On the Earth, or in a Language: A Conversation with Dong Li
Dong Li | The Orange Tree | University of Chicago Press | March 2023 | 88 pages
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with poet and translator Dong Li over Zoom, where he joined me from his current home in Leipzig, Germany. Thoughtful, funny, and deeply interested in what connects us with those around us (literature, plants, poetry, silence), Li is a writer who sees language as a way to call our loved ones back to life. In his debut poetry collection The Orange Tree, Winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize for 2023 and published on March 31, 2023 with the University of Chicago Press, Li creates a new lexicon of memory. Language, like the past, does not follow a straight line:
imagine the dream / of birth, imagine that / birth is dream- / like insides / imagine the kick / of a rib, a scent of rubber / just whistle (“Event”)
Li’s work is as experimental as it is true to the rhythm of the human emotional psyche, and his reworking of oral and self-created histories defines him as not just a poet, but as a brilliant taxonomist of human desire.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Daisuke Shen: I started reading your work because your friend and classmate at Brown, Vi Khi Nao, told me about The Gleaner Song (Deep Vellum, 2022). I was blown away by your intentionality and attentiveness to the emotions in Song Lin’s work. I know a little about your friendship with him from the introduction, but how did you two become friends?
Dong Li: Song Lin is one of the most lovely people I’ve met. He’s always so supportive of the younger generation of Chinese language poets. I got to know him during my first translation of poetry from the Chinese, Zhu Zhu’s The Wild Great Wall (Phoneme Media, 2018, now Deep Vellum). After Zhu Zhu recommended that I take a look at Song Lin’s work, I fell in love immediately with the language he [Lin] used in his bilingual chapbook in French and Chinese, FRAGMENTS ET CHANTS D’ADIEU (Verdier, 2006). His capturing of the feelings of isolation—and perhaps even alienation—in the French language environment was extremely poignant to me.
When I was translating The Gleaner Song into English, [Lin] was so gentle and patient, saying, “Take your time, don’t worry. Focus on your own work.” He’s a very rare type of poet who always puts others’ work before his own.
By the time I started to translate him, Song Lin had returned to China, so I wanted to create an occasion for us to be together. I applied for this residency called OMI Translation Lab in upstate New York. There, we were able to spend 12 days together. I decided on the poems that needed to be a part of this collection, with Song Lin sometimes adding a poem or two. He insisted on adding one poem that he wrote during the residency for me (laughter).
DS: What a beautiful story. I love the imagery in Lin’s work, as well as your own. There are so many poems in The Orange Tree that mimic the way in which memories work—we don’t think about things in a straight line, we remember emotional shapes. Was it a similar sense of isolation that first led you into poetry?
DL: I grew up and was raised in China, and I was never encouraged to write literary stuff. I tried at one point after reading modernist foreign literature, but was discouraged by my teachers. It was in the US—I actually was already in college in Beijing, so I had to start over, willingly!—that I became interested in literature, because I had trouble with the system and was trying to find my way out.
I found a scholarship in the middle of nowhere, in the Californian desert. I thought it was magical, romantic. And it was a good time [in my life] to live out some magic and romance. And magically, I got in, and it was all free.
I didn’t have a lot of places to go to during breaks. In the Deep Springs College library, I stumbled upon a book called For Love (laughter). It’s an isolating place, and the internet didn’t work, so I couldn’t Google this person at all. And I realized there’s a lot you can do, even with simple language. There was something that you could do to language.
American English and this environment allowed me to find poetry. Though my English was good enough, I couldn’t have very intellectual conversations with people. There was one time my teacher forced me to speak in front of the class. I was so embarrassed!
But one thing I learned from that experience is: As long as you have things to say, you don’t have to package or repackage things in a very intellectual way. If the thought is forceful enough, it will find a way to convey itself, even if it’s in a broken language, even in broken English.
It’s the matter of sharing that’s important. People can misunderstand your silence, perhaps as inattentiveness or arrogance. But out of silence, great things can happen—I was pushed [out of it], and I’m still grateful, because even now, if I think I have something to say, I will say it.
DS: It’s true. I feel like I had to unlearn a lot of perfectionist tendencies over the years, and Vi has been so helpful in that aspect especially. She is someone who loves mistakes, who finds beauty in them, because they’re human. It’s human to get out what we can, when we can.
What do you think of as a specific impetus for your retracing of your family history? What are we searching for in these poems?
DL: Even at Deep Springs College, I wasn’t thinking of becoming a poet. But then there was a prompt in [public speaking class] about where you’re coming from, and that’s when I wrote the speech that the title poem is from. Something clicked—or rather, it was that something did not click. Something about the form wasn’t right to me. I finished my undergrad and did my MFA at Brown, and that’s when I thought that perhaps I could do something with the speech.
My grandpa passed away. I had this… abyss for a moment. That information was withheld from my parents for a year, and I thought, maybe I should do something about it, pick up that speech and shape it into something beautiful that helps me remember. The childhood memories, times spent with my grandfather, the stories my mother told me later on. My memories and imagining him. Poetry was a means for me to achieve that goal.
DS: I am grateful that I was able to meet your grandfather in these poems. All of the people in these poems are people that felt alive to me and are alive still in your work.
I wanted to ask—was there anything scary about remembering? As a way for you to remember your grandfather. Is remembering or forgetting scarier?
DL: I think it’s scarier not to remember. We always want to remember, for our lives to have a narrative, to make sense. Because once our lives have a shape, linear or non-linear, we can make sense of the passage of our lives. There is a human tendency to remember, but we only remember the facts.
To me, it’s the “underfacts,” the undercurrents, that are more interesting. You want to excavate the feelings from those moments. There has never been fear in me to forget. I want to examine my life. To see where the mistakes are, to see where I could do better. In terms of poetry, I feel like I’m not just one person writing this book. I felt that these other people [in my family] were behind me, looking. They cannot speak, or at least they are not speaking in our time. But I wanted to feel their presence.
My parents aren’t educated. They can barely read—my grandfather could really not read anything I write—especially things that are complex as poetry. But I wanted to feel them supporting me in what I do. To inhabit the same time as they do.
In poetry, it’s often about “me” or “I.” Because for me, my life is not interesting, my feelings are not that interesting (laughter). But my response to how other people feel, that interests me.
DS: I think that generally, people think that writers are self-involved or are just writing about their breakup or whatever. But that analyzation really shows through in your work, the sense of determination and curiosity that permeates your writing that seems to be missing from a lot of literature.
I especially loved the way that you re-invented the English language. It’s my favorite thing about English. I got a C in grammar in undergrad even though I was a lit major, and I was just like, “I don’t think it matters that much!” (laughter). In my head, I was a writer. Some things just sound better this way!
So what propels your interest in languages, as a translator between three different languages? What about language ignites that same interest you have in people?
DL: Sure, sure. I wanted to go back and add a little bit about the “self.” I think the self is very important… it’s very important to cleave to your own feelings, very individualized feelings. These breakups are important. These late-night conversations, crying, are important. Because without the self, how can you be selfless? And when you write, you use everything. Without the self, nothing else can exist. So it is important when you’re working on a project, because then you can forget yourself. For instance, when you run a marathon, you’re tired, you’re out of breath, but you still have that goal and you use every muscle, every cell. And you forget about yourself. Whether achievable or not, it doesn’t matter, but in the moment, it’s fulfilling.
In terms of lexicon and thought, I love languages. I just hope I have a few lives to learn languages. I’ve always been a very slow learner. I had enormous trouble in learning English. And I thought, “Languages, they don’t like me,” but I’ve always loved those challenges. Every language I’m trying to learn, they are challenges that could be overcome. It’s like a baby trying to walk. You can’t just have parents trying to help you. And I just feel like, “Wow.” What a triumphant feeling, of the self. To stand up. On the earth, or in a language.
I can reveal that when I was doing this book, I was learning to put a book together. It was so messy. I thought, “It’s not going to work.” I was also learning French and German and was having a hard time with German. I was really bad! But I remember these Komposita, these long words in German. And I felt like, well, isn’t this [my manuscript] like a new grammar to me? English is so flexible, you can break the rules, especially in daily conversation, or speak in fragments. But for me, I was trying to find crutches while putting my manuscript together. I would read a few poems, then think, “What are the crutches? What are the essential components?” So it was more like translations of the particular sections. Then I realized I loved the sound[s]. How they congealed together. They’re easily recognizable; they’re not complicated; they extend, they contract. I love the energy, the resistance, that they have. It became a method for me. Different kinds of big or small signposts become the index, the vocabulary.
DS: I like what you said about writing as a kind of translation of emotions. Language as something that you can use to signify the self—there is value in however the words come out.
This reminds me of how many places you’ve lived in, many of these poems describe specific political events. How do you think we locate our specific geographical identities, or the identities we find in these poems?
DL: Because of my family’s experience—that’s one thing—but I’m also attracted to these catastrophic events because they command a drastic response. They put you in a state of urgency, or emergency, in which you have to respond. Oftentimes, people think about—especially in my book—violence, all the people killed during these times. But there was also solidarity, helping each other. These things that helped people survive, [helped] the family gather together around the orange tree, though they came from opposite sides. This will help us survive, I feel. I just want to pass that onto others: How to survive in opposing, conflicting situations.
DS: Like the choice to live, as you say in one poem. And, you know, that you have been saying that poetry is a way that you chose to live.
Some of these poems were written a long time ago. I’m thinking about some lines in your poem: “Am I dead or dying. / Is death the only family.” Are these rhetorical questions, or ones that you have managed to answer for yourself in time? Or do the other poems answer this question for themselves?
DL: That’s sort of a hard question. I feel like death is this state that we don’t know [about]. When people die, we imagine that they’re all going to the same place, an unknown place. In that poem, I was just thinking about it [death] as a stable place, a joyful state where you can go and be together with everybody.
But I feel like I think about it differently now. I was a little devastated when writing the book, but now I feel like the sound of my family is there. Whether it’s that they still sound as they should sound for me or not. I just feel, like, well, when you focus and fixate on a particular word or moment or image, you are there. You forget yourself, you are there—not just with that word or that image, but with this entire constellation of people and things of earth. In the beyond world, the netherworld.
If you can really focus, they are in your presence. Not the present, which is a given time. In German, the word “gift” means “poison.” It’s a poisoned prison of time if you don’t choose to live. You really have to live in that moment, not to conform to what is expected of you. But to really live out your possibilities. A kid can learn every language, and maybe it’s a sort of return to that realm of possibilities. You can do things, you can use your life to pursue many possibilities.
Just a tiny thing can open us. An incision.
DS: Is there a part of you that worries about being too vulnerable in these poems? Like when a friend reads your poems and says, “Oh my God, I learned so much about you!”
DL: I’m totally okay with being vulnerable. I don’t often see these things as vulnerable; I just see them as things I want to express and publish and share. If [readers] want to respond, I’m happy to listen. The bad things often connect us more than the good things, I feel. It requires labor, love, effort, and then you remember. That kind of work is not necessarily vulnerable, but rather, what are you vulnerable to? What are you afraid of?
DS: So many of the people in my life are stoic people, I think. My father and grandmother are both this way—people who think of emotions as “weak.” Who view them not as things that you should communicate, but as sources of embarrassment. Are there any people in your life who’ve tried to persuade you to be this way?
DL: My family is not very verbal. When I was a kid, they tended not to have a lot of words for each other. They talk around things rather than talking about them. They have trouble putting their emotions into words. My parents had to work quite a bit, and sometimes I had to spend time with different family members. Whenever I was alone with these adults, they would just start talking to me as if I were another adult (laughter). They would tell me all these stories. Of course, I vaguely remember their sounds, their acts, though I don’t remember the stories themselves. But I found this quite interesting—when they were alone with a child, they had a lot of things to say.
I didn’t experience the atrocities [that they did] myself. As an outsider of their stories, it felt as if I were at an advantage. They were there, but did they see the whole thing unfolding? Or did they really see them, were they trying to look away while fleeing? I also experienced a stretch of difficult times myself, but it’s not comparable to what they experienced. It placed a kind of responsibility on me—if you can do something, you should do it, and do it well. An invisible responsibility is on my shoulder to tell their stories. They don’t even know that I write, they don’t know what a writer does. No one is really a literary person in my family, but they had even more poetry for me [than poetry itself] when no one was around, talking about their lives in such a frank, unguarded way. Those were precious moments for me, now that I think about it.
We only have responsibilities for ourselves. I give myself this responsibility, and I call it “invisible” because it’s associated with others. Writers shouldn’t feel like they’re taking on the evils of the world just because they have these connections. Their [my family’s] conversations ticked poetry in me—a ring. Language became and becomes alive for me, an expressive mode that I like to indulge myself in.
DS: One time, I was in Hiroshima, and I felt it was my responsibility to write about the atomic bomb, which my grandmother who raised me experienced firsthand. And then she told me, "Okay, I’m only going to tell you this once," and it was the first time she’d ever told me anything about herself or her family. But I frankly didn’t learn that much about her from what she was saying, I learned more from the things she was not saying, the things she didn’t want to discuss.
DL: You have a lot of grandma poems!
DS: I have a lot of grandma problems! (laughter). I tell people I don’t have mommy issues, I have grandma issues. My writing improved a lot when I realized I was trying to understand rather than report on my grandmother, or do this socially responsible thing. And I felt okay with that.
DL: But these are interesting problems! I’d forgotten about my mother’s stories, and so I had to piece them together myself. Moreso than the stories themselves, it was about their presence. Sometimes you write toward these presences; you cannot have a dialogue with the dead, but you can have a dialogue with their presences when your mind grabs onto them. Just like when we have conversations with ourselves. It’s what you're writing toward or with.
DS: It feels really refreshing to talk about these things so candidly. In Chinese culture, death is a big deal! It’s something we celebrate or pay respect to. In terms of cultural differences—China, Germany, France, America—I’m curious as to how people think about death in Germany, as I don’t know a lot about that. Is it a serious business?
DL: I think it’s a serious business. Generally speaking, Germans are very good at separating fact from emotions. You can have an emotional response, but there remain the facts. You have to recognize them as such. In different cultures, such as China, it’s emotional, so emotional. You have to stay with the dead for 49 days in the house. I think different cultures have a different way of remembering, of celebrating. How they live. Not just celebrating, how they think they should live. How you treat death is how you treat life.
But of course, as you know, Chinese is “tenseless.” You must use a lot of different words focused on the tenses. But I sort of like that. We are not fixated on the gift of time, restricted by it. But we can be on the same plane as the ancestors we don’t know. At some point [in earlier conversations], you mentioned the line: “Life departs the face” (“The Wheels, The Wheels”).
Maybe your subconsciousness remembers the faces of your ancestors, but you don’t remember the ancient times. There’s no high-tech stuff to capture their faces, so you have to use memory, which I think is wonderful. When you want to remember them better, you’re more protective. You want to conserve them better. That’s how it [our genealogies] sort of continues.
DS: In terms of passing things onto younger generations, what are some things that you try to impart onto your students? Or to the younger people who might be interested in poetry? Was there a particular moment that a student has told you you’ve helped in this way?
DL: I feel like wherever I am, I’m a student. I’m curious. I’m a student of languages, a student of students. The best part about teaching is learning about how to be in touch with people—sometimes older, sometimes younger, doesn’t matter. We’re all on the same plane. But because you’re the teacher, in this “authoritative” position, it’s a given position for you to learn about their individualities. If you’re a teacher, then you might have published more stuff than the others, but it’s just a practicality. It doesn’t mean that you’re better or that you cannot learn from the students. For me, it’s about learning about each person, where they want to go.
As a poet, you might want to listen to yourself, but as a teacher, we listen to our students. We want to help them not be affected by external forces like material expectations. Helping them be themselves, write the poetry and lines and love letters and accusations in their own cadence and own tones, that’s important, more important than anything else.
They write better than I do. That’s the future—in their hands, not in mine. Especially if they’re younger and hopefully all live longer, and don’t have many depressive periods in their lives (laughter)... because especially in publishing, it can be depressing. It took me so long to get this book published. To be able to tell them that it took this long, they might feel a little encouraged. But to also find things to do to protect the self. Without the self, we cannot get anything on the page.
And also, I think there’s more poetry outside of poems. [When you] write a poem, you want to be that poem. You want to be poetry in your life— to be caring and supportive whenever you can. To help others in their emergence. Their growing, their pains, their sorrows. What will make things click in their poetry or fiction-writing journeys? What’s going to make them stand up on their own legs, without crutches? In their own languages? Your cadence, tone, shade of color, smell, all of that belongs in your work. If you liberate yourself from the restriction of time, and circumstances… there’s a line from a poem by Arthur Sze that says, “to flower where there is no flower.” Even if there are no flowers around you, just flower.
DS: I know we’ve been going for a long time, so if you have to go, don’t worry. But for me, I’m always so tense and awkward the first time I talk to someone, so it’s exciting when the conversation gets going.
DL (whispering): I’m usually super nervous.
DS (laughing): Okay. So it’s good that we can understand each other in this way. My friend Mara, I was telling her I’m so awkward sometimes, how do you get over this? And she told me, just pretend that you’re in a play. So that’s what I’ve been doing recently.
I really liked what you said about treating your students as equals...
DL: The best teachers always do this!
DS (laughing): Yes, the best teachers do this. I wanted to ask you who the first writers or teachers were who impacted you in this way.
DL: My first revelatory encounter with a professor was at Deep Springs College—John Scharr, a political science professor. I was so lucky to be able to attend his lectures. He told these stories of political philosophy. He engaged in dialogue with students in order to help us learn. But I loved those intricate lectures that he gave, because for me, it was like when my grandpa would talk to me, alone. So immediate and familiar, but at the same time, enlightening. I felt like I was in a different domain, a different time. That type of dialogue with different students, the Socratic dialogue—it was real! “Wow, you can have a Socratic dialogue these days as well,” I thought. That was magical. That was poetry. A generative and generous force that helps you to open up, and in those conversations, new thoughts got formed. That’s how I learned that I had to communicate, even with resistance, to be in dialogue with something.
The other thing was preparation. I slept in the library a lot because I was a slow reader, and we had to read a lot of books. People would just come in and wake me up so I would be on time for class. But I noticed that he [Scharr] could recite the books [from memory]. He would be going through the books in the library before doing the lecture. I thought it was so magical: that tension, that preparation. You know the material so well, but you want to give it another look because you have another group of colleagues or students. I thought that level of attention was like looking at the grass for a millionth time until that grass speaks to you.
I think with literature, you want to be out of your mind. Not being crazy… or being crazy if you prefer it (laughter)! But out of mind, out of body, being someone else… living another life, living multitudes. As a reader and writer, you find those multitudes in literature. In terms of being a teacher, you are presented with those multitudes with each individual. It’s a great privilege to be able to have them open up and share with you.
DS: How do you balance those multitudes with you in your different lives, in the U.S. and Germany and China? The loneliness you talked about in regards to Song Lin?
DL: I never feel lonely. I can feel other peoples’ loneliness, the loneliness in their poems. But I never feel lonely. Especially with technology, you can watch a good film. Or write a letter. For me, the means of communication isn’t important, but the communication is. If you can focus on a book, well, that book becomes alive to you. That book becomes a friend. That’s why people often go back to this book or that book, particular presences that help them and nourish their minds. Plants, too. Especially in Asian cultures, they look at the stars and moon, feeling the presence of ancestors. These are all things that can help you when you feel like you are alone or want something to do.
Sometimes it’s kind of important, [that] there’s an excess of nostalgia and longing, to find ways, to help yourself find ways to shape good thoughts and new experiences. The self is important—helping yourself express yourself in different ways, poetic or not, writing or not writing. In that sense, I never feel lonely because there are always things to do to engage yourself with.
If you’re in the mountains—I like hiking quite a bit even if I’m not an extreme sports person—I can think, “Okay, I’m very small.” But when I’m in the mountains, I realize: We’re all one with other people, other beings, they’re all there. You just have to allow yourself to feel it.
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Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His poems have been published in Conjunctions, Fence, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Poetry Daily, and many others. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree, was published March 31 with the University of Chicago Press.