Memory and Blindness in Li-Young Lee's Poetry

Introduction: Shared Themes in Lee's Poetry

Within the poetic works of Li-Young Lee, there are significant thematic commonalities that reveal the poet's personal and fundamental point of view. Two poems that share a common theme — one reflecting the poet's life, his world, and how childhood experience echoes into adulthood — are "Persimmons" and "This Room and Everything in It." Each work reflects the poet's attempt to construct an alternative memory: a set of memories learned from a father losing his sight. Lee was profoundly affected by his father's progression toward blindness, and in both poems he explores the common theme of building alternative memory — a memory that might transcend blindness — through alternative symbolism and poignancy.

In the latter poem, "This Room and Everything in It," Lee's attempt to arrest an experience and etch an alternative memory into his mind is most fully realized, and it demonstrates the core of the lesson first encountered in "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, "This Room and Everything in It")

Building Alternative Memory Through the Father's Blindness

"Persimmons" reflects on a formative moment in childhood when Lee discovered that his father was going blind, and how his mundane school experiences — preserved in memory — played little part in the tragic reality unfolding at home. The work builds on this theme by developing the first hints of how his father's blindness created lessons of memory that would stay with the poet into adulthood, shaping the way he experienced both the ordinary and the deeply personal. The poem moves from childhood back and then forward into adulthood, carrying with it sensory memories of touch and presence that Lee regards as fundamentally worth preserving — and therefore worth applying the lessons his father taught him about what deserves to be remembered.

Sensory Imagery and the Art of Memory in 'Persimmons'

In "Persimmons," Lee equates his father's lessons about sensory alternative memory with a present-tense encounter, marking a sensual moment between himself and a woman named Donna. The imagery mixes the mundane with the imperative of recorded memory. Lee juxtaposes the way he has been taught to peel and eat a persimmon with the memory of how to be present 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, "Persimmons")

The sensory imagery throughout the poem — taste, touch, scent, texture — is not incidental. It is the medium through which memory is made durable, precisely because sight cannot be relied upon. Lee's father, moving toward blindness, modeled a way of knowing the world through all other senses, and the poem enacts that alternative epistemology.

Forgetting and Recollection in Both Poems

Lee goes on to challenge his own memory of the encounter with Donna in a manner that directly anticipates the strategy deployed in "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, "Persimmons")

A similar pattern of memory and diction appears 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, "This Room and Everything in It")

Each work demonstrates how easy it is to become complacent about even the most sincere emotional experience — that of sensual love — and then makes a deliberate attempt to etch something essential to life into memory, as Lee was taught to do by his father.

Conclusion: Etching Experience Against Forgetting

The value of this memory exercise — making the poet see and express through memorable symbols the mundane experiences of the present — is essential to his style as a poet and is reflective of the core of each of these works. Both "Persimmons" and "This Room and Everything in It" demonstrate the need to etch into memory the symbolic nature of simple pleasures so they may be recalled as life moves forward. This imperative is all the more urgent given the threat of forgetting — whether through the passage of time or, as Lee frames it, through what he terms le petit mort (the little death) of sensual climax, which washes away what is most important to hold.

Works Cited

Lee, Li-Young. "This Room and Everything in It." Retrieved November 5, 2008.

Lee, Li-Young. "Persimmons." Retrieved November 5, 2008.