Poetry | Reality (Lee)

I feel a poetic truth is closer than any truth that we can approach. The closer something is to poetry, the closer it is to reality. Let's just take the lyric poem as an example—the manifold quality of a lyric poem, the instantaneousness of a lyric poem, the feeling that many consciousnesses are simultaneously being enacted—that is closer to reality. The lyric moment is reality. But we don't always live in that reality. The lyric moment is closer to the truth, to me, than a narrative which is a fictive process.

Li-Young Lee