutes of his speech. A shocking piece of information led us to this moment; our professor told us that Li-Young Lee was considered one of the best living American poets.
What? How come I had never heard of him? A Chinese immigrant? One of the best living American poets?
Come on, have you ever heard of any living poet outside of classrooms? No. It is an incontestable fact that the contemporary poets live in relative obscurity. Still, as a literature major who cares about Chinese immigrants writing in English, I’m familiar with names like Yiyun Li and Ha Jin, even though they are just as unknown to the general public.
This only proves how even more invisible contemporary poets are.
Now, back to the video clip—Lee is delivering a keynote speech at a Poets and Writers event in 2015."
He wears a denim jacket. His shoulder-length hair is tied up in a bun atop his head. Before speaking, he touches his forehead with his left hand and closes his eyes. The hills on his face cast shadows over its plains.
He seems a bit nervous, though he shouldn’t be. By then, he had already won nearly every major poetry prize in America, even if the general public remained unaware of his existence. But this is a Poets and Writers event.
He begins his speech, his head slightly vacillating. The shadows on his face wax and wane. He says, and I paraphrase:
This is a wonderful event. I guess during the rest of the day you'll hear the language of scarcity—the marketplace, the profit economy… there are only so many places that you can publish, so many awards, so many jobs, so many events… All of that is a paradigm of scarcity. It's hard to negotiate. But that's okay. Because arts participate in a double life—the life of scarcity, and the life of abundance.
A life of abundance is a different paradigm, and the hierarchy of values of this life is a little different from the others. The more you practice your art form, the more you understand yourself, the more you understand the world, the more you understand your medium…That life of abundance shouldn't be forgotten. I don't want to be disparaging. We need jobs, publications, etc. I just want to remind you of a life of abundance.
In my life of abundance, I have been trying to write this poem my whole life. The irony is going to be: when I read this poem to you, you’re probably going to say: “Man, that’s it?” And I have to live with that.
The audience bursts into laughter. He shrugs.
He continues, explaining how he began preparing to write this poem the day he was born. He talks about his interest in love and war, insisting that every poet should be concerned with both. In his own practice, he constantly reflects on how to measure his art against a standard—one that must be unmoving, unchanging, and immune to violence and death. That, he says, is the definition of the sacred.
The most striking part of his speech is about the double life—the life of scarcity and the life of abundance. But is this really new information? Of course not. Every literature student on campus knows they won't earn as much as computer science, nursing, or business majors. And everyone involved in the arts defends their choice by claiming, in one way or another, that they are in it for a life of abundance. So why did Lee's speech hit me so hard? This question lingered in my mind for days until I realized it was because, for the first time, I saw a living poet, through his countenance, demeanor, and tone, who had truly experienced that life of abundance.
Admittedly, it wasn’t just his speech that made me feel this way. We had been reading his poetry collection, The City in Which I Love You, and I had a vague sense that it was a manifesto for poetry. His speech only deepened and intensified that impression.
I need to cite his poem to support my point.
The first poem in this collection, titled “Furious Versions,” consists of seven sections and spans 17 pages.
In section 1, the speaker “waken in the used light / of someone’s spent life, to discover” that he is burdened by memories (“I was born in Bandung, 1958; / on my father’s back, in borrowed clothes, / I came to America.”) and he faces his sense of inadequacy (“I’d answer in an oceanic tongue / to Professor, Capitalist, Husband, Father.) As time passes by ("I feel the hours. Do they veer / to dusk? Or dawn?"), memories "revise" him (Lee 13-14)
“while I await
injunctions from the light
or the dark;
I wait for shapeliness
limned, or dissolution.
…
I wait
in a blue hour
and faraway noise of hammering,
and on a page a pome begun, something
about to be dispersed,
something about to come into being.”
(Lee 14-15)
The rest of the poem continues to explore the entanglement of history, memory, and time—the complex conditions the poet seeks to understand and transform into art. The poem is rich with metaphors, and the one I appreciate most is: “the mind... snagged on the world” (Lee 20). The speaker sees the world and cannot unsee it, much like a woman’s stockings caught on a thorny plant as she wanders through a garden.
In section 6, the speaker hears the sound of the trees in a landlocked place, but he is “full of the sound of water.” Why? Because “To think of the sea / is to hear in the sound of trees / the sound of the sea’s work, / the wave’s labor to change / the shore, not for the shore’s sake, nor the wave’s, / certainly not for me…unless you count / my memory, my traverse / of sea one way to here” (Lee 25). It is the poet’s imaginative mind that connects the sound of the sea and the sound of the “landlocked poplars.” Thus, the speaker declares:
“But I own a human story,
whose very telling
remarks loss.
…
But I’ll not widow the world.
I’ll tell my human
tale, tell it against
the current of that vaster, that
inhuman telling.
I’ll measure time by losses and destructions.”
(Lee 26-27)
This is how the poet navigates life: when he is “unable / to see in one darkness… [he] shut his eyes / to see into another.” As artists, we all like to claim we can see through the murky light. The truth is that some truly can, but some cannot. Our anxiety arises when we fail to convince others that we can grasp what we claim is there even when we really can.
How do we handle it? Lee simply shrugs and says, “I have to live with that.”
He has the confidence because he experiences the life of abundance himself while I often glimpse it secondhand—in great literature. I haven’t yet created great literature myself. I haven’t practiced my art form massively. I’ve dabbled, but not nearly enough.
The only way to truly see that life of abundance is to practice your art form, to understand yourself, the world, and the medium (media) in which you work.
Returning to the premise of this reflection: why have I begun to experience a joy I hadn’t known before? It’s because I’m living this MA-in-Creative-Writing life, studying my craft every day. Never before have I been able to focus on my craft with so few distractions. Well, not entirely without distraction—there are still interruptions here and there—but this is the least distracted time I’ve ever been.
Works Cited:
Lee, Li-Young. The City in Which I Love You. BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990.
Comments