Li-Young Lee Selected as Eighth Westminster Poet

Michael Cervas, head of the English Department, has announced that Li-Young Lee has accepted the English Department's invitation to become the eighth Westminster Poet. The celebrated Chinese-American poet will visit Williams Hill for two days in the spring of 2008.

Noted for his beautifully crafted poems which often braid together the deeply personal and the profoundly philosophical, Lee is scheduled to give a reading in the Werner Centennial Theater April 9 at 7:30 p.m. The following morning, he will participate in question and answer sessions with English classes and with the English faculty. A soft-spoken but mesmerizing reader, Lee will surely add his own distinctive voice to the very successful Westminster Poetry Series, which has included visits by several U. S. poet laureates, a Maryland State poet laureate, a Connecticut State poet laureate, and a number of Pulitzer Prize winners.

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. His great grandfather was China’s first republican President, and his father, whose spirit hovers over many of Lee’s poems, was the personal physician to Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Lee’s parents escaped from China to Indonesia, where Dr. Lee helped found Gamaliel University. But in 1959 the Lee family was forced to flee Indonesia because of rising anti-Chinese sentiment. Dr. Lee himself spent a year in one of President Sukarno’s jails before managing to lead his family to safety. A five-year odyssey through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan ensued before the Lees finally settled in the United States in 1964.

Acclaimed Author

Li-Young Lee is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poems. His first book, Rose, won New York University’s 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. In 1990, Lee’s second book, The City in Which I Love You,  was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. His third collection, Book of My Nights, was awarded the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award by the Poetry Society of America. Lee’s fourth volume, Behind My Eyes, will be released Jan. 21, 2008, by W. W. Norton and Company. Lee also won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for his 1995 memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance.

The literary critic Gerald Stern has said, “What characterizes Lee’s poetry is a certain humility . . . a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness.” Of all American poets working today, Lee is perhaps the one most at home with the silences of ordinary experience. His poems often reveal themselves as a dance of silence and sound, lyrical, spiritual, and erotic all at once.

Lee has studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. In addition, he has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa. Lee’s many honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lannan Foundation Award, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Li-Young Lee currently lives in Chicago with his wife, Donna, and his two sons.

Lee’s visit is made possible by a generous gift from the Ford-Goldfarb Fund, which was established by Trustee Maureen Ford-Goldfarb and her daughter Kirsten Ford ‘00 in 2005 to support English Department enrichment activities. Last year, the fund enabled the whole school to travel to the Yale Repertory Theater in February to see In the Continuum, and it helped make possible the visit of Naomi Shihab Nye in the spring.

The following is an example of Li-Young Lee’s poetry:

FROM BLOSSOMS

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

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.