Who hasn't thought, "Take me with you," hearing the wind go by?

Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia August 19, 1957 to Chinese parents. Both of his parents had lived notable lives, his father once personal physician to Mao Zedong, his mother the granddaughter of the first president of the Republic of China, Yuan Shikai.

Prior to Li-Young Lee's birth, the Lee's were exiled from China and eventually settled in Indonesia where Lee's father founded the Christian college: Gamaliel University. He was a teacher of both Philosophy and English. Lee's father had pro-western sentiments and was very vocal about them.

But at that time Indonesia's officially recognized President Sukarno; born Kusno Sosrodihardjo, had begun to stir Indonesia into an anti-Chinese furor. Lee's father was subsequently arrested and jailed, spending nineteen months behind bars.

After his father's release from prison, the family was sent to Macau into exile yet again, but this time a supervised exile.
However the family never reached their destination, rescued by a previous student of Lee's father while at sea, they were taken to safety in Hong Kong.

"There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."¹

Where are you in the cities in which I love you, the cities daily risen to work and to money, to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

The family eventually left Hong Kong and in 1964, immigrated to the United States, staying in Seattle, Washington for a time but eventually settling in Pittsburgh where Lee's father would become a Presbyterian minister in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania.

Li-Young Lee would attend the University of Pittsburgh. There he was mentored by professors such as Ed Ochester and Gerald Stern and would learn that he could take poetry writing seriously. He realized that creating poetry could be a form of meditation and that poetry as language was a "presence".

Li-Young Lee had always been exposed to literature by his parents, both were classically educated and fluent in traditional Chinese poetry, mostly that of Zhuang-zi and Lao Tze. He has cited many influences on his writing; noting a few which have been: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Yang Wan Li, Walt Whitman, Tu Fu, and Bruno Schulz.

Lee is favored critically and is felt to be one of America's leading poetic voices. He is also one of the very few full time poets in the United States.

Speaking to Tina Chang in 2007 for American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets, Lee had this to say:

Chang: In regard to writing poetry, Stanley Kunitz, said, "You have to move into areas of the self that remain to be explored, and that's one of the problems in maturing as a poet. By the age of fifty, the chances are that you've explored all the obvious places. The poems that remain for you to write will have to come out of your wilderness." By wilderness, he means the untamed self, all the chaos behind the locked door. Do you feel that you've explored all the obvious places or that you have more to discover?

Lee: Well, I feel both. I do feel that, as a yoga that one practices, writing poems is like any meditative path. You move through your own psychology, and then you move beyond your psychology. At that point it gets a little rough, because you have to posit something beyond your own psychology toward that which your psyche is embedded in. That adventure is, I think, an infinite proposition. That, to me, is the real wilderness. Beyond species-specific, beyond gender-specific, beyond culture-specific, what kind of poems are your cells writing? What kinds of poems come out of the space that is our bodies? ²

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.

Li-Young Lee's poetry is a personal and collective spiritual questioning. It answers back to itself with yet more questions. It is full of a history of sorrow and a tenderness drawn from love and loss. He immediately wounds and heals you in the same line.

The presence of his words seem immersed in memory and longing that is distant yet near. His poetry naked yet with lines invoking a measure of mystery. Much of his memory and longing is written from the life of his father which he describes while speaking with Tina Chang:

Chang: You mentioned "presence," and I remember in your book The Winged Seed, you wrote about your father's presence. In one part you wrote of washing your father's body in the tub. And of that you wrote, "because he's dying, his presence is bigger than anyone elses in the room." Can you speak a little bit about that?

Lee: When he was young and strong, he was a formidable person, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. When he started to die, the family was so attracted to him, and yet he kept a big space. He could keep us at bay or draw us in. The issue of his dying filled the whole house. You know, I come from a really old-fashioned Chinese family. So when he was anywhere in the house, we had to be aware of where he was. If he was napping, you were not allowed to cross the line of his head. Or, if my mother or father were sitting in particular ways, we could not walk past them in certain ways. You had to be very conscious of their bodies. If an elder were sitting where you are, I wouldn't be able to cross my legs in certain ways because it implies that the bottom of my foot is facing you. So I have to be very aware of my own body and the elder's body. And I think this obsession with my father's body was taught to me all my life. I could never touch his head or kiss his face, but when he was dying, I had to strip him, put him in the bath, and wash his head. I was breaking all these taboos.

" It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade." ³

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through the bare rooms over
my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house?What could he possibly need there in heaven?

Li Young Lee has studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona and the State University of New York at Brockport.

He has published four books of Poetry: Rose(Brockport, N.Y.: BOA Editions) 1986, The City in Which I Love You(Brockport, N.Y.: BOA Editions) 1990, Book of My Nights (American Poets Continuum, 68) in 2001, and his new volume Behind My Eyes (Norton) 2008.

Lee also penned his memoir The Wingéd Seed: A Remembrance(Simon & Schuster) in 1995. He has received several honors including the Whiting Writers' Award in 1988, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award in 1994, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1995, and Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets in 2003.

He is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife in Chicago. He continues to teach and speak at numerous universities and says this about poetry:

"Poetry is favored language. It makes the claim that it is at least half divine. If not complete, at least half. That claim of the divine, it packs more meaning, more being, more presence. Saturation of presence is one of the criteria in divine speech and I think poetry aspires to divine speech."

(1) Excerpt: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee
(2) The Totality of Causes: Li-Young Lee and Tina Chang in Conversation;Tina Chang and Li-Young Lee (American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2007 by The Academy of American Poets. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19802
(3) Excerpt: Eating Alone, Li-Young Lee