I Ask My Mother to Sing

Lee published his poem in 1986, but his influences include classical Chinese poets such as Lil Bai and Du Fu. Lee’s sober and contemplative voice is in many classical Chinese poems. Lee’s emphasis on nature—the rain and the waterlilies—reinforces the link between his poem and poems from ancient China. Many classical Chinese poets took up the theme of nature. Du Fu focuses on the Jo River and winter in “Farewell to My Soldier-Friend.” Lil Bai notes the autumn, the moon, and, like Lee, waterlilies in his poem “The Green Water.”

“I Ask My Mother to Sing” was a part of Lee’s 1986 collection, Rose. In his forward, Gerald Stern distanced Lee from the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams; yet Lee’s poem has much in common with the poetry of Williams. Williams was associated with a literary movement known as Imagism. Besides Williams, Imagism featured poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Imagists believed that the best poetry conveyed images using exact, no-frills language. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) and Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) are two well-known examples of Imagist poems.

Lee’s poem is in conversation with the Imagist tradition. The language is bare and direct, and his similes are clipped and taut. His mom and grandma “sing like young girls” (line 2). His dad sways “like a boat” (line 4). The image of the picnickers escaping the rain in Lines 7-8, and the image of the rain and the waterlilies in Lines 10-11, are equally precise. Lee depicts his mom, his grandma, his dad, and his memories without ornamental language.