Li-Young Lee on poetry as DNA
“Poetry is language — the best form in the worst chaos.” Li-Young Lee
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One reason we delight in poetry is the way it sees, acknowledges, and brings attention to what is — the details, the tone of voice, the dusty skin of a peach, the shape of an experience. And how it doesn’t stop there, but attempts to see, acknowledge, and experience what is inside, below, and connected to all these things. In distilled, intentional language.
Lee puts it this way: “If you think about it, poetic speech is so dense because it accounts for the manifold quality of our being. There are many selves in me. As I am speaking to you now, I am speaking out of one self, the self that is in conversation. But there is a self that was dreaming last night. Poetry means one thing, but it means a hundred other things too, because we are as humans manifold in being. Poetry accounts for the many-ness of who we are.”1
This accounting of the many-ness of who we are can be such a relief. Such a powerful tool for healing. Particularly in the midst of change, or after long seasons of not acknowledging or facing or knowing quite what to do with our many-ness.
“When I look at my shoe—or this cup, or this couch, or this jacket—if I think about how these things came to be, I’d have to account for the infinite net of circumstances, causes, and conditions that make each thing. We might as well say that each thing is a shape of the totality of causes. This is one shape of the totality of causes, that is another. But they look different.
And it seems to me that a poem is nothing less than that.
I think, too, that this is why the language in poetry is much more dense than in other conditions. The poem somehow seems to have a 360-degree or spherical view of things. I think that’s what makes poetic consciousness. That is, the consciousness that a poem imparts differs from other forms of consciousness.”2
🧶 Craft chat
Lee’s philosophy about poetry as a spiritual practice is a huge part of how and why he crafts his poems the way he does. For him, it’s as much a way of learning to perceive and exist and open to the world, as any particular technique. “When I come to the page to write the poem, I have to surrender everything. You have to accomplish a kind of deep yin quality—openness, yielding, getting out of the way so that the poem can come in. And that is a way to practice my life.” 3
☯︎ Quick reminder here, yin is the shadow part of the yin/yang symbol, and in Taoist philosophy represents things like the feminine, earth, inside space, and receiving. Lee speaks often about being influenced by Taoist philosophy, and you can feel this in his work, in things like his inclusion always of a little light with the dark, a little dark alongside the light.
When asked about how to craft a poem, he suggests “I think the paradigm for a poem is DNA—that is, as much information as possible written into as little space as possible. It’s like writing code. There’s so much code in a tiny strand of DNA. And there should be tons of information in a poem. I don’t mean information from the phenomenal world alone. I mean spiritual information, emotional information, concrete information.
The more you practice that kind of work, the more you change your own thinking so that it is saturated with meaning and being, the more you see how thoroughly the world is encoded, that information is written into every single quantum quadrant of the universe. That God is everywhere, literally. Everything is saturated with God. So the sacred condition of meaning in a poem seems to me a perfect paradigm of mind and world. The saturation of meaning and being in a poem exactly mirrors the saturation of meaning and being in the cosmos.”4
✍︎ Try it
Our exercise this week is to begin writing a poem that explores the things beneath/inside/connected to a chosen object, experience, or moment. A poem that intentionally accounts for some of the many-ness of you.
This could go all kinds of directions, but one idea to start is to pick your thing, write it in the middle of the page, and then begin drawing lines outward in a kind of web, writing anything it’s connected to— themes, questions, experiences, origins, words, history, other objects etc. As you use some of your web to piece together your poem, try including bits of darkness alongside the light, and specks of light inside the darkness.
Bonus: See what you can do to take Lee’s advice on writing from an open, flexible, receptive place, rather than being forceful, stiff, or urgent. Lower the stakes. Take off the pressure.
💌 Writing Invite #2
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Begin your free write with “I am trying to see….”
Let whatever comes, come.
And lastly, two more poems for you. ♥︎
source: The Wonder of Small Things
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Can’t wait to read what you come up with this week! You can share here. ▼
“When we name things in poetry, we name the world. I feel as if we’re trying to name it in a deeper way than other forms of language can achieve. And my sense is that language has this double function, if we can call it that. Its original function is a way for us to shelter the world, to receive the world. In tai chi they talk a lot about that. They say that fledgling students want to learn tai chi so they can encroach on other people’s territory and dominate others. But originally, tai chi was taught as a way to receive, to host, even to host an enemy, and to host that enemy in a way that the enemy gets transformed and becomes a friend. Language can host the world and can be a place where the world is apprehendable to us and we can receive the world.”5
https://missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-li-young-lee/
https://poets.org/text/totality-causes-li-young-lee-and-tina-chang-conversation
https://imagejournal.org/article/conversation-li-young-lee/
https://imagejournal.org/article/conversation-li-young-lee/
https://imagejournal.org/article/conversation-li-young-lee/