The first poem I remember loving was “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee. I memorized its soaring verses, each one a dedication to peaches, and would recite it at nearly every lunch period to the chagrin of my classmates. I was a girl obsessed. That was the first time I had seen a poem that was unapologetically jubilant; Lee eschewed everything I thought I knew about poetry in “From Blossoms.” There was nothing depressing, pejorative or traumatic. It was simply an exalting review of some really good fruit and a really good summer’s day — and it was in that simplicity that Lee found the nuance and depth that marks interesting poetry.
“From Blossoms” grew in its sophistication as I grew old enough to look for it: “There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background” became more than a description of today being a happy day, to the insinuation that there are days where death does exist in the background. When Lee writes “to carry within us an orchard,” the reader can think of transferring the literal fruits of an orchard to one’s stomach, or the reader can imagine that contained within the consumption of peaches is the consumption of the shade, shadow and dirt. This line, while so simple, reveals a manifold of information to contemplate. His deft writing is what has amassed Lee recognition as one of the most important poets writing today. Among the landscape of his awards is the William Carlos Williams award for his third collection of poems, “Book of My Nights.” Lee is the first poet I can say I was truly moved by, so when his collection “The Undressing” came out in late 2018, I expected reading his work to feel like coming home to the first traces of my love for poetry.
And feel like coming home it did. Titles such as “At the Year’s Revolving Door” and “Eavesdropping at Morning’s Sill” go with the fact that most of Lee’s poems have a sense of domesticity, as if readers are overhearing conversations going on in the narrator’s home. The first, eponymous poem of the collection is a conversation between romantic partners, one reminding the other “the things you need reminded of.” The partners describe the “World as a story/ that keeps beginning.” This bare bone observation is startling in its beauty: the assertion that for time immemorial, we will be, as the two narrators of the poem are, lying in bed telling each other stories. This is a gentle reminder of our simultaneous cosmic smallness and our endlessness to those we love.
Observations of love abound in the collection, with lines such as: “the voices of lovers/are creation’s most recent flowers;” “your loving look finds each of these things/loveable, I can see. Things/by other means poor;” and most resonant to me, “…longing entered time as this body.” The personification of grief as the human body extends the conversation beyond love to the sadness of being. Grief is our body, because it is within our body that our ultimate loneliness is enshrined through our separate containment to individual flesh.
Lee also makes powerful comments on the nature of time in “The Undressing.” He writes, “And time is a black butterfly, pinned/while someone searches for its name in a book.” The delicate assertion that time simultaneously possesses wings and the ability to be held, forces the reader to decide whether or not they believe that they may reach out and pin the past or whether they think the nature of time is as archaic as being in a book or if it lives as in a butterfly. Another potent description of time comes in “At the Year’s Revolving Door,” where he writes that time is “music/the living, the dead, and the unborn/step in and out of, shadowing each other.” Lee gives a beautiful description of the malleable nature of time, which for me conjured thoughts of religion and spirituality. There are indeed times I feel the ghosts of my passed loved ones and the ghosts of all the strangers I haven’t yet met, but will soon love, dancing with me on my walk to class. Conjuring up the idea of being influenced even by the spirits we cannot name, Lee’s writing always makes me feel less lonely. His poetry is a bridge between the living realm and the other realms of the universe, tying us all together with assertions as such: “To say no to death/ is to say no to living.”
Many feel as if poetry is too opaque for them, something meaningless and dark, with no relevance to our lives and none of the fun of novels. But poetry is how we name ourselves; it is the explanation of human phenomena of grief, love and longing. Poetry is the assertion that I am alive and important, and so are you, simply by looking around and noticing. Lee’s collection “The Undressing” is a beautiful foray into poetry for those looking to engage with the genre’s deep capacity for self-affirmation, and for those who already recognize that a poem can indeed change your whole life. While no poem will ever mean as much to me as “From Blossoms,” the poem “I Loved You Before I Was Born” from this collection has earned an immoveable place in my chest. Listen: “I give you my blank heart/Please write on it/what you wish.” In reading his collection, I gave Lee my blank heart, and he wrote on it truly incomparable descriptions of the love, loss and joy that make life worth living, and poetry worth reading.
