Coming Soon to Mankato...

Friends,

The below video is a bit long, just north of 40 minutes, so budget your watching time appropriately. The video is a reading Li-Young Lee gave at the University of California-Berkley in 2002 for their Lunch Poems reading series. I'm posting this, of course, because in March 2008, Mr. Lee, along with resident non-fiction superstar Bronson Lemer, will give a reading here on campus as part of this Nadine B. Andreas gift that the College of Arts & Humanities received.

I don't want to oversell it, but Mr. Lee is an amazing poet. In fact, I bought one of his books (can't think of the title right now, I think it's Book of My Nights) without needing it for a poetry class, or for my comprehensive exams. And that's a big deal to me. There's about three poetry books I have bought simply because I wanted to read them (John Berryman's Dream Songs, Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, and Li-Young Lee) and compare that to the hundreds of novels I've purchased, it seems like a big deal to me that he's coming here. Another vote of Mr. Lee's awesomeness, I have the below reading on my iPod. So sometimes when on random, I'll get: John Prine, Local H, Cake, Li-Young Lee 40 minute poetry reading. Also, I was thinking about using a line from one of Li-Young Lee's poems as an epigraph to my novel-thesis. What's the line? Well, I will say he reads the poem in the reading YouTube'd below. So watch it and be amazed (especially the poem about The New Millenium...that's not the epigraph poem, but it's just a badass poem is all).

Without further preamble, here's Li-Young Lee reading poetry in California (oh, if only he had a mustache):



VIVA EL MUSTACHE