Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist.
Her poems "Given Air" and "Happiness Machine" appear in Issue Forty of The Collagist.
Here, Karen An-hwei Lee talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about pocket sized poems, California weather, and the bees, the bees, the bees.
1. How did you come about writing “Given Air”?
One summer, I composed a group of poems about air.
To do so, I compiled indoor and outdoor lists of living things breathing air, things exhaling air, and all things given air – whether breathing or not, such as moss or ball lightning.
2. “Given Air” is fantastically pocket-sized. Personally, I always struggle with smaller poems, afraid that I should be expanding or saying more. How do you know when a pocket-sized poem is complete?
I often think of poems as cells or organisms, self-contained entities. I allow a poem’s space to expand, organize its innards. When there’s not enough material, it cannot exist on its own, so I feed it a little imagery or other information. A poem achieves a certain homeostasis with time. If there’s too much silence – or noise -- the poem explodes. In some cases, the chaos is desirable since it yields necessary tensions in the poem, so I let it be. There is no formula.
3. This poem deals mostly with the natural world, from the ball lightning to the still bees. How do these images, or perhaps the science of the images, influence your writing?
The weather of California fascinates me.
My first years in the Bay Area sent a heat wave, the rains of El Niño, and minor earthquakes. Now I live in greater Los Angeles, where it’s common to see gardenias blooming in November, grapefruit trees heavy with globes in December, and hybrid tea roses in January – all in the midst of urban sprawl. The natural world thrives in abundance here. I once studied biological sciences, so this field of knowledge resides with my words, too. I love observing ways in which creative design is present in nature.
When I moved from New England to northern California over a decade ago, I was enthralled by the long growing season, whose produce – radicchio, fennel, avocadoes, kumquats, pomegranates, figs -- spilled from local backyards. Every day, I walked past an urban garden that alternately produced giant sunflowers, squash, and string beans in four seasons.
In the rawness of civilization and its discontents, so to speak, a healing.
The still bees, ah. As a girl in New England, I would wait for melting snow in late March: no bees. The crocuses: no bees. Then the maple trees in our yard would put out oddly green flowers with nectar, and then: the bees, the bees, the bees. Even California bees are less active in winter, although yesterday, I did see a weary one exploring the fuchsia bougainvillea in a new year’s light.
4. What have you been reading recently? What’s really stuck with you?
I’ve enjoyed a novel by Hiromi Kawakami and am currently re-reading Making Peace by Denise Levertov. More writers, an eclectic list: Paul Celan, Josey Foo, Lily Hoang, Tan Wan Eng, Éireann Lorsung, Arlene Kim, Julian of Norwich, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Mary Burger, Sarah Gambito, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Arthur Sze.
5. What other writings have you been working on?
I finished a collection of poetry and prose by a Song Dynasty woman poet, Li Qingzhao, forthcoming from Tupelo Press.