Quotes from Li-Young Lee

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

And of all the rooms in my childhood, God was the largestand most empty.

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.

Every time you write a poem it's apocalyptic. You're revealing who you really are to yourself.

Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,

a bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.

I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.

Memory revises me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. The vein in my neck adores you. A sword stands up between my hips, my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.

I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son, my little root who won't drink milk, little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, little clock spring newly wet in the fire, little grape, parent to the future wine, a son the fruit of his own son, little father I ransom with my life

in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.