Karl Thomas Rees and Dr. Keith Lawrence, English
My research, which I successfully defended as an Honors Thesis for August 2001 graduation, explored the poetry of contemporary Asian American poet, Li-Young Lee. Specifically, I was interested in how his poetry interacts with the American literary tradition. This project was an extension of a twelve-page essay I originally wrote in 1999 for an Asian American Literature course taught by Professor Keith Lawrence. The essay was subsequently published with further improvements in Insight, BYU’s Honors academic journal. The final product was sixty-five pages long, including a works cited list and an appendix. It will soon be available in the Harold B. Lee Library.
Li-Young Lee’s poetry is a remarkable blend of diverse influences, ranging from ethnic discourse and ancient Chinese writings to biblical texts and modern American poetry. Well anthologized for a poet who just turned fifty, Lee has become one of the most influential poets of our era. While his poetry is often read in university classrooms, the body of significant critical papers regarding his work is still relatively small. I hope that my research will contribute to a growing academic dialogue about Lee and his poetry.
My project began when I read the concluding question of Robert Pinsky’s 1999 essay “Poetry and the American Memory,” which explores how the “fragile heroic enterprise of remembering” defines the American people. Pinsky asks, “Who will remember the great work of memory itself, that basic task?” The question is neither trivial nor academic; for, as Pinsky declares, “Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are” (70). Perhaps no poet writing in America today answers Pinsky’s question more emphatically than does Li-Young Lee. Often labeled a poet of memory, Lee utilizes both the power and insufficiency of memory to rediscover his origins. “Memory revises me,” he declares in “Furious Versions” (The City in Which I Love You 14), at once describing his need for regular nourishment from its regenerative power and its god-like influence over the direction of his life. In short, Lee’s reliance on memory illustrates its mythic depth: memory is used by Lee to define not only himself but also the individual reader.
But is Lee the solution that Pinsky seeks? After all, Pinsky concentrates his discussion of “the American Memory” around a more traditional canon of American poetry, founded upon the likes of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. Lee, meanwhile, as an Asian American poet, does not obviously share this same Eurocentric heritage.
It is not my intent to question Pinsky’s omission of Lee and other representatives of minority literatures—after all, Bishop is the most contemporary of the poets that Pinsky discusses. Rather, I ask, can Lee’s poetry be considered traditionally American? If so, what does that say about—or do to—the American tradition? I contend that Li-Young Lee not only belongs to the American tradition, but that his poetry, in its preoccupation with memory and the loss of origin, epitomizes it. This similarity is neither deliberate nor coincidental; it exists because the American tradition, founded upon a confused potpourri of immigrant European cultures, is defined by the need to continuously rediscover its own identity and heritage. Lee’s poetry, like the poetry of many of his American poetic ancestors, sorts through the confusion of memory resulting from this loss of origin, eventually arriving at a divine and universally applicable sense of origin that restores faith in an underlying meaning to his existence.
I divided my argument into four parts: 1) a brief survey of various viewpoints on Asian America’s role in the American tradition; 2) a definition of what I mean by “the American tradition” and how memory relates to it; 3) a general discussion of how Lee is traditional in this sense, relying primarily on a simultaneous reading of Lee’s “With Ruins” and Frost’s “Directive”; and 4) an in-depth comparison of Lee’s “Furious Versions” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, revealing how Lee’s approach to memory is both similar to and a departure from the approach employed by one of the Western tradition’s most “traditional” poets. Finally, I concluded with some thoughts regarding the contribution Lee’s poetry makes to this tradition, particularly in regards to its arrival at the divine. My Thesis included brief analyses of many works from Lee’s two volumes of poetry, Rose and The City in Which I Love You.
Another significant part of my research was a telephone interview I conducted with Mr. Lee for about an hour in January. The transcription appears in an appendix at the end of my thesis. His comments greatly improved the quality of my essay. While some of his comments required me to revise my thinking (for example, I read too deeply into his conscious attempt to discuss the American tradition), he led me to consider several aspects of his involvement within the American tradition that I had not considered, including the significance of Protestantism and the expanded role of Whitman and Frost in his work.
I am also greatly in debt to the advice of my mentor, Keith Lawrence, and the other members of my Honors Thesis Defense Committee, Lance Larsen, and Scott Miller.
Altogether, I estimate that I spent 200 hours over the last half year researching Mr. Lee’s poetry and writing my thesis. I could not have devoted so much time without the help of the grant from the Office of Research and Creative Activities. It has been a very rewarding and academically worthwhile project. I hope to continue this research as I pursue graduate studies in the future.
Works Cited
- Lee, Li-Young. The City in Which I Love You. Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 1990.
- Pinsky, Robert. “Poetry and American Memory.” Atlantic Monthly Oct. 1999: 60-70.