Thanks, Saffron,
For posting Li-Young Lee's poems! I had the
wonderful good fortune to be able to take a seminar called Ethnic Autobiography that was offered through the Department of Creative Writing at U of Oregon (years ago) in which he was a visiting professor. Please excuse this bit of name-dropping on the grounds that I just want to say he was (and I am sure is still) as remarkable a person as you might suppose from his writing.
He advised us to memorize passages and poems, to write out -- by longhand -- the words of favorite texts
over and
over, both to memorize them and so that they would "get inside your body." We talked about how you could feel what it felt like to write those words and think them at the speed of writing, in the
act of writing, as the person who wrote them had thought them. He was grateful that his father (I believe it was his father) who was a minister, had made him memorize and write out
Bible verses and he thought that this much-maligned practice was a way of really making the literary understanding a physical, deep, real part of yourself. I felt a spiritual quality in his appreciation of writing.
He also had this thing about language or thinking that was "far" as opposed to another kind that was "near." I believe he thought both kinds could be really good, but the middle-distance stuff was pedestrian. At the time, with his examples of who he thought was a "far" or "near" writer, you could understand exactly what he meant and it was clear and perfect. Right now, my clarity about it has faded. This was probably close to 15 years ago now. But the impression of his earnest, vibrant and fascinating personality and the beautifully individual quality of his way of speaking truth, of his way of thinking and expressing himself, his personal idiom, if you will, has stuck with me. His were definitely some of the most valuable (because the most sincere, creative and passionately felt) thoughts I heard expressed in person at the University and I took classes there on and off for more than a decade.
He was wonderful -- although he
didn't believe Jesus was a pacifist and tried to engage a debate about it, which I resisted entering into although I knew it was my writing about my grandfather which had caused him to bring it up. I don't think it's something to fight about.
"Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so that I can talk with him?"
-- Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 B.C.E.)
as quoted by Robert A. Burton