ISSUE 16 | FALL 2013
KR: Did you ever stop? LYL: No. You know, when I tried to stop, it was because I thought that somehow it was wrong—that writing poems was an indulgence and it was evil. One more way to go wrong in the world. Literary fame. You know the Buddhists talk about that. They said the delusion of literary fame is a very specific kind of delusion. Famous literary people—that’s a whole illusory world of its own. I heard that and I thought, I don’t want to be there. Everybody’s agreed upon this year’s whatever winner is— all of that, the Buddhists said, is one big illusion. They didn’t go so far as to say literary fame is a hell, but I find it a hell.
KR: How do you reconcile that with the fact that many poets and readers perceive you as somebody who has that kind of fame?
LYL: It’s very complex because I’m grateful for the support and that I can make a life, but the fame is very bad for me. Here’s the state I’m in most of the time when I’m not thinking about my career or anything else: I live in a state where I do feel that I’m being observed all the time. By God. Then fame—or little news of fame—wafts into my window and I experience that I’m being observed by an unseen public. And suddenly, that God who is an unseen audience gets projected onto this public. Suddenly, I forget what the actual experience is—that my actual audience is God. I forget that. God as the audience is both greater, more significant, happier, and in a weird way, more lonely, than the other experience, which is less lonely.
KR: So the awareness of this unseen, public, human audience starts to overshadow the consciousness that the primary audience is God? LYL: Right. My visceral sense is that there is a body out there listening. And I say, “out there,” but I don’t know what I mean. Out there in the stars? Let’s say “in the future” even. I don’t know whether that future is two years from now. But my sense is that it’s not just out there. It’s in here, too. It’s in me. I feel there’s an overhearing going on. Or an overwatching. And sometimes I feel invisible to God, and then I feel very frightened, angry, hostile. Most of the time, though, I feel observed. Is that the feeling? Haunted! Like I’m being watched, and I can’t tell where!
Gary Snyder asked me once, “When do you feel this?” and I said, “Ever since I was little. In the woods.” And he goes, “Do you know when you walk into any woods, every animal for like fifty miles knows you’re there?” He says, “So when you walk into the woods, you’re literally being 37