Marsh:
….It’s clear from your work that you’ve read a lot of American poets.... Was Frost one of the first poets you read?Lee:
No, I came to Frost late. I grew up in a household where my parents were reciting Chinese poetry a lot. So it was mostly Chinese poems that moved me and I remember my parents reciting them. and being very moved by them. My father was a minister, so he read from the Bible a lot to the congregation on Sundays and I loved hearing that. One of our jobs was to read the Bible straight through and he would make us recite and so the Bible was important that way. Then as we grew older, he had us read Taoist texts in translation. It wasn’t until maybe ten years ago I really discovered how wonderful Frost was—I’m totally new to this game. I think it was about ten years ago I discovered Wallace Stevens. I discovered all these people late and just fell in love with them.Marsh:
I guess because of your saturation with the Bible at a much younger age you were already in the mainstream of all these American writers, since that’s what they’d grown up on too. I certainly felt in reading the “Winged Seed” that you don’t say much about the Chinese side of your education. It’s present, but not explicit. But you’re quite explicit about the Bible all over the place. I had this impression that you had a kind of 17th century education growing up. That’s the impression you give in your memoir, that the reading you did was the kind of reading that Emerson would have gotten from his minister father.Lee:
Yeah, probably, I mean the Gospels meant a lot to me and the Epistles. Paul and stuff like that.Marsh:
You are a religious poet, are you not?Lee:
That sounds like a mantle or a crown or something; I would say that aesthetic practice is religious practice. I would say that.Marsh:
Not everybody is a religious poet. What does that say about you [as a poet]? When I say religious, I don’t necessarily mean Christian, of course—spiritual might be a better word. How does that affect your poetry if you’re coming to it from a kind of religious or spiritual direction.Lee:
I would say, for me, the stakes are pretty high for art. I do see that there is a mission for art and the mission is apocalypse. The mission is a revelation of realm after realm after realm until we reach some sort of consciousness, real consciousness. I would say aesthetic consciousness is God consciousness—it’s the same thing. So the aesthetic mind is God mind. When we practice prayer, or meditation, it’s Yogic. It’s a link to God mind. I would say when we practice art it’s the same thing. Art mind, aesthetic mind, I don’t think is just something we do in our little studio; I do it when I’m bathing my children. When they were very little, I used to bathe them, and if I bathed them kind of haphazardly, kind of distractedly, I create one value in that experience, I created one value in them. But if I’m bathing them with aesthetic consciousness, that is, something that approaches whole consciousness with a heightened awareness of what is going on, I created another value. It’s a much deeper value that they can carry with them and that creates values in them. I don’t like the fact that aesthetic consciousness sounds rarefied. I don’t think it is. I think we can practice it when we bathe our children or plant gardens or when we talk to people. It creates more value in the world, quite simply put.