li-young_lee

Marsh:
It sounds like it should be.

Lee:
It seems to me, especially in the area we live in, it’s so devoid of soul. Everything is so abused and insulted. There’s just no place for the soul. We’re just trying to wake the soul in that area. I know it’s there. These kids, they have a lot of problems, they have a lot of imprints and bad habits in their minds, but the soul is there too and we’re trying to wake that in them and it’s working.

Marsh:
I get the feeling that it truly is, when I hear and see you talking about it. What’s the name of your organization?

Lee:
Right now we’re changing it to the “International Association for World Peace.”

Marsh:
I guess poetry at it’s biggest has something to do with that; it’s international. It’s about world peace.

Lee:
I think so. You know, Alec, I’m so happy I’m talking about it because usually in academic settings I’m so shy about talking about it, because I know it sounds hokey or something. In the outside world it’s weird. It isn’t hokey, and for some reason I don’t feel it is, talking to you.

Marsh:
I don’t think of poetry as academic. If you only talk about poetry academically, then you’re not talking about poetry anymore. That’s just an ongoing issue that academics forget. People who don’t read poetry or really know what it is just assume it must be an academic subject because it’s a course they could take in college. But that’s missing the point because then nothing can happen.

Lee:
Somebody told me that Duchamp said, one day art will just be finger pointing, you just point to something and you say, well I think that’s art. When I hear that I think he must mean that art is all around us and a lot of our job is to recognize it. We say, OK, that’s art. I feel the same way about poetry, and if I can just get these kids and these senior citizens [to see it]—both are at either end of the spectrum, the very old and the very young who are the refused and the insulted and the injured fringes of society—that’s who we’re working with. But if I could get them to walk through our crummy neighborhood and start spotting poetry in a flower growing next to a beer bottle or something. The more we recognize it, the more we create it, the more we put it there, so there will be more and more and more of that in the world. Otherwise what are we doing, we’re just reading it in school and forgetting about it. I want to wake them to this.

….

{Back to the start}