[April is National Poetry Month, and
to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all
be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add
yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]
On the power of
a single perfect poem, and the need to go beyond it nonetheless.
For the last 15
years, the contemporary American poet with whom I’ve had by far the most
consistent experience is Li-Young Lee. The
reason is very specific and somewhat random: when I constructed my first
American Literature II final exam at Fitchburg State, back in the Spring 2006
semester, I wanted to include both a prose and a poetic passage for a close
reading question; somehow (I honestly have no recollection of how or where) I
came upon Lee’s stunning poem “The
Gift ” (1986, part of his first published
collection Rose), and I felt that
it had so many compelling choices, elements, and themes that it would make a
great such close reading poetic passage. It did indeed work so well in that
context that I’ve kept Lee’s poem in that role for every subsequent American
Lit II final exam since, and since I’ve taught at least 20 sections of the course
over my 15 years at FSU, that has meant many, many times re-reading “The Gift”
as well as reading hundreds of student analyses of it (they get to choose
between it and the prose passage for their close reading answer, but I believe
the majority have chosen “The Gift” over the years, a testament in and of
itself to its quality as poetry tends to be a less popular option than prose in
such settings).
Another
testament to the quality and power of “The Gift” is that it has retained its
ability to impress and move me even after all those readings and all those exam
analyses. One of the reasons is that Lee’s poem manages to capture the
perspective and voice of the speaker (presumably Lee himself, although a persona
is never identical to the poet) as both a seven year old and an adult, both
a son to a loving father and a loving husband to his wife, existing both in
memory and the present. That is does so in four relatively short stanzas, in
just thirty precise lines, is to my mind nothing short of a miracle—and it does
so while also foregrounding a number of other complex and important human
themes, from the power of storytelling to the different shapes that love can
take (Lee’s poem embodies the concept of “love
languages” long before that was all the social media rage). And on top of
all of that, Lee also includes the audience in compelling ways through his use
of the second-person “you,” a striking choice that makes the poem itself into a
storytelling moment from poet to reader and adds yet another vital layer to its
effects and meanings. I guess I just wrote my own final exam close reading of “The
Gift,” and the poem is so good that I’m not even mad about that!
No poet,
especially one with a more than three-decade (to date)
career, can or should be reduced to a single poem, however. I’m ashamed to
admit that I didn’t know much about Lee beyond “The Gift” before researching
this post, and so for example I didn’t know that his family were deeply tied to
the early 20th century Chinese government (his great-grandfather was
its first republican president) and fled to Indonesia after the Communist
revolution in 1949, nor that his father was imprisoned for a year by Indonesian President
Sukarno before the family fled once more. Those multi-generational
histories and stories, losses and links, are certainly all present behind the
family saga of “The Gift.” But they are also part of Lee’s voice and work well
beyond that poem, as illustrated for example by the other two poems (“A Story”
and “Early in the Morning”) featured alongside “The Gift” on this page. And they
remain part of his evolving career, as illustrated by the intimate yet epic titular poem
from his newest collection, 2018’s
The Undressing. The depictions of
love and intimacy in that poem feels both similar to and quite distinct from those
in “The Gift,” and highlights the continuing arc and growth of this wonderful
contemporary American poet.
Last poets
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other poets you’d highlight?
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