Big Clock By Li Young Lee (Grades 10+)

Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, later immigrating to the United States. A distinct and influential voice in Asian American poetry, he is most known for his collection The City in Which I Love You. Influenced by classical Chinese poetry, Lee's work embody characteristics of strength, silence, and simplicity, often in conjunction with existentialism, as exhibited in his poem "Big Clock", a rumination on time, aging, and grief. On the writing of this poem, Lee: “This poem is an attempt, I suppose, to understand time—the nature of time—and it seems to me that each of these stanzas is a figure of time on the one hand, and on the other hand a figure for eternity. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully communicated that, and I don’t mean in terms of subject matter or narrative, but in terms of what the language might inspire in the reader: the images, the ideas, but even more than the images and ideas (which are all in the head) something at a cellular level of understanding, something at a logic beyond our diurnal logic."