Li-Young Lee Within the Poetic

¶ … Li-Young Lee

Within the poetic works of Li-Young Lee there are significant thematic commonalities that show the poets personal and fundamental point-of-view. Two poems that show a common theme that is a reflection of the poets life and world, and how childhood reflects into adulthood are Persimmons and This Room and Everything in it. Each of these two works reflects the poet attempting to create alternative memory, a set of memories learned from a blind father. Li-Young Lee was obviously profoundly effected by his father's progression to blindness and in Persimmons and This Room and Everything in it, the poet reflects the common theme of building alternative memory, a memory that might transcend blindness, with alternative symbolism and poignancy. In the latter poem, This Room and Everything in it, is the best example of how Lee attempts to stop an experience to etch an alternative memory in his mind plays out and demonstrates the core of the lesson he learned as it is reflected in the former poem Persimmons.

Lie still now / while I prepare for my future,/certain hard days ahead,/when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use / of the one thing I learned/of all the things my father tried to teach me:/the art of memory. (Lee, 2002, This Room and Everything in it)

Persimmons, reflects on the core time in childhood when Lee discovered that his father was going blind, and how his mundane school experience (reflected in memory) played little part in the tragic reality of home. The work builds on this theme by developing the first hints of how Lee's father's blindness created lessons of memory for the author that would stay with him into adulthood, as he experienced both mundane and poignantly simple experiences. The work harkens back to childhood and then steps forward into adulthood with sensual simple memories of touch and presence that are seen by the poet as fundamentally memorable and therefore worth the application of the lessons his father taught him about what is important to remember. In the work Lee equates the lessons his father taught him regarding sensual alternative memory with the present, marking a sensual encounter between himself and Donna a mysterious woman who Lee experienced at least a moment of the sensual with. The imagery of the work is of mixing the mundane experiences of life with the need for a type of recorded memory. Lee juxtaposes the manner in which he has been taught to peel and eat a persimmon to the memory or how to express the sensual with a woman; put the knife away, lay down the newspaper./Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. / Chew on the skin, suck it,/and swallow. Now, eat / the meat of the fruit,/so sweet, all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white./in the yard, dewy and shivering / with crickets, we lie naked, / face-up, face-down,.. (Lee, 2002, Persimmons)

Lee even goes on within his summary of the same experience to challenge his own memory of the experience with the woman Donna, in a similar manner as he does in the later Poem This Room and Everything in it.

Crickets: chiu. Dew: I've forgotten./Naked: I've forgotten./Ni, wo: you and me. / I part her legs,/remember to tell her/she is beautiful as the moon. (Lee, 2002 Persimmons) similar pattern of memory diction is employed in This Room and Everything in it.

And one day, when I need/to tell myself something intelligent/about love,

I'll close my eyes/and recall this room and everything in it: / My body is estrangement./This desire, perfection./Your closed eyes my extinction./Now I've forgotten my/idea.... (Lee, 2002, This Room and Everything in it)

Each work demonstrates how easy it is to become complacent about the mundane character of even the most sincere of emotional expression, that of sensual love and then makes an attempt to etch something that is essential to life into memory, as Lee was taught to do by his father. Lee, as a child gave riper persimmons to his father and the persimmons became a tool of symbolism for the child, as he grew to a man;

Finally understanding/he was going blind,/my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost./I gave him the persimmons,/swelled, heavy as sadness,/and sweet as love. (Lee, 2002, Persimmons)

The poignant memory of a young boy offering his father a consoling gift of two now ripened persimmons that he had found in the cellar, and coveted through the experience of their ripening on his boyhood window sill becomes imagery in which the father teaches the son, the lessons of memory once again. The men are sitting together as Lee again has found a treasure in the cellar, a group of scrolls that his father has painted;

Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth./He raises both hands to touch the cloth,/asks, Which is this?/

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,/the strength, the tense / precision in the wrist./I painted them hundreds of times / eyes closed. / These I painted blind./

Some things never leave a person: / scent of the hair of one you love, / the texture of persimmons,/in your palm, the ripe weight. (Lee, 2002, Persimmons)

There is a clear sense that in this short but symbolic exchange between father and son there is an expression of memory that is essential to the future life of the poet. A future life he expresses, through the lessons of memory in his work This Room and Everything in it.