Marsh:
That sounds good to me. Although (I’m trying to think of the disadvantages now) would that mean that we couldn’t write occasional poems or political poems or a fun poem for a son’s birthday, let’s say?Lee:
But those would be religious too, right? (laughter) I mean, just like bathing my son. How is going to church better than bathing my son? It isn’t. If I bathe my son in the right attitude, I’ve created our own worship there, our own values. Sometimes you go to church and you don’t even get the values of, say, cooking a meal. If you bring a certain consciousness to cooking, I think the food tastes different than if you’re doing it haphazardly and not paying much attention. It has to do with attention.Marsh:
Is caring attention always in the same key or can it manifest itself in different keys?Lee:
Yeah, I would say different keys, different colors, and different tones.Marsh:
The kind of poet that we’re creating when we have this conversation that’s going to go out to the world as Li-Young Lee sounds really serious, and of course you are in your work very serious, but there’s also a kind of extravagance I find in it. An Emersonian sense of going out of bounds.Lee:
Yeah, the ecstatic.Marsh:
Exactly.Lee:
Yeah, I would say art is the practice of ecstasy, so it’s the practice of God mind.Marsh:
Standing outside yourself.Lee:
Into something bigger, which is also yourself, which is the real you. We’re not these tiny little selves. I would say the ecstatic self is the real self.