John B. Lee's LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS read as a politics of poetry

But this "I" that accompanies the poem and that is produced in echo with its act is also the subjectivity of a traveller who passes through a certain territory, makes words coincide with things, utterances with visions, and implicates in this travel some relationship with the "we" of the community. (Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing)

I would purchase the rains of remember
I would purchase the stars of recall
and what to preserve in a poem
but the drenching of darkness with light (John B. Lee, "Being Human")

Poetry can't afford to be too fanciful when it's borne on the wings of the travelling poet, and it's usually a safe bet that (as the Rancière epigraph shows) a lot of interesting grey area is to come between the poet's imagination and the realities of  unfamiliar language, terrain & native customs. Poetry becomes a type of mediation. Any "I' that encounters difference in foreign places, trying to scribe properly the "relationship with the "we" of the community", is bound to be political. The poet is not immune to it. Misreading foreign places can be as pernicious as bad translation of their chief literary figures, and the poet must avoid both. Travel that results in writing is at best a problematical engagement with a potential source of inspiration of which language can give (if it's careless) only a superficially sympathetic account & image. Bad travel can make for bad poetry.

I read the work of one of Canada's most celebrated poets as a primer on travel-poetry in an active critical sense of a politics of both viewing and writing.Taking my cue from Rancière's The Flesh of Words, I see here in Lee a type of poetry that accounts for a genuineness in encounter with the Other. Do politics and poetry seem too antithetical here? Do we even need to use 'political' at all? Fortunately, yes. Lee wants to comment, naturally, on underlying structures of injustice as well as celebrating cultural diversities in a book of poems in which he's "walked the throngy labyrinths/of sellers' stalls/and tourist shops/in Seoul and Burgundy, Leon/and home " (8), but to do that he must draw a line beyond which the Westerner can't proceed and remain unintrusive & respectful at the same time. As Lee says in "Echo's revenge", "and thus there is a threshold in myself/I cannot cross/but once and once alone"(9) Lee cannot compromise that vital twofold sense of his work as a physical dwelling and potential storehouse of poetic impressions, not if he's to write a genuine travel lyric that is both a chronicle of life-events in distant lands and vision for global justice.

Lyric subjectivity and its horizon of community are established only at the price of a critical effort that separates the "wandering" of the poetic "I" from the poetic utopia of politics. The newness of the aesthetic community is also that of a dividing line that is maintained, always fit for transgression, between the universality of the aesthetic community and the archipolitical objectification of the link."(19)

Rancière refers (in his discussion of the wandering poet image in Wordsworth's Prelude), to the initial migration & impression-gathering of the poet through distant places as a "politics of the sensory", " a general aesthetic that expresses the laws of feeling, the conveyance of sensation in general." (19) In other words, feelings generated through an initial "wandering", always at first disparate and scattered, and attuned particularly to issues of social justice, cannot become a poetry without disclosing a democratizing (or perhaps 'globalized') impulse. It's in this sense a concern for the preservation of the integrity of that encounter through language (however that need to preserve is expressed, whether through poetry, translation or social activism ) that the poetry in Lee's book, and all poetry based on a primary poet-as-wanderer motif, is political. I'd like to consider to what extent Lee's poetry survives its own political impulses.

John B. Lee is a translator and traveller, and so the legitimacy of LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS as a politics of poetry established in travel has already been assured (to my mind) by his and Manuel de Jesús Velázquez León's bilingual Sweet Cuba anthology of Cuban poets from 1608 to 1958, one inspired and framed by the literary-nationalist figure of José Martí. The poet's heart is certainly in the right place.To travel (for the poet), going from Burgundy to Seoul to Bangkok, is to pay homage to language & the most diligent and sensitive uses to which it's been put in a national literature. Lee cannot be accused of bad viewing wherever he goes since he's already, in his poetic practice, met a vital prerequisite to good viewing through a preliminary work that honors a sanctity of language & Cuban poetic tradition rooted to place. Cuba and Martí become "archipolitical" influences in Lee's wandering poetics, both socialist impetus and muse, and this active principle of viewing and writing would not have come about without the primary labors of translation:

...the presence of José Martí at this stage of Cuban poetry transcended his role as a reformist and modernizer. That is why his poetry sets up the internal structure of this compilation and becomes that moment in which all the tones sketched during the protracted configuration of the national poetic consciousness take shape in a coherent and harmonic voice. As it happened socially and politically, in the poetic field Marti's voice was also prophetic of much of what was to come." (Foreword to Sweet Cuba, xvi)

But is translation in the sense of the "configuration of the national poetic consciousness" a suitable analogue for the way Lee wishes to translate travel experiences into original poetry? Though the "peripatetic" poet-wanderer motif, again, is established in the very opening of "Echo's revenge", it's only unevenly effective as a poetic principle, good where only single easily graspable objects are concerned but problematic in larger cultural domains. As one who cannot be unconcerned with customs & rituals, & with language as a record of  human history, he must see the difficulties in offering a topographical poetry to which he's necessarily a stranger. And to make strangeness palatable to Westerners is to deal in delicately precise shadings & a radically readjusted way of seeing for which Lee's not always prepared. In short, Lee's handled the shadings & interesting  nuances of fragments masterfully: it's the jump to cultural 'narratives' of the type we see in "Sex with a Second Woman", "Bad Men Come" & "Ghosts in the Mud" (particularly after "and thus beginneth the lesson") that is problematical. It's the politics of the piece running away with itself.

Again, Lee's "Echo's Revenge" is an exquisitely elegant statement of the paradigmatic encounter of language with travel that the poet fails to apply consistently throughout the whole work.

ii

last week
I was in France
this week, in Seoul
I've lived
the peripatetic summer
of a flibbedegibbet dragonfly
above a water flash
my life become
the shadow flutter
of a mortal thing
going "briefly briefly"
as I beat the ragged membrane of my wet wings("Echo's revenge" 4)

One sees that even in language as lyrically brilliant as this human agency, the "I' of "I beat the ragged membrance of my wet wings",  won't assert the primacy of poetic language for long. The temptation is to think here of the Benjaminian flâneur who samples cultural artifacts as he strolls, and expect not poetry but cultural criticism. It is language alone on its own terms, and a more heightened Parnassian view of the poet as weaver of delicate figural threads & tones, that is needed. Language cannot be just a repository of exchangeable cultural signifiers. It can only be the poet's own openness to the melancholic weave of light-effects everywhere unravelling into shadows that counts here as good viewing & writing: a pixiesh inner sense that removes the "I" from travel to marvel at a place's silent ethos  from which the poet-wander has been sadly excluded—"rucks of shadowed space"(3)—and sees Seoul here as a gallery not so much of things as the power of words to convey them imagistically, in a multisensual play of almost objectless impressions, in a "politics of the sensory" that can be "inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish"(4).

there is a gallery I've seen in Seoul
within that current city
at a recent hour
wherein a sculptor sharing my name
has hung a pool of ice-blue cloth
come waterfalling
from a broken branch
it gathered gravity
then flung a spill across a patch of floor
like silence
in a photographic stream
it honoured
lingering and limned
with coolness-lovely folds
and rucks of shadowed space
too pale to contemplate
it held itself inhaled
like childbreath to a candlewish ("Echo's revenge" 2-3)

It's a necessary requirement that Lee very effectively meets but does not sustain. Since the foreigner really can't share in its material conditions, he adopts a creative distance in which to "imagine then with such a seeing blindness/all an unseen inner world you hold/against the tip of memory" ("Echo's Revenge 1). Here the poet's an Echo-figure rather than a strictly Western recorder of cultural history, trying to make progression into the work move along lines of a new aesthetics of travel that must be engaged and respectful at the same time: a case of being both there and not-there. A collection of "loosened stays" (5) & the poet's desire to bring forth a "myth/of unrequited calls". (4)

The book's first poem is its best because it's more a language of creativity than a tangible chronology, and one that handles things wistfully as only the poet "once and once alone"  should. What is established is a seeing conjoined to feeling: and what is seen primarily (just fragmented pieces of a human history to which John B. Lee's a stranger) can be translated into a melancholic shadow-play. This is the work's greatest figurative strength. Lee's clearly disavowed any connections to a rationalist (Cartesian) tradition of thinking restricted only to representations rather than the multiform, ephemeral edges the poet seems to prefer. In "What I Think" he says "if I were only a head/I'd want a philosopher's palm/to be fond of my mind/as child of a peach" (14), replacing a richer synesthesia for a straightforward sensory apparatus. Objects  are metonyms for a History that can only recorded at its most elusive borders, & the poet, condemned to seeing only distant "autumns...fastened there" (10), has to make up for language deficit by searching out artful substitutes in a new minimalist impression-gathering presented as foreign words & objects. A language of fragments to serve as conduits to an impermeable cultural whole such as in the following:

we pace a single square
of urban wilds
alive with light
we stand in fear of strangeness
we manage
to say dam-sa-ham-ni-da
as if we were grateful for everything
we say thank you
like the poor, like the mad
like the sorrowfully addicted
like the war-wounded
like the legless, the abandoned
the orphaned, the hopelessly homeless
the drunk-by-noon loser
the derelict, the exiled
the refugee, like Tarzan

and we ruffle the pages
of our little sleeping dictionary
like a lousy-feathered bird

and we say
the words ("Sleeping Dictionary" 15-16)

Lee's poetry at times looks like an archaeological dig and language a sieve for sifting through dirt to what's worth preserving. Among the symbolic pieces of an unapproachable past—poetic artifacts he writes into his travel poetry—are " a single helmet rusted/with a fatal hole" (6), "garden pots" (6), "rag of tin" (7), and even "coins and stones" (8) at market stalls.But it's here that a vital threshold is very likely to appear, and one Lee (as he's admitted) shouldn't have crossed: it's here, in other words, that the work is beginning to look too crassly political. Larger cultural wholes are a problem for vision trained on  things: they are like stolen temple stones that  he turns "over palm-upward in my hand" (17), lovely lyrical artifacts in themselves but not easily assimilable to ingrained habits of feeling . Even preparations for a son's wedding are an occasion for cultural dissymmetry and disharmony, because the ceremony can only be measured in terms of awkward fitting & a display of wasted fabric("Handsome in Hanboks" 11-12), an effect Lee may not have intended: because marriage in a foreign land cannot be properly abstracted from its constitutive ritual elements and made to look like part of a home wedding video:

the elderly seamstress
throwing her short arms wide
embraces my wife
about her bosoms from behind
taking her measurements
for the pink silk wedding garment
she is making for the marriage of our son
and his beautiful bride-to-be
and she is laughing like busy shop bells
at the ample endowment of western women
for she herself is small-breasted
as a girl
and as for me
she must leap up
like a child after apples (11)

 And a language that tries to remove itself from cultural difference, whatever the occasion & place, is doomed to turn eventually into nationalist sentimentality. As it does.

Transferring onto distant cities whole cultural artifacts from the poet's own childhood experiences (through a genealogy of  Canadian landscape poetry) is Lee's way to remedy this narrative defect. The poem "What I Think" stands as a solitary, almost caesural, moment in which poet pauses to make a sentimental display of his own childhood "orchard shadows" (14), "plastic helmet" (14), "toque": where poet-father frames his Korean experiences in a Canadian sensibility that's as out of place here as the ceremonial fitting of groom's father in "shining blue embroidered fabric".

what a little soldier I became
that Christmas my parents bought me
the plastic helmet
what a porkpie cool
what a toque
what a wet-wool balaclava
flavoured by cold
tasting like sucked mittens
and cold closets thinned by moths(14)

The result is an unnecessary duplication of poetic energies: expended once in purely imagistic terms for individuals and then again as a desperate search for familiar paradigms (like a Canadian childhood Christmas ) in which to locate & interiorize essentially foreign "laws of feeling". As if Lee were thinking of reverting to the layout of a safer, more disengaged type of poetry. If he'd followed his original impulses more closely, conveying (as delicately & skilfully as he does) the sense alone of the "blindfolded child in a game/of touch the trinket", dealing in delicate trinkets alone, the narrative could have avoided its disastrous fall into the later touristy preoccupation with illicit sex ("Sex with a Second Woman") and childhood prostitution ( "Bad Men Come"), or even the more awkward reportage of  tsunamis. The "touch the trinket" game has been trivialized to the point of comparing the terrifying experience of being swept away in tsunami tidal floods to tired Canadian folklore: "the bridegroom washed from the rocks/at Peggy's Cove".("Ghosts in the Mud" 31)

With the exception of "Thai Boxer", where individual "arms in the dark" (25), "gloves and foot wraps" (25) and "smoke light" (25) come the closest to a pure form of movement we'll ever find, several of the post-"Echo's Revenge" pieces seem to have failed as a work of  mediation: a structure of engagement with the "we" of community anywhere in the world that makes a poetry political. To act as recorder only of cultural shocks & metonyms of lost narratives— "to run my finger/on a rag of tin//or build back a broken nation/death by death" (7)—would have acted wonderfully as a demonstration of poetic truth but didn't. That purity of the fragment, marvelously conveyed in verses like "[a gallery in Seoul] held itself inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish" (3) passed too joyously into cultural design, language, globalization, and issues of social justice, and lost itself in the exchange.