by Dianne Bilyak
Editor’s Note: In the following roundtable conversation, we go behind the scenes of the recently published chapbook I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee (Wesleyan University Press, $7.95), which was edited by Oliver Egger. Pocket sized and smartly focused, the chapbook draws on poems from Lee’s six acclaimed collections but also presents seven previously unpublished poems. Lee’s longtime friend Dianne Bilyak spoke with both Lee and Egger about this unusual publication.
Li-Young Lee is the author of six books of poetry, a “remembrance” titled The Winged Seed (Simon & Schuster, 1995), and a new translation (with poet Yun Wang) of the Dao De Jing of Laozi (W. W. Norton, 2024). He has received many honors for his writing, including the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. He lives in Chicago.
Oliver Egger is a Connecticut-based writer and editor; his anthologies I Said That Love Heals from Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and The Route 9 Anthology: A Collection of Writing from Wesleyan Students, Faculty, Staff & Middlesex County Residents are both published by Wesleyan University Press, where he is a consulting editor.
Dianne Bilyak, a graduate of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, is the author of the poetry collection Against the Turning (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2011) and the memoir Nothing Special: The Mostly True, Sometimes Funny Tales of Two Sisters (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). She lives in Connecticut.
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Dianne Bilyak: How did this chapbook come about?
Oliver Egger: The chapbook series at Wesleyan University Press started on a whim in 2017 because Rae Armantrout wanted to do a really short book, and we couldn’t say no! But it grew from there. After I edited I Said That Love Heals from Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa in 2023, you mentioned that a selection of “mother poems” by your friend Li-Young Lee would be a good chapbook, and I found the idea interesting because I’d always thought that the father was the dominant figure in his work. But as I started reading his books again and circling “mother” every time it came up, it was in at least fifty or sixty poems. I knew you were on to something!
Li-Young Lee: I was just so grateful and happy and surprised to hear from Oliver that Wesleyan wanted to do this. I always knew that my mother was present in all of my poems—she’s not necessarily the one talked about, nor the one speaking, but she is the one listening, and it’s the quality of her listening that I was trying to make in my poems, like a giant architecture of listening. I actually used to wonder if anyone would ever catch on that my mother was much more present than my father, who appears to be the ostensible subject of my poems.
OE: It became apparent to me as I was reading through your work to assemble this chapbook—I felt like I was uncovering something that had obviously been there all along. When we approach a text with something in mind, it’s just such a powerful experience.
LYL: Yeah, it’s fascinating. Who was it who said, “Poets are always trying to recreate their mother’s body” or “every poem is the recreation of the mother’s body”?[1] I always felt it wasn’t just her body I was trying to recreate but her audience—the quality of her listening—it’s something a little more nuanced than just her body. The human body is such a fraught site, for me, anyway.
DB: What was the process of choosing and ordering the poems? Did you work on that together or apart?
OE: I originally envisioned the book as an anthology of previously published poems, but when I showed it to Li-Young, he said, “Oh, I’ve been writing some new poems about my mother, can we put those in here as well?” And I said, “Of course. That’s incredible.” Those new poems transformed the final book: After the title poem (which is from Li-Young’s first book, Rose), we roll straight through the new poems—I wanted to center where this poet is right now—and then wind our way through a journey to the present. I didn’t make the order chronological, though; rather, I tried to sequence the poems so that they tell a kind of story. And of course I don’t know your mother, I didn’t experience your life—I was just looking at the text and letting the poems speak to me and to each other.
LYL: I remember, Oliver, when we were doing interviews to create an introduction for the chapbook, you said something like, “Your mother’s presence is always that of an overarching observer,” and I thought that was very astute of you to notice. Do you remember that?
OE: Yeah, I do. I don’t remember my exact words either, but I felt her presence in the work. As I alluded to earlier, when I approached your work thinking, your mother, your mother, I realized I couldn’t get away from her in any of your poems. She’s not necessarily a literal subject—it’s not my mom did this or my mom said this to me—but she is this presence that’s always seeing you, interacting from one step away. She’s almost beyond human.
LYL: I’ve been thinking for a while about how we poets all belong to a cult of the word, and therefore adhere to the structure of definitions, which says that the word being defined must never appear in its definitions; if that word appears, it nullifies the definition. I think my mother’s presence in the poems is something like that, or at least I’ve experienced her that way: she is the word. Everything about me comes from her and will go back to her. She does appear in many of the poems, but even when she’s not the subject, every word is directed toward her. And all the poems have their being, their existence, by virtue of her.
OE: Yes, many of the poems in the chapbook have no mention of the mother figure. But when I came across the poem “In the Beginning,” I thought, What is the mother but the beginning of us all? I knew instantly that poem belonged in the book, along with others that touch on that mother spirit of creation.
DB: Li-Young, you chose the chapbook’s cover because I sent you a photograph of a statue in Italy. I’d like you to talk a little bit about why that image spoke to you—I probably sent you twenty pictures that day.
LYL: First of all, it looks like my mother, and second of all, I love the way the child is grasping at her robe and is obviously starving for her. It seems to me that my relationship to poetry is exactly the same: I come to it starved. When I read poetry, I’m starving for something. When I write it, I feel starved. Dante said that all successful poems are informed by infant longing, and this photograph looks like infant longing to me. Even to this day, as old as I’ve become, I feel infant longing for my—is it my mother? Or the mother? The great mother, or the bosom of the universe, or something—I don’t know.
I also love that the sculpture looks kind of eaten away. There’s something so moving about images that depict the difficulty of remaining, images that get eaten away by time. This one is just barely making it. And I love the colors in the picture, the blue and the red, classic Mary colors, representing the heavenly aspect and the earthly aspect of Mary. Ever since I was a child, I mistook my father for the Father God and my mother for the Virgin Mary. Even after she had eight children, there was something very virginal and untouched about her. She worked hard to be that, even at the cost of having a personal being. I think my father set out to be a male icon, and my mother set out to be a female icon, and this statue looks like an icon. I love icons. I think I’ve been trying to write my versions of icons by writing poems.
OE: Obviously, you have awe and love for your mother, but did her performance of being distant, almost like a God in your life, ever make you sad or resentful that you didn’t really get to know her as a human, with a multitude of flaws? Or did you see her in a deeper way?
LYL: I think I did see through the icon to the person. She couldn’t hide it completely. We have this phrase in Chinese, “kàn chuān,” to see through, and she would say that to me a lot—“I feel like you see through me.” What I saw was a lot of pain and struggle. It moved me.
It was a gift to me that she wanted to be an icon. It allowed me to see existence as an icon. I see the universe as an icon. I see the self as an icon. I see the poem as an icon. I saw in her life something that was not entirely personal, something that was fulfilling patterns older than her—female patterns, Chinese patterns.
DB: Is an icon something that stands alone, or is it something to be worshipped?
LYL: I think about it this way: To me there’s something sacramental about writing poetry. A sacrament, the way I understand it, is any practice we perform that makes the invisible visible. So when I’m writing a poem, there is my visible mother with a history and a body and a temporality, and there’s a kind of invisible mother, too. When both are present in the poem, it becomes iconic.
My wish is to create icons; it always has been. I love icons. I’ve looked at them my whole life. My father painted his own icons, using his own blood to paint the red. He would bleed himself to paint the red to make the icons. He was a madman.
When you look at icons, you know they’re not necessarily portraits. I think the Byzantine artists must have been very upset when subsequent artists started painting the saints and Jesus and Mary to make them look like real humans—and I understand that. There’s something profoundly enchanting about Byzantine icons because they’re not entirely human.
Some viewers who look at the Byzantine icons might think, didn’t they know how to paint better? No, it isn’t that—that’s not what they were setting out to do. Similarly, I never set out to make a Polaroid or a snapshot of my mother; I was trying to understand my mother in the context of the great mother.
OE: My mom is also an icon, but in a different way: She is a really strong woman who doesn’t take any shit. But she had just gotten diagnosed with breast cancer when I began working on this chapbook, so I finally began to see her as vulnerable, too. Working through your poems was a good companion as I wrapped my head around this; as they kept pointing to the universal mother, I found that icon in my mom. I dedicated my contribution to the book to my mom.
LYL: I think of poetry as the locally inflected voice of the All. I want to whittle down this local inflection—that is, the personal—as small as possible, leaving just enough there so that the reader has something to hold on to, but my real hunger is to get a glimpse of the All, which I can’t see except through some local or temporal detail. So it never occurs to me that my personal life is that interesting to write about—it’s just a glimpse of the All, of eternity, that I’m seeking.
DB: I wanted to ask about writing as a form of expressing grief.
LYL: In my own experience, writing from grief or out of grief or through grief just makes the grief deeper, more visible for me, more potent . . . But this allows me to carry it. I think this is because a really good poem creates a profound stillness, a silence, at the end—a musical rest. That rest intrigues me, because it’s not the rest of inaction, of vacuity, of nothingness; rather, it’s a fullness, an awe. I love the saying, “Adoration is the proper attitude for a soul in awe”—that would be me.
I think this notion of rest is articulated in the Book of Genesis: The world is created in six days, and the seventh day is one of rest. Rest comes after creation. And then throughout the biblical tradition we hear, “the Lord’s rest is true rest.” I don’t think that means death; I don’t think that means taking a nap; God didn’t rest on the seventh day because he was tired. What kind of God is that?
So I’ve been trying to create that musical rest in my poems—the kind that resolves everything, that lets you look back and say, “It is good.”
DB: Would you like to read a poem?
LYL:
Mother Comfort and Who
Little One, you can come out now.
The soldiers are gone.
They’ve had their fill of blood for today.
Mother, I saw God, and God was three
bare-chested men carrying machetes.
God’s three bodies glistened
with sweat and spattered blood.
God’s three breasts heaved, God’s three mouths
open and panting from a morning of hard work,
killing and dismembering.
I’ll come out
when the new moon comes out.
Little One, you can come out now.
The mob has moved on.
They’ve had their fill of rage for today.
Mother, I saw God and God was three.
And one third of God pointed with his finger and said,
Let’s kill this one too.
And one third of God said,
No. Let him go.
And the last third of God
turned his face to me and said,
One day, you must return
to this country where you were born.
Mother, I’ll come out
when the new stars come out.
Little One, wake up.
You’ve been dreaming again
about what happened so many years ago.
Mother, I’m awake.
I saw God and God was three men,
and the three men became three blades
turning this way and that way, dull on one side
and sharp on the other side.
And the three blades became three tongues.
And the three tongues are inside one cave.
And one tongue keeps saying, You must return
to where you were born.
And one keeps saying, Kill this one too.
And one keeps saying, Let him go.
You know, I am still knocked out by that, that the soldier said, “Let him go.” I don’t know why he said that. Why did he let me go? Why did he let us all go? They spent all morning killing the neighbors; he could have killed us all. It haunts me to this day.
OE: How old were you when that happened?
LYL: I was three. My father was holding me. They were trying to decide which one of the kids they were going to kill, and my parents just had to stand there and listen. They couldn’t even object. They were surrounded by a mob. It’s strange when you see your parents in that kind of disempowered situation—the humiliation of it, and the parents trying to come back from that humiliation, trying to reassure their children that for the rest of their lives, we can protect you, we just couldn’t then. . . . It created a lot of shame for them.
DB: Do you actually remember it, or did you just hear about it?
LYL: My father told me that story all the time. I don’t actually remember it.
DB: When I first interviewed you over twenty years ago, you related that as a child you didn’t speak for a very long time, but when you finally did, you said something like “When are we going home?” Is that right?
LYL: Yes, the minute we got on the prison boat and it left the harbor—this is what my parents tell me—I just started speaking in complete sentences, saying, “I want to go back.”
OE: Have you ever gone back?
LYL: I have. I went back there to look for my brother who was buried there, and when we finally found the graveyard, we found out that they had buried nine other people on top of him. This is in Jakarta. But just this morning, man, I heard that Jakarta is sinking, that all of Indonesia is sinking, so they’re looking for another place to build the capital. It’s strange to think about all those graves being underwater.
We also went back and visited the prison where my father had been. The leper colony that they put him on was gone, but we visited the hospital, the prison, and the insane asylum. They put my father in an insane asylum to get him to stop preaching the gospel. I always wondered about that; I was a little hurt that he wouldn’t recant. Wouldn’t you recant if your family was being threatened? You know, if they said, “Recant, say it’s all lies, the God, the New Testament, or we’ll kill you and your family.” But he said, “No.” I always wondered why.
OE: Perhaps he saw himself as an icon.
LYL: Yes, maybe so. I don’t know, it’s very strange.
[1] Editor’s Note: It was Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller. “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure. For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not language, it is the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body…in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language, and opinion will strenuously object, since it opposes ‘disfiguring nature’.”
