The Winged Seed: A remembrance was the last of Li-Young Lee’s book for me to get. The book’s an easy fit in the mind at the same time with What’s Left by rob mclennan. I’ve already gone thru that twice and a bit. (Although I’m not at half way thru rob mclennen’s titles yet).
They share a chewing over of histories, the emjambments of lifetimes, of histories larger than one individual mapped into the tiny details of one moment so that universals are personal.
This seems the opposite direction of a lot of poetry, where the process is to go from the particular personal experience and try to tie it to the universal. Both talk about large scale scope of external events, but they are fragmented to particulars and by that means the wider is internalized, personalized, psychological. As much details are included there’s the documentary sense that there never can be enough details.
For example p. 84, from What’s Left
metal spears sunk deep
into corpses & sand
in pre-war china, the wipe
of memory & teaching years (they justwont say ) erase
of a certain pride built in
/the brain too small to get the pieces fit
like being covered in cat hair, when you don’t even
own a fucking cat)the highland clearances
& irish potato famine
filling the other side of the ocean w/ shipshalifax & new york,
st johns & montreal(the biggest part of history, what cant
be seen
) probably pushing
my family out too
This by p. 87 becomes…
some of us still write letters & poems by hand,
enjoy the thickness
of unprocesst milk, or popcorn
a pot on the stove
/arranging our days out by latitudes,
& the shape of the wind
It’s interesting to see Li-Young Lee’s writing from 1995 since some of his prose is what got re-processed into poems later, although I read the poems first.
To call it prose seems inaccurate. He cycles to and fro over pages, returning to door stoops of concepts. p. 17, from a dream of memory of childhood,
Will he join me to my shoulder bone? Don’t they know I’ve hidden my fate inside a peach, which isn’t round because it is in search of a theme, or a stem, or sugar, or a leaf, but a destiny? Whose night is forming inside the fruit? Night is the night’s peony and monstrous forehead, so our brief bowls, shattered, might spill the sea./ Night is the night carried, death by the rectangular, black-lacquered trunk my father hailed on his back until he got tired, then my brothers and I took turns shouldering it.
There’s a meditative chant to it. It may sound trippy and not make a lot of sense out of context but there’s a press of power in there. (The ripe fruit and his parents are a refrain thru all his writings.) It’s interesting to see poem 5, of a dream of his father’s visitation in broken shoes, back from the grave to attend a family protrait and call Lee home to the afterlife reoccur. It was in The City in Which I Love You (1990) and expanded on in a familiar way in his opening chapter of Winged Seed (1995).
He next goes into a more literal story of his mother growing up in the Old President’s household in mainland China. But even in more linear prose there’s an intensity of drive. I had forgotten how dense his writing is. I can’t gorge any more than I could eat a whole bakery of fresh bread at a sitting.
There’s this tying of disparate things and the sensation can be like reading a newspaper in a wind. Yet it isn’t that the things don’t go together. The connections are there the way fingertips are dissconnected from each other but the hand joins them.
At the same time there is a sense of centred focus in Lee’s writing that keeps it grounded in his earnest intentions of seeking. He isn’t tripping along playing with language, but trying to reach beyond language thru it to a cosmic sort of truth and he does that in sensory-rich details and rhythm.
Likewise mclennan’s got a press behind, a driving from idea to the next that is both restless and wrestling in a similar tone.
In the chapter paisley, 3., p. 120 each line pivots to mean what it means by itself, then changes its meaning with the next phrase, in an expand, rest, expand. For instance, an excerpt (to cut thru a line, because each hooks forward and back)
for customers. a sweet bottled grey.
her hair for the picking. we all sit
in chairs. a forever until. the first wordthat we said then. would we mark it
in stone. could you leave thatalone. would that you need me.
a bowling ball try. the thirdfamily reunion. a shirt second hand.
would that only a quarter. putthe second hand down. ticking out
from the why. if we made itthat far. damn the fortunes
There are obvious differences as well. At times Lee seems so drawn to the dark images as to seem more locked to pain. The work is constantly keenly, not so much exploring and cathartic as seeming to decorate the walls of the prison of his making, not so much a tribute as tributaries from an bottomless lake of remembering until it is sister of sorrow. It is elegaic, reverential, a verbal answer to being at the altar on ancestor day. He has internalized the sermonic voice of his preacher father into his words. As Lee describes his family’s exodus and escape thru Macau, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Singapore… (p. 39)
Out of accidents and silences. Out of the step of the fleeing who went before us. And though our course seemed aimless, decided by nothing but fear, Ba assured us it was momentus, even predetermined. Our seemingly incoherant and stray rovings across the horizontal plane of seemings and doings were, in fact, he convinced us, a continuous unfolding of vertical and ultimate meaning. And since the nature of moving is collecting, naturally we collected: curly sea foam, scaly archipelegos and leafy rain, lunatic moths…
There’s a beauty but its often achingly so.
For the Lee family to end up going from upper class estates with household of entourage of servants, thru political prison and refugee run, to tenements in Chinatown, Chicago is a remarkable shift thru collections of experiences.
(p. 42) We were jettisoning luggage, names, bodies. There was Tai, my brother, then there wasn’t. There was Chung, another brother, then there wasn’t. Brothers swallowed up in some murk we called, conveniently, The Past, as through it was a place we could return to.
Although most poetry is an attempt to pin something for perpetuity, both of these writers contend with a similar focus of overwritten histories, nearly or completely out of reach and lost in pasts, struggling to sort out what can be kept, pulled back, work on preserving living histories, figuring out what the relationship now and here is to then and there.
The styles and paces are different y
et it seems there’s an overlap at times in the density and a sort of brooding/cherishing.
Lee has said that he writes after everyone has gone to bed, sometimes thru the night, in solitude of dawn. That seems to come thru how his thoughts are structured in sustained moods and he turns, for example, the concept of seed as stone, as tear, as grain, as symbol of his father, restlessly, endlessly, for more than 50 pages.
Lee tends to keep a fairly limited range of tone from longing to regret to ecstatic grief and awe of transient beauty, both in this work, and in his poetry collections, Rose and The City in Which I Love You. The sense of guilt and loss as undercurrent that surfaces more often than goldfish at feeding flakes. For example, in The City in Which I Love You, p. 41
Forgive me for thinking I saw
the irregular postage stamp of death;
a black moth the size of my left
thumbnail is all I’ve trapped in the damask.
There is no need for alarm.
There is a symbolic way of speaking and density that distinguish it from any prose and align it with religious sermons and the spiritualism he was immersed in with gods and wizards and curses to consult over in Indonesia. That influenced his development yet god is largely stripped from the equation except as the form of his parents. In his mind the daily prayers for his father became daily prayers to his absent father (a political prisoner). (p. 64) There is a flow and a natural syntax that with the content pulls one forward thru the text.
In mclennan’s work there is a fluidity that functions similarly but with a different mechanism for achieving the density and intensity.
While themes of father and home and elements of history are revisited in new setting, each chapter takes a fresh vantage point and within poems, pivots with asides. He writes in the day of day things.
He’s willing to play with language and tone. The scope is wider. It goes from the tight pings of playing with concepts (quoted earlier) to more intense confessional, reflective, raw but polished p. 49
the drive to banff in yr car
from calgary, sweat of hot springsflush of exposed skin & for other reasons
/the mere suggestion, suddenly
to more narrative and light, p. 26
  thrift shops have their hands full
furniture, history, strata down, a physical
archive of the last few decades, ten books
for a dollar, aldus huxley
    the more you buy
the more they pull
    from storage
This work of mclennan’s (in general) is more contending with the ephemeralness of now and recent whereas Lee is exorcising his childhood.
—
Editor’s Note: I seem to have bogged in Winged Seed. On p. 56 of 204 of his poetic prose, my reading seems to have petered out of the linear. Lee’s cycles are darker than any of his poetry. I’ll post what I have to this point.