THE COVENANT OF LANGUAGE A Conversation with Li-Young Lee (Rock & Sling, Fall 2004) An Excerpt from the Interview Rock & Sling: So if spirituality is at the heart of poetry, what do you make of much of poetry in America? Li-Young Lee: Well, I feel it could be a very wrong turn. I think it’s problematic when anything loses touch with its spiritual roots. A lot of it, I think, is very well-written, a lot of it is even beautiful, but ultimately, for me, poetry that is not spiritually rooted and doesn’t look back to its spiritual origins, I think it’s—is the word jejune? Un-nourishing? But maybe you can’t even write poetry without it being spiritual. I think I’m only now beginning to realize that I feel like a fledgling poet.      I feel as if this whole idea of the Sabbath, and the idea of rest, is built into poetry. The greatest Sabbath, the greatest peace, and the most mysterious rest that we can find in language is the rest at the end of a line; that pause at the end of a line is the most mysterious rest, or the most mysterious peace, or Sabbath, in the world. It’s all about the pauses, and it’s all about the rests. When we write poems, that’s what we’re working with, that’s the real medium, the rests between words, between two lines, between stanzas. All those rests, I feel like those are versions of Sabbath. By rest, I don’t mean flaccid rest, something dead, but I mean something that is very full, full of meaning, and full of decision. I’m thinking now of between words and at the ends of lines in poems that go anywhere, so it’s full of myriad directions and surprise and at the same time, resolution, and fullness, and emptiness, and, on the one hand, it’s full of expectation. So it’s full of Parousia. Full of waiting, on the one hand, and full of deep answering. And so I feel as if, when we write poems and we wrestle with line endings, we’re wrestling with spiritual matters.      And actually, not only spiritual matters but physical matters, because physicists have been looking for the building blocks, this materiality, and they keep coming up with space. And I think that the pause is the building block of all materiality. You can’t even think like that unless you’re thinking in poetry. But a tree, or a piece of wood, or a rock is basically full of pauses. 99.99% space. And I’m thinking about pause as space now, so that miraculously, God is some sort of miraculous poet, and this whole universe is just like a big poem. Of course, the Hindus came up with that thousands of years ago: the whole cosmos as the song of God. And it feels true to me. So I feel as if utterance, poetic utterance, is sacred. I feel as if even secular poets who call themselves secular, that ultimately, deep-down, they must not believe that. And maybe they just say it to be safe. Read this interview in full in the print version of Rock & Sling, Fall 2004. If you do not have one, you can click here to order a back issue. About Li-Young Lee Li-Young Lee's first book, Rose, received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. He has won numerous awards, honors, and fellowships including: the American Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, Pushcart Prizes, and the Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. His other books include The City in Which I Love You and the book-length prose poem/memoir, The Winged Seed, which details his father’s arrest as a political prisoner of President Sukarno and the family’s troubled exile after they fled Indonesia. Lee has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the NEA, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His most recent book is Book of My Nights. For information on Li-Young Lee's books and to read his poems visit the BOA Editions website. Order the back-copy featuring this interview here.