Noted poet Li-Young Lee comes to Spokane

Li-Young Lee ’s life story reads like something out of epic poetry.

From 1912-16, his maternal great grandfather served as China’s first republican president – and tried to install himself as emperor.

His father was a personal physician of Chinese leader Mao Zedong .

By 1957, when Lee was born, his family had relocated to Jakarta, Indonesia, where his father helped found a university.

Lee’s life was further altered when his family, fleeing Indonesian anti-Chinese sentiment that had resulted in his father’s imprisonment, immigrated to the United States in 1964.

Lee, who now lives in Chicago, is a nationally renowned poet who has won a number of literary awards. And as a poet, he’s conscious of the effect that such a polyglot past has had on him and his work.

As he said in a 1996 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, “I’m highly aware that I’m a guest in the language. I’m wondering if that’s not the truth for all of us, that somehow we’re all guests in language, that once we start speaking any language somehow we bow to that language at the same time we bend that language to us.”

By the way, Lee will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Gonzaga University as part of GU’s 2008-2009 Visiting Writers Series . He will read from his works at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at Spokane Falls Community College.

Here are a few examples of his poetry: Click here , click here and click here .

Below: Poet Li-Young Lee, who will speak at Gonzaga University on Tuesday, reads from his works at the Univ. of California-Berkeley in 2002.