Like all great poets, Li-Young Lee leans sensuality up against philosophy; he achieves intimacy from a distance. Virtually all of his poetry addresses the spaces between us that we are constantly trying to traverse. He deals as much with the space between a husband and wife sleeping next to each other (”am I inside you? he asks, lying between her legs, / confused about his heart, and his body. / If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not / she answers, at peace with the body’s greed, / at peace with the heart’s confusion”) as the space between strangers in a train station (”Your attention please / train number seven, Leaves Blown By, / bound for the color of thinking / and renovated time, is now departing. / All ticketed passengers may board behind my eyes”). Paradoxically, it is by making us aware of these spaces, by drawing us into emptiness, that he is able to achieve that uniquely poetic intimacy.

His languorous reading style, too, is filled with empty spaces, places for breath to settle. When he speaks of Plato’s “Ladder of Love”, you feel that each line in the poem is a rung, bringing us up from the sensual to the spiritual by steps, without ever losing sight of where we began. Yet it is the spaces between the rungs where the movement happens. The rung is merely a place to rest before traversing the chasm between the body and the heart. And so with each line, Lee is merely preparing us for the silence that will follow it, where the breath will settle, where the movement occurs.

When I first saw one of Li-Young Lee’s readings, at Site Santa Fe in 2000, I couldn’t quite appreciate what he was doing; the slow pace led my mind to wander, rather than to dwell in emptiness. On Friday night, thanks to Gemini Ink, I had a chance to see him at the Coates chapel at the Southwest School of Art and Craft. Here I began to feel more fully how the sound of his voice is juxtaposed with silence, how his imagery pushes us to the edges of what we know.

It must be said that the acoustics in the chapel were very poor. It may be that the space does not lend itself to the PA system they had set up, and perhaps amplification muddied the voice. One result of this situation is that at times I gave up on understanding each word, and began to focus on the sounds, the timbre of Lee’s voice, and again, the way his voice plays off of the silence that surrounds it.

The reading lasted about 20 minutes, with six poems in all (”Station“, “To Life”, “Immigrant Blues“, “Hymn to Childhood”, “Trading for Heaven”, and “Virtues of the Boring Husband” (which is “very much autobiographical”)). Following the reading, Rose Catacalos collaborated with Bett Butler and Joël Dilley on jazz settings of Lee’s poetry. This was a combination of Catacalos reciting the work to the music (her reading style reminded me of Laurie Anderson on “Big Science”), and Bett Butler singing the work. My feeling is that the music detracted from the poetry by removing the silences, and by shifting the emotional landscape in a way that is at odds with Lee’s strengths as a poet. The sort of light, carefree jazz that Butler and Dilley tend to play just doesn’t mesh with the gravitas of Lee’s poetry.

So while it is a pleasure to see Li-Young Lee under any circumstance, this reading was not the best of circumstances. But despite these problems, Gemini Ink deserves credit for bringing authors of Lee’s caliber to San Antonio.

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