Poet Li-Young Lee on Awe, Adoration, and Turning Toward the Unknown

For poet Li-Young Lee, writing is a deeply spiritual practice. Taking inspiration from Daoist and Christian texts, his poems investigate the paradoxical relationships between silence and sound, stillness and motion, and form and formlessness. He recently published his sixth collection of poetry, The Invention of the Darling, as well as a translation of the Dao De Jing, which he completed with the poet and cosmologist Yun Wang.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Lee to discuss the spiritual influences on his poetry, why he views every poem as a descendant of God, how he writes from a state of don’t-know mind, and why he believes the task of the poet is to reconcile all opposites. Plus, Lee reads a few poems from The Invention of the Darling.