Bilingual Poetry

Interviewer: English is not your first language, though it is the language in which you write. Do you see yourself as a poet who writes in a foreign language?
Li-Young Lee: It happens that, as time goes by and I use English more, it grows less alien to me. But I feel the real medium for poets is silence, so I could be writing in any language. To inflect the inner silence, to give it body: thats all we're doing. We use the voice to make the silence more present. It's like in architecture, where the medium is not really stone or metal, but the space they enclose. We use materials -brick, glass, words- to inflect space, both outer and inner. So I would say the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.
"The Sun" August 2005