Week 15: Pick a Poet #4 - Li-Young Lee

          This poem, “Immigrant Blues” starts with the line “People have been trying to kill me since I was born,” as a man is telling his son how dangerous of a place the world is, especially for an immigrant. For a reminder, Lee was born in Indonesia to two Chinese exile parents and later immigrated to America. This poem is quite fitting for Lee’s writing style as he continues his style of inserting a kinda conversation in his poem as well as it fits with his theme of expressing his experiences of being an immigrant. 
      

         Unlike his other poems, the title of this poem “Immigrant Blues” gives a very straightforward hint to what his poem is about. The title hints at the fact that the world is not always open to immigrants, by which they are faced with harsh discrimination and often feel isolated from the rest of society. Additionally, blues is a genre of music with a lot of repetition is then shown in the poem as Lee repeats the immigrant experience in various phrases like “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation,” “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,” “Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved,” or “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.” Each of these lines provides insight into the harsh reality of what immigrants often face. 
        

        This poem has multiple shifts in it from a man telling his son to change to fit into society to Lee retelling a conversation with his own son to adapt to society. Additionally, the speaker then has a conversation on the phone with women, by which he is asking about his confusion on flesh and the soul. The different characters in the poem can be related to Lee’s life with the man being his father, the son, his own son, and the women, the women he loves. 
      

         I thought this poem was quite fitting as many of us have learned throughout our highschool years about how Jewish immigrants felt when moving to either America or Israel. After the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, many Jews had moved to Israel but were uncomfortable with being their trues selves. One key example of this is how Jewish people from Europe did not want to cook European food anymore. Nowadays, many of us have eaten the amazing European dishes our grandparents make, but back then they hid those foods from the rest of the world simply because all they wanted was to get away from their old lives and integrate into Israeli society. In this poem, Lee illustrates this struggle when he writes “Practice until you feel the language inside you.” This is similar to what the Jewish immigrants felt as they had to hide their identity and in every way transform into this new person who fits into society, whether it be with food or language.