Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: And today we're reading a poem by Li-Young Lee, titled “From Blossoms”. Joanne, would you like to read this poem for us? Joanne: Yes, I would love to. “From Blossoms” [To read the poem, visit this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms] Abram: I love this poem. Joanne: Yeah, me too. I'm so glad you were the one that recommended we read this one today. Shall we talk a bit about who Li-Young Lee is and why we're so drawn to this poem? Abram: Yeah, I think that one of the things that draws me to this poem is that joy is actually very hard to write about, I think. It's hard to do joy well without it sounding naive or sentimental or withdrawn or unaware. And I mean, one of the things about Li-Young Lee is that he is not an unaware, naive person. He was born in Indonesia. His father was a personal doctor of Mao Zedong, but then had to go into political exile and they fled for five years through three different countries before they landed in the United States. And then his father became a Presbyterian minister. And so Li-Young Lee grew up in that kind of household with a sort of loving, but fraught relationship and often tense relationship with his father that he writes a great deal about in the rest of this book. So anyway, this is a person who knows struggle, who knows sacrifice, who knows that the world is not always just a joyful and easy place. And even in this poem itself, the joy of this poem of this, you know, simple peach on a simple day is always against the background of things that might fail, that might die. This is a day that has lived as if death were nowhere in the background. But of course, the point is that it is. Joanne: There is such a powerful sense of him and his poetic voice. He's a kind of seer or has come almost like a prophetic voice. And I love how he's really zeroing in on that fragility of life and how there are these moments, very occasionally, where you can forget about death entirely and just be in the blissful present, right? The poem begins with a very simple statement of fact, right? So the poem is divided into four sections/stanzas, and we've talked about the word stanza. It's the Italian word for room. So each of these rooms gives us a different kind of habit of thought or feeling. And the first stanza, very simple statement of facts that are material and temporal, right? “From blossoms comes / this brown paper bag of peaches / we bought from the boy / at the bend in the road where we turned toward / signs painted Peaches.” What do you think of that opening? Abram: I love this opening. A few things I love about this opening. One is just the pure sound of it, right? So just follow the bees, blossoms, brown, bag, bot, bend. Like he's just playing with language and rhythm in a way that makes you want to read further. That makes you sort of fall in love with a simple statement of fact. It's a kind of search for origins. Where did these peaches come from is the first thought. And so even though we're just getting the facts here. They're facts that already come shaped by this notion of all that has gone into the making of this day and this moment. And the last thing I love about this opening stanza is that it rewards the paying of attention. It's about the way that they went off the road, they turned aside, they saw a sign, they didn't continue on with the day that they had planned. They saw a sign that said “peaches down this way” and they took the detour. And so a lot of the joy of this poem comes from the interruption of their day because they were paying attention, because they were able to be interrupted. They took the bend in the road that took them to this experience. Joanne: And I can't help but think, as I hear you talking, about an episode we did with Richie Hoffman and how he talked about the way in which for him as a poet, he's routinely drawn to the things of this world and just paying attention to an object, a singular object and then delving deeply into it and allowing himself to explore it. I feel like this is a very similar move in this poem, right? Abram: Absolutely. And then the paying of attention sort of draws to his awareness, all the rest that has gone into the making of this experience, making this moment possible. And so in the second stanza the from expands, we get that repetition of from, but it's not just “from blossoms”. It's from all kinds of things. So listen, as he goes on “From laden boughs, from hands, / from sweet fellowship in the bins, / comes nectar at the roadside, succulent / peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,” — ACHOO Joanne: That was the pollen from the peach blossoms! That was amazing! Abram: “comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.” Joanne: I appreciate that this poem acknowledges the labor of what it takes for the branch, the bow to bend, but also for the hands to do the picking. Right? I love when poems remember the labor that's behind every material object in the world. How strange to describe sweet fellowship in the bins. So I'm assuming here, these are bins of peaches that are at the peach stand. I kind of love the idea of peaches in fellowship. It's like a little congregation of peaches. And then comes, then listen to this, comes nectar at the roadside. “Succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all”, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. So there's the nectar, the peaches themselves, the dusty skin and the dust of summer that we eat. There's several different kinds of materials and, and forms of consumption here. What do you notice? Abram: I just, I want to dwell for a second on where the stanza ends, which is on this repetition of dust, because it's, in a certain sense, the absolute opposite of nectar. And what you begin to see as this poem goes on is that these joys, this succulents, this richness of the peach is up against dust is up against shade, which we get in the next stanza, is up against the death that is always in the background, which we are going to live. There are days as if we live as if death were nowhere in the background. And so it's not ignored. It's almost as though the joy is made. All the sweeter are all the more possible because of that dust. And, you know he, like we said, he grew up his father was a Presbyterian minister. He grew up on the King James Version Bible, and there's so much resonance with the King James language. He himself was not a Christian as he grew up. But there's so much of his poetry that resonates with the KJV. And this is just one of those moments, you know, dust we are, to dust we shall return becomes the familiar dust of summer dust we eat. This repetition makes us aware of that original language of death, even as we're talking about joy and nectar and sweetness, Joanne: Well, and you know, adjectives when they're well placed are so powerful. The familiar dust of summer dustweed. I love that adjective “familiar”. It means that. We know it's there. We know it's coming. We regularly recognize its presence. This is a habit that summer has, right? And that dust, that reminder of our origins as well as of our mortality, it's always present, right? But on this day, That familiarity is punctuated by a resistance to death, right? Abram: Absolutely. And as you track that into the next stanza, you get again, this kind of resonance with communion and the familiar line of communion is “take and eat”. And that is exactly what happens in the next stanza. But again, it's a kind of overarching spirituality and sacramentality. That is, a sacrament is the way in which the spiritual is made physically manifest in something that is material. And you see that happening in the taking and eating of the next stanza. And so you get, “O, to take what we love inside, /to carry within us an orchard, to eat / not only the skin, but the shade, / not only the sugar, but the days, to hold / the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into / the round jubilance of peach.” I just love this movement from the receiving, you know, at the stand and then the taking in, what do you notice in this third stanza? Joanne: I'm thinking of what we said at the beginning of this episode of Li-Young Lee and his life in exile. You know, anyone who's in exile has to carry within themselves an orchard in order to survive, right? What do you carry within you? Your inner strength, your inner resilience and abundance. But on another level he's picking up on some of that Judeo Christian tradition. I'm thinking now of John Milton. Paradise Lost, that final book of that great epic when the angel Michael is saying to Adam and Eve who are inconsolable because they've fallen they've eaten of the fruit in the Garden of Eden and the angel Michael says to them “Look, it's okay, you can carry this paradise within you and bring it into the world.” Right? So I feel like there's a real heft and significance and complexity to this idea of carrying within us an orchard. What do you think? Abram: It's in the light of that. Exile and death that this poem is seizing on a moment of pure joy and saying there are these moments That bring it all together From all of these roots from all of these origins that come together in this pure joy And that give us a taste of something that goes beyond exile and beyond death To live as though death is nowhere in the back Joanne: And I like that pattern of repetition that he's using in many parts of the poem, but here in particular to eat, “not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days”. What, what do you see going on there? Because I think what he's saying is the sugar is the sweetness and the days are the quotidian habits that we go through from day to day. Abram: And then that day is transformed into the last day where we begin the last stanza. “There are days we live”. So, you know, we think it's just about this peach, this great peach, you know, at the beginning but actually it turns out to be about the whole experience, the whole day as an experience of joy. So it kind of leads us to that last stanza where again we pick up on another repetition and where we end on nothing but repetition. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background from joy to joy to joy from wing to wing from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom to sweet impossible blossom. Joanne: What a great ending. Abram: You know, it reminds me of this idea that one use of repetition is a kind of incantation. I mean, this is true of a lot of religions. There's a way in which this is a joy so extreme, so transcendent, that you can't really describe it. All you could do is repeat the words, and the repetition of the words in a kind of incantation can take you into that experience. And that's the closest approximation. Joanne: Yeah, beautiful. And I loved too, the iambic pentameter beat of from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing. It's beautiful. And also how he picks up that oss sound that's in both impossible And blossom, you know and he yolks through sound and rhythm. He's yoking together these images that are really resonant and so just blissful. It's amazing what he does by the end. Abram: Yeah. You know, oftentimes this poem is read in isolation, but it's really not a poem in isolation. There's a poem that comes immediately before this poem in the book. And the poem that comes before this one is, lo and behold, about a bag of peaches. And, and so they're, they're clearly speaking to one another. But the poem that comes before has a very different sensibility, very different mode, very different tone. And I wonder if you want to say a word about what that poem is doing, which is called “The Weight of Sweetness”. Joanne: So this poem that appears before “From Blossoms” is called “The Weight of Sweetness”. And what I'd like readers to listen to is the weight, the bending, the straining, the labor that is really foregrounded in this poem, right? [to read this poem, visit this link: https://poets.org/poem/weight-sweetness] Abram: Yeah, I mean, my sense of the tone or even just how I would describe these poems one is falling and the other is rising. One is about gravity and weight and strain and labor and the other ends with this image of from wing to wing, everything is just taking off as if death is nowhere in the background. And so they're speaking in a certain sense, directly to one another. And I think one of the ways that you put it with what we were talking about, these poems just before we started recording is that the first poem establishes the days, the normal way of things, the weight of things, the strain of things, and the second acknowledges that weight and says, even so there are moments, there are days, there are these ways in which joy just becomes so transcendent that we lift away from it, that we can live as if death is nowhere in the background. Joanne: With all that we've learned about this poem, would you be willing to read it again, Abram? Abram: Absolutely. “From Blossoms” [poem]. Joanne: That's really great. To learn more about Li-Young Lee, you can visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm You can find this poem and “The Weight of Sweetness” in Li-Young Lee's book titled Rose, which was published by Boa Editions. Thanks to Boa Editions for granting us permission to read this poem today. Abram: And please remember to subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Joanne: Thank you for listening. Abram: Thank you.