Ed Bok Lee

Ed Bok Lee was raised in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota. A former bartender, phys ed instructor, journalist, and translator, he studied in the U.S., South Korea, Kazakhstan, and Russia, earning an MFA from Brown University. Lee has shared his work in journals and anthologies, and on public radio and MTV, and teaches part time at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. Lee is the author of Real Karaoke People, which was the winner of an Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice) and the PEN Open Book Award, and most recently, Whorled.

Interview

On Whorled: Ed Bok Lee in conversation with Gerald Maa

Gerald Maa: What are some of your hopes for a reader as she or he encounters Whorled for the first time?

Ed Bok Lee: I love books that mess with my dreams at night. My favorite poetry books transport me, but unlike fiction, the journey is more inward. In Whorled, there are settings that range from Ancient Greece to New York, San Francisco to Seoul, Xanadu to Southern California, the Midwest to Kazakhstan. But hopefully those are just foyers with set pieces that lead to a deeper exploration of what it means to be a human being wandering through the world.

Q: After quoting Simonides, your poem “Mnemonikos: a Foreigner’s Figment” starts by introducing a young peasant who “travelled / on foot and boat for two years from his homeland / in search of learning, art, and wisdom”; can you talk a little bit about your journey arriving at your new book’s title, Whorled?

A: In “Mnemonikos,” I was trying to get at the whole idea of immigration from a different angle, using the misty story of Simonides, a major Greek lyric poet born circa 550 BC in Ceos, a small island in the Mediterranean with a long history of colonization by the Minoans, Ionians, Athenians, Spartans, Egyptians, Aeotolians, Macedonians, Rhodes, Romans, Turks, etc. He’s credited with being the father of mnemonics, the art of memorization. The Simonides quote in my poem is fabricated, because almost nothing is known of him, and only a few papyrus fragments remain of his work, but as a poet, it’s recorded that he ushered in an era of “public performance.” I thought maybe there is some kind of connection between memory and citizenship and loyalty and worth and ridicule and suspicion to be explored.

Actually, “Mnemonikos” is probably more a throwback to my first book of poems, which I can see now was more of a backwards-looking kind of coming-to-social consciousness in America.

I was raised in and by a family of Confucians, Christians, Buddhists, and a grandmother who practices shamanic animism. For the past several years, I’ve been struggling with something the Dali Lama said on religion: “People from different traditions should keep their own, rather than change . . . In the United States [people] take something Hindu, something Buddhist, something, something . . . That is not healthy. For individual practitioners, having one truth, one religion, is very important. Several truths, several religions, is contradictory.”

Whorled, at its core, I think is an exploration of this, and other obsessions surrounding globalization.

Q: One of your above answers implies that you sense some sort of change between Whorled, your second book, and Real Karaoke People, your first book of poems. How would you describe this difference?

AIn my first book, the psychic perspective was more backward-looking, trying to make an artful record of the past, the inner spiritual reverberations of a war that divided my family and a nation. Hopefully it wasn’t only about that, but that was a major piston.

Q: Looking back, now that the second book’s in production, do you see any possible variants that effected these changes?

A: In this current book, I think one major piston is this longing to look forward . . . maybe to make sure a part of me and the world I know is still there. Because if the past can disappear, then so can the future. It’s not logical, of course. You’ve heard of this concept of “nostalgia of the future?” (I think it’s from Pessoa.) Maybe it has something to do with that. I have memories of a Third World Korea, from childhood, shanty towns, how the people acted, sounded, smelt, etc. Korea is now basically a First World nation, though the suicide rate has gone from one of the lowest in the industrialized world in the 1980s to now the highest in the world. I feel very compelled to try to make an artful document of this shift in consciousness, and then superimpose that on how I feel about globalization and, perhaps, ultimately, on the future of America, upon which so much of the world beyond seems to depend.

Q: I love how “this shift in consciousness” you mentioned appropriately and equally applies to both the shift in your own psychic perspective between the two books and the shift in Korea’s suicide impulse during its promotion from the third world to the first. The braiding of these shifts reminds me of a quote from the suicide note of a former South Korean President that you have as an epigraph. “Too many people have suffered because of me. And I cannot imagine the suffering they will go through in the future.” It seems like the poems in Whorled use this prospective burden as a departure point, or as a method, time and again, with so much weight on the word ‘imagine.’ You’ve talked about poetry and the news, how about imagination’s relation to looking forward?

A: I am an American poet, born of parents who lived through the Korean War—my mother from what is now the (Communist) North, my father from what is now the (Capitalist) South. I attended kindergarten in South Korea, grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota, and have lived, worked, and studied in America, South Korea, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

But for the past five years, I’ve been living very closely with the moral, historical, and spiritual conundrum, which lives and breathes at the core of globalization: “Power corrupts. But one who is afraid of corruption, is afraid of life.”

I feel this issue is central in my latest book, Whorled, and to our times. Maybe this is true of every age, but in particular, I relate this statement to the war in the Middle East, upon which public opinion was a crucial catalyst. As the American son of war immigrants whose land was colonized and divided, I feel a particular kinship with those families most affected by this current war (both Muslims and Americans). I know how war reverberates through families, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually for generations. It divides nations, families, and individuals. But I also feel I am fair. I understand and try daily to appreciate all the privileges I’ve been granted as a citizen of the United States. So, in my work, I always strive to include both truthful confrontation and celebration. I do this through language because it is the only trustworthy home I know.

Q: Your sense of belonging in language grows out of passionate reading, and your poems constantly signal an indebtedness to work that seems to be important to you—from Hardt and Negri to James Welch, from The New York Times to a suicide note. Could you talk a little bit about how other works figure into your poems, on the page and in the process? In retrospect, do you intuit anything a bit different with the reading-writing dynamic with this more global project?

A: An epigraph for me is a kind of appetizer to the main meal of a poem or story I pick up and read. In writing my own poems, a lot of my choices have to do with what I’m currently reading or thinking. It’s a pretty happenstance process. But then so is all writing.

Q: Your poem “Heaven” ends with a proclaimed attempt at translating the words of a citizen of this outcast city of plurality, a person alienated and overlooked by the institutional injustices that feed on her body. The poem also implicitly ruminates on the differences between the news and poetry as mediums for understanding one’s social world: “I interviewed her when I thought writing meant / articles, analyses, a lapidist’s objectivity.” You were a journalist then, but you wrote a poem about the experience. What does poetry have to offer, that journalism lacks, as a medium to communicate the world’s happenings and one’s political investment?

A: I’m thinking of that line by William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

In “Heaven,” I was searching for some kind of sweet spot between poetry and journalism. I think poetry and journalism have pretty different functions. Poetry is so unabashedly subjective, and good journalism aspires toward objectivity. I guess if a writer goes deep enough with poetry, it gets to some level of white-hot objectivity, like how maybe deep, deep down, all bodies of waters in the world are connected. But maybe the best journalism approaches that too. Or maybe the best writing, in general. In some passages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the voice and vision are in total God-like, yet poetic, yet very informative. I guess that’s why I love that novel so much. But, at the end of the day, I think all you can ever do is try to write what compels you in the moment, for reasons you may never really understand.

Gerald Maa is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Asian American Literary Review.

Multimedia

Video: Ed Bok Lee reads at Global Poetry Festival

Video: Ed Bok Lee reads “Thrown”

Praise

“Ed Bok Lee is an exciting new American writer. ”—Elaine H. Kim

“Ed Bok Lee’s words hit like pellets. . . . Lee is a truth teller of the immigrant experience in our vast and diverging demography.” —Diane Glancy