[In the following excerpt, Rector examines the lyrical structure and sense of character that mark Rose, comparing Lee's work to Rainer Maria Rilke's.]

Much of the recent chatter about poetry has centered upon “form” as it exists solely in the prosodic, technical sense, and the debate between the “new formalists” (nothing new there, really?) and “free verse” hounds us into the present. In a truly amusing inversion, it's now the formalists lobbing grenades into the foxholes of the free verse status quo. Oh, the pendulum … and beneath it, or to the side of it, real history. Whether one is working in received patterns which exist a priori to the composition of a poem, forms which are then adhered to, expanded upon, corrupted, tricked-out, or reinvented, or whether one composes “by field” in an “organic” grid of free verse “discoveries,” what's most left out of this action and discussion is any sense of form as it exists in the dramatic movements of a given poem, as it exists in the subtext of form where words and their meanings move rhetorically, dramatically, as this might be discussed by novelists, playwrights, scriptwriters—dramatists of all stripes—in delineating the rise and fall of meaning as a matter of form.

As Donald Hall has contended, there will always be the debate between the constructivist and the expressionist modes of creating. It's borne out in Death in Venice as the argument between mathematics and passion, and most artists will shake down, fall at some point to one side or the other. And in terms of dramatic form (the classical arc of desire, complication, rising action, climax, and denouement, as one example) there will also be a necessary tension between the narrative and the lyric. Whether we are talking about narrative on one hand (the bone and movement of sequence, or what Seamus Heaney has called “the music of what happens”) or lyric on the other (the sustained yelp occurring in one moment, looking to speak for All Moments, and in most cases engaging a dramatic form), in our best poems both narrative and lyric drives will push each other to their outermost limits, creating that third thing—the poem itself. Four Quartets is a superb example of this. Narrative takes many forms; our response to both the truth and the lie of “story” has made an elliptical narrative almost a precondition of our modernity, a physics of our perceptions, and it is in fact difficult not to engage narrative, where one word follows another. Lyricism, where it is also the relation between words in a poem, words bereft even of their meaning, is the necessary lifeblood flowing through the circulatory system of any sequential movement, where any engagement with the materials (language) is at hand. In between the narrative and the lyric falls, to corrupt Heaney, the documentary of what is.

What everyone is after here, as both writers and readers, is the powerful poem of truth, however it might be wrested down or received. I'm making no liberal plea for tolerance here, urging that we “celebrate” the “diversity” and give equal weight and honor to every aesthetic that happens to toddle down the pike, but I am suggesting that the best poems being written now engage form in a much wider synthesis than our current discussion and its cloistered terms allow for. “ Let the dialectic be written in blood,” said Trotsky, and I'll go along with that where the trench warfare, the mustard gas of contending aesthetics take their stand, but what's at stake here is the difference between the major poem that defines a time and the second order of stylists who hover about that poem, falling to one side or the other of it. Meanwhile a vast portion of the intelligent reading public takes a hike away from the shoptalk, in a dither of indifference …

Allen Ginsberg has argued that ours is now a time of revision rather than vision, as vision and prophecy were undoubtedly enacted in the “Howl” of the 1950s, and there's more than a grain of truth to that. The generation of poets now in their thirties, careening currently not so much towards the bop apocalypse as towards the vast revisions of middle age within an historical moment which is itself an impasse, cut their postwar teeth on the debate between formalism and free verse, and the books of poems I'll discuss here both profit and suffer from the revisions of the hysterical and extreme dramatic forms (God bless them) it has been our lot to inherit and move on with.

. … Rose, a first book by Li-Young Lee, is … a book obsessed with family and the realities of emigration, of being between two cultures and between tongues in a manner which makes memory simultaneous with the present and the passage of time. Lee's structure in Rose is not narrative, but a tale does emerge from the raw repetition by which Lee builds discrete poems and then melds, hurtles one into the one following it. Each poem and the entire book exist in and are held up to an endless instant I associate with the structure of a lyric, and it's more a sense of character (and all that character bespeaks of intelligence, wisdom, authority), rather than a story, that marks this book. Unlike Miller's book, this one is absolutely pared down, and a dramatic structure does emerge in book form.

There are many children of Rilke at the moment, many for whom his work is a presiding spirit, and Lee is one of those who honors Rilke's high lyricism best. Lee has appropriated the idiom of Romanticism but practices a tone all his own. With the clean, taut free verse line Lee most often employs, he has also fashioned rhetorical forms within that form which trade often on repetition and parallelism and their hypnotic advancing and returning powers.

Not for the golden pears, rotten on the ground—
their sweetness their secret—not for the scent
of their dying did I go back to my father's house.
          Not for the grass
grown wild as his beard in his last months,
nor for the hard, little apples that littered the yard,
and vines, rampant on the porch, tying the door shut,
did I stand there, late, rain arriving.
The rain came. And where there is rain
there is time, and memory, and sometimes sweetness.
Where there is a son there is a father.
And if there is love there is
no forgetting, but regret rending
two shaggy hearts.

The way Lee gathers a poem and the syntactical twists he often employs (as with “rain arriving”) are akin to the best weaves spun by a poet like Michael Burkard. Like Baca, Lee manages to take very personal materials and rend them into individuated yet generalized, even mythic themes. Lee's characters of mother and father in these poems are defined and known by details of their histories and relations, but everywhere we feel pressing down upon us the force of mother, father, in their originating and motivating incarnations. The father, especially, is a rueful presence in Rose, an Oedipal titan there to be overcome, supplanted, forgiven possibly. But he is also, as Gerald Stern points out in his introduction, a godlike figure to be comprehended, withstood, while we fear and love him. As Stern also says,

The ‘father’ in contemporary poetry tends to be either a pathetic soul or a bungler or a sweet loser, overwhelmed by the demands of family and culture and workplace. At very best he is a small hero who died early or escaped west or found the bottle and whom the poet, in his or her poem, is forgiving.

Lee's meditations upon the father, the father who is both inspiring and spanking, are rueful in their own right, rueful so that we can see the father within the son, the poker within the fire, the myth as it moves from soul to soul. Lee chronicles this passage with a tenderness and empathy which always threaten to fall into bathos but seldom do. I would quarrel, on occasion, with Lee's use of the word human. Like Stern when Stern lapses, Lee uses the term as if it signified all that is sweet, tender, oh-so-warm, when in fact as a synonym for Homo sapiens it often means just the opposite. Let's face it—if the term is to maintain any meaning at all we must also admit that Hitler and his cronies were “deeply human,” and where we mean humane let's get the record straight. Otherwise this book is signed by its considerable authority over any number of words as they cover and recover each other in what reads like one long poem. The book has both the ambition and audacity we'd expect in a Hart Crane, simmered down into the Rilkean lyric.