Funds for bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed Or you are the only animal

Who can think, who can reason, who can read

Hello and welcome to Bookworm

I'm Michael Silverblatt

And today my guest is Leung Lee.

He's a poet whose most recent book of poems is coming out from B.O.A. Editions

called Book of My Nights. His earlier books include The City in Which I Love You, which won the

Lamont poetry selection for 1990. His first book of poems was called Rose, and he's the author of a

remembrance called The Winged Seed. I'm talking to Leon Lee outside the studio in Santa Fe,

before a reading that he'll be giving for the Lannin Foundation. Now, when you began as a young poet,

you began with fairly concrete gestures for poems.

There were actions, hair as being combed or braided.

They're not anecdote poems in the conventional sense, but as you've gone on, the poems have become

more and more spiritual, less and less materialized.

And I wondered about that gesture in writing, that movement toward the mysterious and the less earthly, the unearthly.

I think for me, Michael, it was the enterprise, I mean, even in the beginning was the same.

I think what I experienced when I was reading poems was this deep and profound silence.

Somehow the poems, though they used words, they disclosed a kind of almost primal silence.

And when I started writing poems, that was what I wanted to be in touch with.

So it was part of the enterprise for me was to use words and write poems that somehow imparted this silence.

And so as I've gone on over the years, that silence has meant more and more and more to me.

...