Readers of the poet Li-Young Lee know him as the son of a formidable father.
That father was a doctor and scholar who served as Mao Tse-tung’s personal physician and endured a stint as a political prisoner in Indonesia before making his way to the U.S., where he worked as a small-town Presbyterian minister.
The son wrestled repeatedly with his father’s long shadow in a 1995 memoir, “The Winged Seed,” and in early poems such as “The Gift:”
I . . . 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,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
But at a recent lunchtime interview at the Hon Kee Chinese restaurant in Uptown, the ghost of the father is nowhere in evidence. Looking very much the poet in a sage turtleneck and dark overcoat, a thick wedge of dark hair swept back from his face, Lee speaks with authority of his own teenage children, the way his poems have changed to reflect his relationship with them, and the lessons he hopes to impart through his work.
Almost two decades after the award-winning poet first made his mark, it has happened: In art and in life, the son has become a father.
“Fatherhood is really important to me,” says Lee, who believes his two sons, Rainer, 18, and Richard, 17, have made him a more opinionated person and a better poet: “I don’t want them to be up for grabs. I don’t want the cult of society to command them. I want them to command themselves.”
He encourages them, he says, to become more knowledgeable about themselves and the world around them. He speaks to them about Noah, the biblical figure who built an ark in preparation for a massive flood.
“There is a flood of ignorance” in the world today, Lee tells his sons. “We are in the flood, man. Build your ark.”
If this father is more passionate about learning and literature than most, he is no different than he was as a son. Even Lee’s first book of poetry, “Rose,” published in 1986, was marked by a fierce desire to comprehend the mysteries of the universe:
“Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn. . .
During the moments of silence
I wait
And wonder about the bruised bodies,
The terror of diving through air. . .”
But if such early poems were marked by concrete images — apples, walnuts, boots and ships — Lee’s current investigations are more confident, abstract and intellectually ambitious. Where once Lee pored over his own memories, inspecting them like signposts on a road to Truth and Beauty, in his 2001 collection, “Book of My Nights,” he casts his net wider, pulling in signs and symbols: ticking clocks, the darkness of night, the space between stars:
“My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely . . .”
Speaking over the cheerful clatter at Hon Kee, a neighborhood barbecue restaurant, Lee doesn’t claim to have resolved the personal issues that informed his earlier poems, but says that at a certain point dissecting them in the same direct way was no longer a “fruitful project.”
“The personal stuff, it’s just there. It’s always going to be there,” he says.
As time went on, he wanted to address broader questions, to accelerate his pursuit of “absolute reality,” a phrase he uses to refer to ultimate truths about moral, aesthetic and spiritual existence.
“I’ve always felt that there’s an absolute reality to strive for,” he says. If veils are a metaphor for what stands between human beings and deep truths, he says, it’s the poet’s job to “keep taking the veils off to uncover the body of God, if you want to call it that. We’re here to uncover sacred reality.”
On some level, as an Indonesian-born person of Chinese descent who was raised in Pennsylvania and lives in Chicago, his quest for absolute reality is a search for “home,” he says. Indonesia can’t be home. China isn’t home.
“Absolute reality is home,” he says.
At least if home is where the agony is. As Lee describes it, absolute reality is a place where infinite joy walks hand in hand with bottomless anxiety. But it’s a place that vibrates with intensity, offering the weary traveler a glimpse of complete conviction and inescapable truth.
Living in the same scruffy Uptown neighborhood where he and his wife Donna, an X-ray technologist, settled 20 years ago, Lee, who has won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, still works at a warehouse to supplement his poetry-related income.
He avoids teaching, which he says is too much of a mental drain, and thinks about poetry almost constantly.
Life, he says, is not about freedom from suffering, and poetry is not about “getting off the hook.”
“It’s about getting on the hook,” he says. “It’s about suffering in the center. Everyone wants to be free. We’re all free — wheee! I don’t want to be free.”
What he does want, as a writer and a father, is to one day create a poem that can account for all that he is and knows, all the unmapped rooms in the castle of human consciousness.
“If we want a better world, we’d better know the self,” he says. “Because it’s the self that causes trouble or causes joy, right?”
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Li-Young Lee will be featured on a segment of WTTW-Ch. 11’s “Artbeat Chicago,” which airs at 7:30 and 11:30 p.m. Thursday and again at 11 p.m. Sunday.
