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Li-Young Lee, "Persimmons"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Anthology of Poetry website, edited by James F. Knapp]

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents "who were classically educated and in the habit of reciting literally hundreds of ancient Chinese poems." In his poem "Persimmons" Lee remembers his father saying, "Some things never leave a person." Many of the poems in Lee's two books, Rose (1986) and The City in Which I Love You (1990), testify to a sense of the past, especially his father's past, which never leaves him. He has also written The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995).

The figure of the father in Lee's poems is both personal and mythic. Lee's father, born in China, served as a personal physician to Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), leader of the People's Republic of China. His father later was jailed for nineteen months, a political prisoner of the Indonesian dictator Sukarno. In 1959, the family fled Indonesia, traveled to the Far East (Hong Kong, Macao, and Japan) and finally came to America, where Lee's father became a Presbyterian minister in a small town in western Pennsylvania. Many of Lee's poems seek to remember and understand his father's life and to come to terms with Lee's own differences from that powerful figure.

Lee studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York, College at Brockport. He has taught at various universities.

The history informing "Persimmons" could fill volumes because it includes so much of the history of the mid-twentieth century in relation to its impact on the poet's family. Although Lee's father, who figures prominently in the poem, was a part of the revolutionary China of Mao Tse-tung, he carried on the older traditions of Chinese high culture, one trace of which can be seen in the scroll paintings described in "Persimmons." When his family subsequently escaped to a succession of Asian nations before finally emigrating to the United States, Lee joined the millions who have experienced the cultural dislocations—its pain and discoveries—that follow the loss of home caused by war, political exile, or natural disaster. Lee's use of symbols in this poem dramatically highlights the tension and closeness of past and present. In "Persimmons," Lee himself sees that the differences exist in a piece of fruit as easily as in an artistic tradition that is second nature to one generation, but slightly alien to the next.

In Lee's work, memory is often sweet; it draws the poet to the past even when, as in his poem "Eating Alone," that sweetness is as dizzying as the juice of a rotten pear in which a hornet spins. Memory can also be a burden, and its pull is countered in Lee's work by a sensuous apprehension of the present. Just as in his poem "This Room and Everything in It," the erotic immediacy of the moment can disrupt any effort to fix that moment in the orders of memory. Everywhere in Lee's work is the evidence of all the senses: hearing, taste, smell, and touch as much as sight. If the poet's bodily presence in the world recalls Walt Whitman, Lee's fluid motion between the physical world and the domain of memory, dream, or vision also carries out Whitman's visionary strain and links Lee to the work of Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Denise Levertov, among others. The intensity of Lee's poems, however, is often leavened by a subtle winning humor and playfulness.

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