Li-Young Lee Famous Quotes
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In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.
Hair spills
through my dreams, sprouts
from my stomach, thickens my heart,
and tangles the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.
Hair ascends the tree.
of my childhood -- the willow
I climbed
one bare foot and hand at a time,
feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing
my father plead from his window, Don't fall!
Sooner of later, God will again
bear out that semblance He makes of me each day.
He'll knead, fold, punch, pull, mark, smudge,
erase, and tear away.
Sometimes it feels like love.
And makes me tremble.
Sometimes it hurts like death.
And makes me shake.
A poem is like a score for the human voice.
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.
People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.
While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.
SELF-HELP FOR FELLOW REFUGEES
If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment,
or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
and the birthdays of gods and demons,
it's probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States.
And try not to talk too loud.
If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck,
before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.
Don't ask her what she thought she was doing,
turning a child's eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.
And if you meet someone
in your adopted country
and think you see in the other's face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you're standing too far.
Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you're standing too close.
In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.
And if you're one of those
whose left side of the face does
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.
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
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I
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
Then you'll remember your life as a book of candles, each page read by the light of its own burning.
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.
Every time you write a poem it's apocalyptic. You're revealing who you really are to yourself.
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.
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
Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
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.
Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.
One Heart"
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
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Memory revises me.
Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
Sandalwood"
The ash keeps dropping from the incense stick.
I keep turning you over in my mind.
I keep turning you over in my heart.
The stick shortens, burning.
The ash grows
and falls.
I keep turning you over.
I keep turning you.
I keep turning.
The ash keeps falling, piling up, more
of the silent reduction.
Burning earns such clean wages,
eye of ember, eye of ash hastening.
I keep turning your eyes over
to find your thoughts.
Turning your voice over
to find your meaning.
Turning your body over to find
a place to hide me.
And you keep turning inside me.
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The sound of rain
outlives us. I listen,
someone is whispering.
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.
And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
We suffer each other to have each other a while.
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
I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,
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.
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.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.
Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.