Authors
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Writing of love, of family, of ordinary experience and a personal past, Lee may seem to be a spontaneous, romantic poet. But Lee's surfaces are deceptive; his poetry is highly literate, engaged in an affectionate and even playful dialogue with the voices of earlier American artists. Part of the pleasure in reading Lee is hearing how those voices echo and transform within his own.
1. Compare Lee's This Room and Everything In It (1990) -- especially the last two stanzas -- to William Carlos Williams's Portrait of a Lady (1920). These are both self-conscious poems, both on the subject of poetry. What similarities do you see in the ways that Williams and Lee open up questions and ponder them? Is "ponder" the right word? Are these finally love poems? Parodies of love poems? How would you describe the tone of each?
2. In Eating Alone (1986), Eating Together (1986) and Mnemonic (1986), loneliness is invoked outright as a theme. Is it treated in the same way in each poem? Frost, Bishop, and other American poets have savored loneliness at times; what about Lee? How would you describe the way that he presents and portrays that condition?
3. If you are reading Lee in the context of other contemporary American poets, how would you describe the way that he distinguishes himself amid that larger array? What emotional or thematic risks do you see him taking in Persimmons (1986) and The Gift (1986)? Speculate on the direction in which Lee's poetry seems to be going: does he seem to be moving out ahead of other poets in terms of experimentation? Do you find him conservative, recovering older values and forms rather than developing new ones? What are your views on "experimentation" as an issue or value in contemporary verse? How important is it -- and how important should it be?