"People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush."
"Memory revises me. Even now a letter comes from a place I don’t know, from someone with my name and postmarked years ago, while I await injunctions from the light or the dark; I wait for shapeliness limned, or dissolution. Is paradise due or narrowly missed until another thousand years? I wait in a blue hour and faraway noise of hammering, and on a page a poem begun, something about to be dispersed, something about to come into being."
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Source: Li-Young Lee (1990). “The City in which I Love You: Poems”, p.14, BOA Editions, Ltd.
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"Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming."
"Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet."
"Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself."
"That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do."
"To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face."