POET INTERVIEW WITH LI-YOUNG LEE
By: Eugenia Leigh
Chicago poet Li-Young Lee possesses the remarkable gift of being able to retell personal narratives in a way that grips and resonates with a universal audience. He can address a poem to “fellow refugees,” end it with a celebration of spooning, and effectively unite all readers together—refugee or not—by appealing to our basic human desires. Love, especially.
The first of Lee’s books I read was his second collection, The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990). I wrote my first graduate school paper on his book, then subsequently threw myself into a Li-Young Lee book binge. This past summer, I met him in person for the first time when he introduced himself by his first name to the fellows at the Kundiman retreat, an annual program for Asian American poets where Lee served as a faculty member. We found out he listens to the Wu-Tang Clan. He asked us about the positive connotations of the slang form of “gangster.”
Kartika Review follows a decades-long trend in interviewing Li-Young Lee. Lee is a wealth of insightful opinions, and people and publications from Bill Moyers to BOMB Magazine to NPR to Poets & Writers Magazine have probed Lee’s ever-inquisitive, ever-metaphysical mind with questions often about his migratory childhood and often about his father the Christian preacher. My favorite interview is Lee’s 2004 conversation with Scene Missing Magazine, who asked questions such as, “In your opinion, where are the world’s best secrets kept?” (Lee’s answer: “In God’s heart, where the big bang was born.”) The intention of 28