Despite his talent, award-winning poet Li-Young Lee spent 10 years trying not to write poetry because he felt it had become “self-indulgent and meaningless.”
Lee wanted to help the world and became a community and global activist.
During the hiatus, ideas and poems kept coming to him to the point that he would just write them and lock them away immediately afterwards.
After a while, he realized that his talent for poetry was helpful and could contribute to the world in a positive way, so he began to write again.
Lee gave a reading of his work last Wednesday in Conference Rooms A & B as part of the Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month and the speaker series.
The purpose of the series is to introduce different cultural, social and political ideas to De Anza College.
The room was packed and crowded but not a single sound could be heard above the soft-spoken poet’s voice.
“I was very surprised that so many people came to hear poetry. It was very welcoming and I’m very happy,” Lee said.
De Anza President Brian Murphy introduced Lee’s poems as having an “uncommon sensibility.” Lee quietly entered the stage and began with love poems.
Lee began with “Trading for Heaven” but stopped abruptly asking the audience, “I sound huge on this mic. Is it OK back there for everyone?”
Love is a common theme for Lee, as well as exile, estrangement, alienation, death, and loneliness.
After reading his work, Lee discussed his themes and writing process with the audience. Lee said that love is eternal, deep, forbidden and pornographic.
There is so wide a range because it can include almost all human emotions. While most people think of sounds and rhymes when they think of poetry, Lee said one of the most important elements is a poem is the silence, something he tries to incorporate in his poetry.
For “The Face I Love,” Lee explained that the idea came from always looking at his wife’s face. Lee said, “She always tells me to stop looking, but we all know she loves it.”
De Anza student Brian Tang said that the first time he read Li-Young Lee’s poems, “[they] slapped me silly … different than any other poems I’ve read before.”
One poetry instructor descri-bed him as “Woody Allen-ish.”
“I thought he was wonderful, endearing, self-deprecating, and accessible to students because he was very entertaining,” said Nicole Brodsky, poetry writing instructor, “As a poetry teacher, I think he gave some great advice on his process on writing poems. As a writer myself, he gave a model of how to do a good reading, an entertaining reading.”
The other English instructors in the audience were just as impressed.
“I chose Li-Young because my students love him so much when they read ‘Persimmons,'” said Wallis Leslie, coordinator of the event. “It was breathtaking. People were literally holding their breath listening to him.”
Ken Weisner, advisor for the De Anza literary magazine “Red Wheelbarrow,” described Lee as a “devoted, talented practitioner of poetry.”
Lee read from his four books “Rose,” “The City in Which I Love You,” “Book of My Nights” and one memoir, “Winged Seed: A Remembrance.”
He said his inspiration is “everything. I have insomnia because of it. You can begin everywhere.”
On his writing process, Lee said, “I have no original thoughts. Poets have been thinking about these ideas for million of years.”
Lee has won many literary awards and recognitions including The American Book Award, The Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and The PEN of Oakland.
At the end of the day he said he hopes students, “feel a little sense of their own inner richness of their soul and imagination.”
DASB funded the event along with the social science and language arts division.
The Broadcast Media Center recorded the event for the language arts department and the library.