Short Conversations with Poets: Dong Li

There is so much beyond words. There are actually no adequate words for the full complexity of human feeling, for the arcane details of a distant memory, or the colors of the sky. Blue doesn’t really cut it, but most often it’s the best we have. Poems, then, are the last stop before silence. After that, the train goes beyond words, and often beyond any form of representation. All of which has something to do with the necessity of poetry, the necessity of a poet’s urgent and never-ending attempts at making poems. To write is to fail, but to fail well is our only hope, and the good failures are our greatest books. It’s one of the reasons that poetry often arrives in fragments, offering glimpses and snippets: Not only because memory is always an incomplete invention, but also because a poet might wish to dispense with the crude reductivities of plot and setup. The poet wants to take us straight to the shattering moment, or to the essential emotional crossroads, or the livid fact, or the v ... Read full article.