Li Young Lee And His New Chapbook "A Word From His Song" . . .

Christal Rice Cooper

caccoop@aol.com

https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

All excerpts from The Word from His Song given copyright privilege by Li-Young Lee and BOA Editions.

www.boaeditions.org

Li Young Lee And His New Chapbook

The Word from His Song:

“6 Billion Cells A Minute”

            From March 30^th to April 2^nd of 2016 legendary and best-selling poet Li-Young Lee is going to give a poetry reading at two events – the AWP 2016 Conference and the BOA Editions 40th Anniversary Celebration at the Los Angeles Convention Center and JW Marriot Los Angeles, respectively.     

Li Young Lee’s chapbook The Word from His Song will make its debut appearance at both events and will be a limited publication sold exclusively through the BOA’s AWP Book-fair booths 800 and 802. 

The Word From His Song will not be available to order online until after the AWP conference is concluded, and only for a limited time and at a limited press run.

Li Young Lee’s The Word From His Song features 18-pages of eight full-length poems, all new, beautifully designed in a letterpress cover.

https://www.boaeditions.org/

The Word From His Song is the tenth installment in the BOA Pamphlet Series, which began in 1978.  The other nine titles are The Bridge of Change by John Logan; The Toy Bone by Donald Hall; Sunlight: A Sequence for My Daughter Poems by David Ignatow with drawings by Rose Graubart Ignatow; Survivors by Richard Eberhart; Armidale by Louis Simpson; Remains:  A Sequence of Poems by W.D. Snodgrass; Nest of Sonnets by A. Poulin, Jr.; Gratitude to Old Teachers by Robert Bly; and Holes the Crickets Have Eaten in Blankets by Robert Bly. 

 

 

  

       BOA Editions is also sponsoring its “Ideal Reading Experience” where one reader per month will be awarded a free, author-signed copy of The Word from His Song for the remainder year of 2016. 

www.boaeditions.org/boaturns40

BOA Editions Publisher Peter Conners described Li-Young Lee and Lee’s work as vital to American Poetry.  

"Since the publication of his debut collection, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Li-Young Lee has remained a singular, vital figure in American poetry. Because the publication and promotion of his works has been a focus of BOA’s efforts for the past 30 years, it feels fitting that on the 40^th anniversary of the press, we share a selection of Li-Young Lee’s newest work in a beautiful, collectible chapbook. A work of art in every sense, this limited edition publication will be a must-have collectible for poetry readers everywhere.”

http://www.amazon.com/Rose-New-Poets-America-Li-Young/dp/0918526531/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-1&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

Lee’s other works are The City In Which I Love You; Book of My Nights; Behind My Eyes; The Winged Seed:  A Remembrance; and Breaking The Alabaster Jar:  Conversations With Li-Young Lee.

http://www.amazon.com/City-Which-American-Poets-Continuum/dp/0918526833/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-2&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

http://www.amazon.com/Book-My-Nights-American-Continuum/dp/1929918089/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-4&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-My-Eyes-Li-Young-Lee/dp/0393334813/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-3&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

http://www.amazon.com/Winged-Seed-Remembrance-American-Readers/dp/1938160045/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-6&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Alabaster-Jar-Conversations-Li-Young/dp/1929918828/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1459132153&sr=8-5&keywords=Li+Young+Lee

       Feature writer Christal Rice Cooper conducted an interview with Li Young Lee via email and telephone from February 29, 2016 to March 28, 2016.  Below is the scripted interview between Lee and Cooper.

The sparrow on my rooftop shouts,

"All roads be blessed!”

Excerpt from “The Word From His Song”

The last time we spoke was July of 2013.  What has changed in your personal life and poetry life since then?

Wow, the last time we spoke was 2013?  It feels so much longer ago than that.  What has changed?  You ask.  Well, I feel a lifetime older, and less in many ways, mostly physically.  But in important ways, I feel significant increase:  more joy, more mirth, more interest, more mystery, a deeper faith in poetry, in its practice and in its yogic dimensions, and a deeper connection to both time and to eternity.   

Also, all my life, I’ve struggled to keep death and impermanence in my radar, but lately it’s easier, less of a struggle to maintain awareness of my own transience, and that experience more and more instills in me a near giddiness and amazement at being alive, as well as greater focus, greater clarity and direction.  A flower is my organizing principle.  Love is my compass.  And as for my writing, it feels more introverted to me.  But you’ll have to tell me if that comes through.

I loved you before I was born.

It doesn’t make sense, I know.

Excerpt from “I Loved You Before I Was Born”

Can you choose one poem from The Word from His Song and tell us the step-by-step process of writing that specific poem from the moment the idea is birthed in your brain until final book form?

To be honest, I’m not able to give an honest and accurate account.  I have exactly no idea how any of these poems got written.  I suppose I could re-imagine the process for one of the poems, but I suspect that would not be free of fiction.  From inception, and throughout revision, each day, the whole process occurs in a state of heightened awareness and presence I barely remember when it’s over.

It’s just a needle I thread,

A sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing

Excerpt from “At The Year’s Revolving Door”

How did the idea of the BOA pamphlet come into being?

Peter Conners and I have wanted to do a BOA project for quite some time.  When BOA’s 40^th Anniversary came around, the idea of a chapbook came up.  I don’t know who thought of it, but I’m so happy we’re getting it done. 

How would you describe these eight poems?

The best I could do.

In your previous books you’ve written mostly at night, with the focus on your father and struggled with insomnia as indicated in “Folding A Five Cornered Star So The Corners Meet.”  Did you experience the same things in The Word from His Song? 

Well I seem to be working around the clock these days, and with greater glee.  I can’t wait to get to it when I wake up, and find it hard to part with when I’m exhausted and ready to take a break.  I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel something like a greater and greater surrendering to the impulse of writing, a more immediate answering to the call of the imagination.  

It must be the stars’ insomnia.

And I am their earthbound descendant

Excerpt from “Folding A Five Cornered Star So the Corners Meet”

What poem is your favorite and why?

On any day, I have a different favorite poem, but it’s never one of my own.

In “Hidden Hearing” the poem is about God.  Who is God to you now?

God is my true nature and identity, my origin and my destiny.   

Last night I dreamed of voices in a grove.

Ladders reaching from the ground into the branches.

Excerpt from “Hidden Hearing”

In “Leaving” you mention the trees outside your window.  When you look out that window today what do you see, hear, taste, smell?

Well, I’m about 500 miles away from that window at the moment, and won’t be returning to that window for a few more months.

Each day, less leaves

In the tree outside my window

Excerpt from “Leaving”

You are going to AWP in Los Angeles AND you will give a reading to celebrate BOA 40^th anniversary.  What is one (and I know there are many) thing you will talk about, and how do you prepare yourself for such two great appearances?

On the one hand, I don’t prepare at all.  I never plan to say anything or do anything.  On the other hand, I’ve been preparing all of my life since I see everything, everything I do in my life as an opportunity to practice greater presence and awareness.  Whether I daily succeed or not in that practice is almost beside the point.  The point is the practice.  Giving a public talk is just one more opportunity to practice. 

I must know how to bless

And how to receive blessing.

Excerpt from “Treasure Uncovered”

Your books are all different but at the same time with the same theme.  I feel this is true of The Word from His Song.  Do you agree?  And what makes The Word from His Song different from your previous works? 

I guess each book would have to be different, since I’m not the same even from one moment to the next.  I mean, even my body is changing at something like 6 billion cells a minute.  You, as an objective reader, may be in a better position to tell me how these poems are different from my other work. I can only tell you what I wish and hope for.  I hope they are simpler, deeper, truer, more sincere, and less “literary.”  But I don’t know if, in fact, they are so.   

Of all these things,

words weigh too much, yet not enough.

Excerpt from “Why Are You Awake?”

1.

Li Young Lee in 2015

2.

Jacket cover of The Word from His Song

3.

BOA Staff.

Peter Conners is far right standing.

4, 5, and  and 15.

BOA Logo

6.

The Bridge of Change by John Logan

7.

The Toy Bone by Donald Hall

8.

Sunlight: A Sequence for My Daughter Poems by David Ignatow with drawings by Rose Graubart Ignatow;

9.

Survivors by Richard Eberhart

10.

Armidale by Louis Simpson

11.

Remains:  A Sequence of Poems by W.D. Snodgrass

12.

Nest of Sonnets by A. Poulin, Jr.

13.

Gratitude to Old Teachers by Robert Bly

14.

Holes the Crickets Have Eaten in Blankets by Robert Bly.

16.

Peter Conners

Copyright granted by Peter Conners

17.

Jacket cover of Rose

18.

Jacket cover of The City in Which I Love You

19.

Jacket cover of Book of My Nights

20.

Jacket cover of Behind My Eyes

21.

Jacket cover of The Winged Seed:  A Remembrance

22.

Jacket cover of Breaking The Alabaster Jar:  Conversations With Li Young Lee

23.

Artwork by Christal Rice Cooper

24.

Li Young Lee on November 2013.

25.
Donna Lee and Li-Young Lee.  The couple have been married since November of 1976 and have two sons ages 31 and 32.  They reside in Chicago, Illinois.

26.

Peter Connners

Copyright granted by Peter Conners

27.
Photoshop by Christal Rice Cooper 

28.

Artwork by Christal Rice Cooper

29.

30

Top Left, Melissa Hall, Director of Development and Operations

Top Right, Jenna Fisher, Director of Marketing and Production,

Sitting Peter Conners, Publisher

© CITY Newspaper © Mark Chamberlin

31. 

 

Poem by Terri Kirby Erickson: On March 25, 1965 NAACP Member Viola Gregg Liuzzao was murdered by Klansmen . . .

Christal Rice Cooper

caccoop@aol.com

https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

This was originally published on February 6, 2014 in the Winston-Salem Journal

Copyright granted by Terri Kirby Erickson

Guest Blogger Terri Kirby Erickson:

on her poem “Leroy and Viola”

and the history behind it.

From the moment I read John Railey’s column last year about people martyred during the struggle for civil rights, I was intrigued as well as outraged by a brief reference to 19-year-old African-American civil rights worker, Leroy Moton, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white, middle-aged housewife and mother from Detroit.

There are uplifting stories from this tumultuous period in our nation's history, but mostly darker tales — the kind that will haunt us forever. This story, I'm afraid, is one of them. It begins with the everyday image of two people driving down a long stretch of highway, listening to the radio. It ends, for one of them, with sudden and devastating violence.

         On the evening of March 25, 1965, after a march in Montgomery, Ala., Liuzzo — a proud member of the NAACP — was giving Moton a ride back to Selma.

At some point in their journey, armed Klansmen spied this lone white woman driving a car with Michigan plates and her black male passenger. They were so enraged by this "outsider" and the appearance of "race mixing," they began to give chase. By some accounts, both cars were soon traveling at speeds of 100 miles per hour.

When the gunmen were able to get close enough to Liuzzo's vehicle, they shot her twice in the head. The car careened into a ditch and Moton, covered in Liuzzo's blood, pretended to be dead — the only reason this young man survived to tell the world what happened.

It is hard to imagine the terror he must have felt when that quartet of killers gathered around the wreckage, searching for survivors. For Leroy Moton to "play dead" so convincingly (beside the bloody corpse of a woman who had been vibrantly alive only seconds before), is a testimony to his survival skills, not to mention the bravery already evidenced by the choice he made to march for civil rights in the segregated South.

Eventually, three of Viola Liuzzo's murderers were brought to trial. In the Encyclopedia of Alabama (published October 24, 2007), the author writes that the Klansmen were acquitted the first time around, after rumor and innuendo did their work to destroy Liuzzo's reputation. Some even hinted that Liuzzo and Moton had a romantic relationship — damaging not only because Liuzzo was a married woman and the mother of five children, but because it was still illegal in many parts of the country, including Alabama, for whites and non-whites to cohabitate or engage in sexual acts.

As it turned out, the fourth man involved in the shooting was a "paid FBI informant" and the charges against him were dropped. There were subsequent trials, according to the EOA, wherein "Alabama juries" continued to "clear" the Klansmen. Federal juries finally convicted them of "violating Liuzzo's civil rights," and "sentenced the men to ten years in prison." One "died in March, 1966, before beginning his sentence," and "the FBI informant was granted full immunity and placed in the federal witness protection program."

There is speculation that the FBI, under orders from Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover, was responsible for the smear campaign against Viola Liuzzo. Some even say it was the FBI informant who pulled the trigger. But this fact is indisputable: Viola Liuzzo and far too many others, black and white, made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight for equal rights.

Liuzzo's murder did, however, "move President Johnson to order a federal investigation of the Klan, and to petition Congress to expand the Federal Conspiracy Act of 1870 to make the murder of civil rights activists a federal crime. Her death increased congressional support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which Johnson signed on August 6, 1965."

The EOA goes on to say that "in 1989, Viola Liuzzo became one of forty civil-rights martyrs whose lives were commemorated on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery. In 1991, the Women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference erected a stone marker on Highway 80 at the spot where she was murdered."

As for Leroy Moton, he is still with us. I have had the privilege of corresponding with him on a few occasions, and was able to tell him how much I respect and admire him. Both he and the late Viola Liuzzo, as well as scores of other champions for civil rights, are an inspiration.

It is important to continue sharing their stories, and to honor these brave men and women who sacrificed so much in pursuit of justice for all.

Leroy and Viola

Come Saturday morning, poor black men
gathered on street corners, waiting for white
men in Cadillacs to drive by slow, shouting
hey boy from their rolled-down windows, get
in, which meant there was a job digging ditches
or other backbreaking work for less money
than it cost to feed the family dog. Nights
were harder, what with hooded gangs of racists
wrapped in bed sheets roaming the countryside,
and woe to anybody who wasn’t white once
those half-drunk, hatemongering mobs with
their burning crosses and lengths of rope,
arrived on the scene. So in 1965 when married
mother-of-five Viola Gregg Liuzzo volunteered
to drive nineteen-year-old Leroy Moton back
to Selma—both fresh from a freedom march
in Montgomery, Alabama—the sight of a white
woman with a black man in the front seat of
a vehicle sporting Michigan plates didn’t sit
well with Klansmen who were, as usual, wild
as pent-up ponies in a barn blaze. So they chased
the pair down and fired two bullets into Liuzzo’s
brain, laughing like loons when the car careened
into a ditch. Covered in blood, Moton played
dead—surviving the shots, the crash, and the killers’
swift perusal of the wreckage. But Viola Liuzzo
is gone except in memory, where the same reel
runs over and over in Leroy Moton’s mind:
a pretty woman’s profile, pale as milk against
the purpling sky, and his hand, dark as rivers
on the radio dial—strangers joined forever
by history, seconds before the slaughter.

Excerpt from A Lake of Light and Clouds

Press 53
© Terri Kirby Erickson 2014

Terri Kirby Erickson  is the author of four collections of poetry, including In the Palms of Angels (Press 53, 2011), winner of three international awards, and her latest collection, A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53, 2014). Telling Tales of Dusk (Press 53, 2009) was #23 on the Poetry Foundation Contemporary Best Seller List in 2010.  Her work has won numerous awards, and has appeared in the 2013 Poet’s Market, The Christian Science Monitor, North Carolina Literary Review, Storysouth, JAMA, Verse Daily, and many other publications, and has twice been chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for inclusion in his American Life in Poetry column, sponsored by The Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress. She is a member of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International, a professional organization of women educators, and has taught a number of poetry classes in public schools, universities, and other venues.