Li-Young Lee and BW Powe and Transcendant Hope

Robert Peake pointed to a berkley webcast event of Li-Young Lee about 45 minutes long. (The UC Berkeley site has more —Holloway series and lunch poems)

Lee is such a delight to hear. Part of it is his bashful modesty, the way he is Clark Kent until he lets the words take him and us to where the beauty is. I love his goals of life of keeping himself like Joni Mitchell does to that tender painful place, like inside the blue of welding meet metal. He tries to maintain constant contact with the cosmic energies, the profound, the underlying, the holy.

And to think that only by wandering a Dodge Festival pulled in by a Ken-doll of a reader who packed in an enormous crowd, just as he ended the second half of his last poem, sitting because there were suddenly cleared seats, only this way did I happen across Li-Young Lee taking the podium next. Such happenstance uncovering such sustaining wealth of words.

I saw Coleman Barks at Dodge that year too. Since then I’ve read 3 translations of Rumi beyond his. On Sunday he comes to this writer’s festival and I can get a fresh take. He brings Rumi in integration with who he is. Each translation shifts. In English Bark’s has energy and humor and earthiness and that booming projecting voice warms the words so. He aims for the transcendant grounded in the concrete real. This is a common thread between him, Lee and Powe.

BW Powe spoke yesterday at the Writer’s Festival. I had anticipated that with pleasure too since having read his book on the men of Canada who are unique critical thinkers (The Solitary Outlaw). I hadn’t realized that he not only spoke poetically with passion and deep thought, but also did poetry directly. He has a book from Guernica, The Unsaid Passing.

His focus last night was on Canada, and his exploration of what the word and geography and people means, in what he calls his Leaves of Grass, A Canada of Light. Although I took note (and notes), it’s a lot to process.

His way of envisioning himself and the way to peace, and the cultural norm of Canada are based in patience and dialogue, waiting out the blips. He believes ethnic tensions are passing and that Canada is a test model of forming a country through words. Dialogue and debate, consideration and waiting. Genesis over Armageddon, evolution over revolution. The way he thinks as he spoke reminds me of the pondering of Li-Young Lee as well. I mentioned quotes from Lee’s book the Alabasaster Jar last year. There’s a grief but no pity, no mourning, no pain in a way. There’s a sombreness but it has a luster like holy because it is grounded in a tenderness of love and hope.

Similarily, Powe speaks of these being challenging times with a lot of reason for grief but resists the “subversion of hope” and “subversion of joy”. One must let your heart be unprotected, dream new dreams, staying back from the demon of uniformity, stay inside hope.

Powe sees national identity as being the very process of us discovering who we are, each question yielding questions, further mysteries. He sees the basic questions of what is it to be Canadian is the same as the eternal questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? These are the essential human questions asked of the Sphinx. The answers are From Light, Towards Light, Made of Light.

His book elaborates on that. I have a feeling it would be an absorbing read.

We have a model of dialogue which allows us to step away from the ideas of “pious clarity” oversimplication. Too much nationalism is rooted in ethnicity and too much ethnic nationalism is divisive to nationalism, a self-annihilating force. To continue sensationalism, confrontationalism won’t get us anywhere. The very nature of being Canadian is a lack of iconic heroes. It’s our strength to not be monolithic. Just this week, that was on my mind in a debate about RCMP and how Canada is missing Heroes, like the U.S. has. Our lack of closure is as close as we come to a national trait.

Will it work for peace and for perpetuity or is it bound to clog or break into war? He quoted Pierre Trudeau when he said of this social experiment, I will not hang myself if it ends but I will work to do what I can so it does not end.