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Behind My Eyes: Poems

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this review by Leslie Adrienne Miller was featured in Gently Read Literature ([...])--

The opening poem in Li-Young Lee's most recent collection, Behind my Eyes, ends with the lines "While all bodies share/ the same fate, all voices do not," an appropriate emphasis for a book that comes with a CD of the author reading his own poems. Lee's work falls into the interesting gap between poetry for the page and poetry in performance; though most poets writing now know their poems will have a voiced life even as they are prepared for the page first, Lee seems to understand that the spoken is essential and contemporaneous with the written. His headlong embrace of the concept of death is stopped short by the living voice, and he understands that the immortality traditionally courted in the form of the printed word is transformed wholly by the fact of poet as virtual presence.

Lee's work in this book, consistent with that of previous books, appears on the page, but lives best and longest in the ear. He knows that his voice is able to supply the rhythm, syntax and counterpoint that the lines on the page do not supply, and though these poems are adequate on the page, they are most fully realized in hearing. Most of these poems deploy their ideas in rhetorical structures familiar to sermons, political speeches, a Whitmanian insistence on patterns of parallel structure and repetition borrowed from religious texts and delivered by a charismatic figure too possessed with his mission to worry over perfection of diction, image or line integrity. Rather, Lee's poems favor aggressive juxtapositions, breath units, and syntactic parallels that drive shifts in tone and focus through the ear as well as the white space of the page.

Many of the poems, for example, favor a question and answer format, as in "Hymn to Childhood" and "Have You Prayed." Others, like "Immigrant Blues," and "Mother Deluxe" use a trope of re-naming; in "Mother Deluxe," the re-naming is constituted from a card game or tarot deck where the cards are all renamed via titles that resemble local news headlines. In "Immigrant Blues," the strategy is similar: the "old story from the previous century/ about my father and me" is renamed again and again in the poem with phrases that resemble titles of Psychology Today articles. In each case, the private and public experiences are deftly juxtaposed and irony is released by the contrasts.

A similar strategy employed often in these poems is that of the conversation. Poems like "Sweet Peace in Time," involve a first person speaker and a third person responder whose conversation is constantly derailed by an influx of surreal and vaguely spiritual images that ride on the rhetoric of conversation, and ultimately expose the inability of human speech to reach beyond the literal. The he said/she said conversation format in "Lake Effect," however, gets tiresome, due to both the repetition of the dialogue tags and the unwavering project of metaphorical renaming. In combination, these devices are overwhelmingly reiterated corralling rather than releasing the imagination.

Counting is yet another prominent rhetorical strategy of these poems. "Seven Happy Endings," for example counts intimate encounters, rooms, and increments of time to examine conceptions of narrative closure or lack thereof. While "Have You Prayed" counts discrete moments of knowledge: "One:/ I am never finished answering to the dead./ Two: A man is four winds and three fires." And later begins turns to fractions, "two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief" before ending ominously with "one." The poems are unrelenting in their quest for intimacy and spiritual connection, and the constant swing between the highly intimate rooms of beloveds and the high rhetoric of public and spiritual realms is a constant pulse in the book's lyrical travels.

There is a tendency to teeter on the edge of lyric, coupled with a refusal to develop images, ideas or comparisons. They simply are, and while this oracular renaming can and often does release the spiritual dimensions of utterances, just as often it sidesteps opportunities to explore and develop complexities that have been foregrounded. Lee is perfectly able to map the territory, but the view is mostly aerial.

In many ways I miss the ability to sustain meditation that we see in the best of Lee's earlier gems like "The Gift" or "Eating Alone" where the view is a close-up that refuses to pull back to a level of abstraction until the idea has been detailed into an array of rich complexities. The poems of Behind My Eyes often pull back too soon in favor of more enigma, and even the lyric intensity of the many renamings cannot save the poems' tendency to bleed out. Hearing the poems read, however, mitigates the problem somewhat, since "heard melodies are sweet." But to my mind "those unheard" really are sweeter, so on the page, many of these poems fail to make full use of their best moments to get the reader to a place of deeper understanding. Elemental images like birds, water, song keep reasserting themselves, but are never allowed to expand. The poems seem to hope that the reader will fill the gaps, but the autobiographical elements that pepper many of the poems hold the reader at some distance and trouble the "deep image" contract the poems seem to favor.

"Seven Marys," a poem close to the book's midpoint, comes as a great relief with its shock of address to someone other than the reader or the writer's self. Here the voiced direct address to "Father John" not only changes up the perspective, but the repetition of the "seven Marys" until they mutate into multiple Sarahs and Rachels really does push the poem beyond a steady eddy. The enigmatic female figures beautifully and efficiently merge and emerge from each other in the mind of the speaker who desires of them "the fate of My sleep," "the shape of my destiny."

While the poems of section one seem to chronicle the speaker's childhood troubled by immigration and integration, the poems of the second section are pointedly Biblical. Some of these, like "Cuckoo Flower on the Witness Stand" are so nakedly personal in their remembrances of childhood religious experience that we long for the enigmatic spaces from section one's more expansive poems. Plain language packed into couplets like "I sang in a church choir during one war/ American TV made famous" or "I doodled in the church bulletin on Sundays/ while my father offered the twenty-minute Pastor's Prayer" clunk along next to more characteristic lyricism like "And speech's bird/ threads hunger's needle" burying the latter's power to resonate.

In the book's final section, there are poems that seem to undermine or mock the self's more familiar strategies in the bulk of the book. "Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics" welcomes some irony, as does "The Sea With Fish," which offers a list of phrases that typically launch details of remembered experience familiar in earlier sections of the book,

"From now on . . ."
"In that country . . ."
"Were we ever . . ."
So dreaming continued
forward and backward.

However, Lee refuses to finish off the sentences, only leaving repeated ellipsis and moving instead to a list of what feel like titles (On the Spot, Hidden Inside Becoming/ Stranger Going Along,/ Blind but Fixed Between Wings That See). Such a decision reduces the structure of the poem to its lowest common denominators, mocking the simplicity of its own formula and calling attention to the fact that the poet himself is aware of the inadequacy of these familiar gestures of language.

The final poem in the collection, "Station," is among the volume's very finest pieces. It manages a pleasing balance between Lee's lyric intensity and his penchant for repetition with mutation, but here the poet provides more durable rhetorical structures as part and parcel of the subject. Inhabiting a voice from the speakers in a train station announcing arrivals and departures, "Your attention please. Train number 4, The Twentieth Century," the poem is able to move effortlessly between the heard voice and the imagined voice, and the departures and returns from the realm of the literal are seamlessly integrated:

Your attention please. Train number 66,
Unbidden Song, soon to be
the full heart's quiet, takes no passengers.

"Station" brings the collection's senses of nostalgia and spiritual journey into clear and satisfying focus.

Please leave your baggage with the attendant
at the window marked: Your Name Sprung from Hiding.
An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue.
You may board at either end of Childhood.

There are very beautiful poems in this collection. I have always admired Li-Young Lee's early work, and I see how he has grown here. He has always been a champion of the power of memory within; he continues exploring this theme, interfacing it with his very nimble imagination. I taught several of these poems to my students and they described the work as "soft", "naked" and "grasping", which I think is a lovely characterization of his work. The breadth of his imagination is extraordinary, and makes these poems works that can be read over and over, and still be deeply satisfying. I found the CD to be excellent, as the intimacy of his voice extends the intimacy of the poems. A great tool for teachers of poetry; Lee reads his work serenely, and with quiet and inviting emotion.

Li-Young Lee, Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008)

Li-Young Lee has been one of my favorite poets for over twenty years, ever since I first picked up The City in Which I Love You in my college bookstore on a whim back in 1990. Part of the reason I'm such a fan is that Lee, while embracing the poetry-as-therapy paradigm so prevalent among bad poets, but always staying on the correct line of that other paradigm so important to poets, show-don't-tell. Thus it was that I cracked this book and started reading, I was kind of shocked. This first section crosses that line. Obliterates it, in fact. Show goes right down the tubes and tell rears its nasty head.

"'We can't stay where we are,
and we don't know where else to go,'

is the first card my mother deals. We're playing
her deluxe edition of 'Memories
of the 20th Century.'

'Dead Baby,' 'Mystery Bundles,' 'Cleansing by Sacrifice.'

Seven cards apiece and the object is to not die."
("Mother Deluxe")

While the metaphor is kind of inspired, it's still the sort of thing one would expect to see on [...]. Just because William Carlos Williams stuck a grocery list in the middle of a poem and called it poetry doesn't mean everyone can do it. (And doesn't mean Williams should have in the first place, really.) In order to get through that first section, I kept telling myself that things would eventually get better. Thankfully, they did. It's somewhat ironic that Lee's strongest poems here are those where he (or his narrator) seems least sure of his own voice, as in the book's strongest piece, "Virtues of the Boring Husband":

"I just lie down beside her,
prop my head up in one hand and say,
'You know, I've been thinking.'

Immediately she calms down,
finds a fetal posture,
and tucks her head under my arm."

See the difference? Describing. Showing us, as opposed to just dropping things in our lap. It makes all the difference in the world. It's what makes Li-Young Lee great. ***

Li-Young Lee is among my favorite poets - his voice is intensely personal, yet he frequently speaks to universal experiences. _Behind My Eyes_, as the title implies, falls more strongly in the latter category, and therefore I had difficulty connecting with his work. The themes he addresses are similar to those in his earlier work: the challenges and difficulties of immigration (and of being an immigrant), inter-generational disconnect between himself and his father, memories of his childhood and the "mundane" events of being a husband and father. These poems - of his family life - resonate most strongly with me than the others. I was disappointed, therefore that there were not more of them in this collection.

In fact, a number of his poems are unusually grim, with meditations on death, spirituality, and the personal tragedies of fleeing civil war, violence and injustice. His words remain powerful, but I found myself looking for a respite from the burden Lee shares with readers. For example, in "After the Pyre," Lee writes,

"It turns out, what keeps you alive
as a child at mid-century
following your parents from burning
villiage to cities on fire to a country at war
with itself and anyone
who looks like you

what allows you to pass through smoke,
through armed mobs singing themerits of a new regime, tooth
for a tooth ...

what keeps you safe even among your own,
the numb, the haunted, the maimed, the barely alive,
tricks you learned to become invisible,
escapes you perfected, playing dead, playing
stupid, playing blind, deaf, weak, strong,
playing girl, playing boy, playing native, foreign,
in love, out of love, playing crazy, sane, holy, debauched ...

now that you're older
at the beginning of a new century,
what kept you alive
all those years keeps you from living.

This is powerful stuff, of which a little bit goes a long way. I wish this work was spread out between two collections, with a little levity to break the seriousness and tragedy. The final few poems do conclude with a ray of hope. "To Hold", a poem about the act of making the bed with his wife and the unstated love they share, "The Virtues of Being a Boring Husband" and "Living With Her" remind readers that, in spite of the difficulties Lee endured early in his life, there are happy endings as Lee writes,

"... I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping."

Even with a happy ending, though, the weight of the majority of the poems were difficult to read as much for their subject matter as for their autobiographical nature. Rose (New Poets of America) remains my favorite book of his work. In spite of my 3-star review of this collection, I recommend this magnificent poet.

Lee has always been a favorite poet of mine, I loved his first three books, but it seems like so many poets, his work falls off over time. I'm not sure why that is. And Lee is no exception, it appears his best work was his early work, though "To Hold," "Virtues of the Boring Husband," and "After the Pyre" are all great poems.

I first heard the author reading his poetry on the radio and decided to buy the book. The book includes a CD of his readings and I still enjoy hearing him read it more than reading it myself. Many of his poems I don't understand but I pick up more as I go back to them and read them again.

I adore Li-Young Lee, but was deeply disappointed to find that the paperback does not include the cd of him reading the poems. This was the main reason I ordered the book from Amazon. I did not see anything (though it may be there) warning me that the paperback version would be missing the cd.

So my rating is not about the poems, but about the paperbaek and about Amazon's description of the book. If you don't care about the poet reading his work, go for it. The book is worth the Ballad of the Boring Husband alone. For me, Li-Young truly knows love.