I was inspired to write the long poem identity papers after a young assailant at a subway station in Brooklyn tried to kill me with a hammer in August 1994. At the time I was finishing a Ph.D. in literature at NYU. While I was writing, I thought of Etheridge Knight and Ralph Ellison as models, but with respect to race and violence our society had become so complex and perverse that it was necessary to create new forms of language that were as visceral as they were lyrical, as brutal as they were intellectual. Just as I traveled from a research library to a gutter in less than thirty minutes, the poetry had to span the language from the research library to the gutter. I sought to write about race and violence in what was, above all, an honest account. The most explicitly violent parts were closest to what I actually remembered, including many of the strangest bits of dialogue. But what began as an infernal poem became a journey that led to a different kind of vision completely, a vision in which one could recognize and comprehend the violence of our culture yet still find a way to be whole and human again. There had to be something deeper and more enduring than the superficial passions for revenge. So in the end of the poem, even in New York City or Philadelphia, even in the midst of all the ills and catastrophes of great cities, love is possible again. At the same time, I was also compelled to recognize precisely how I was perceived in racial terms in our society. In 1995, I learned that according to FBI statistics violent crime was declining for all ethnic groups in the United States except Asians/Asian Pacific Americans. Thus, I had to rethink how hard it is to be human in a society that glamorizes violence in mass media and, worse yet, often gives violence an Asian—and/or other ethnic—face. Nonetheless, I have always believed that I am not merely the sum of the historical accidents of my birth and culture—no human being whose identity could be so exactly paraphrased would be worth reading about except out of socio-cultural- historical curiosity. Something in us exceeds, eludes and subverts factual definition, even the biological definition of what we are. And we would be too small-minded if we did not admit the possibility that there are far more things beyond our knowledge than within it. Thus, the names for the main characters in this poem, “Phoenix” and “Early Morning Light,” which are translations of the familiar names of myself and my wife, are intended to suggest some of the mystery of our existence. In a way, the particular experiences that haunted me became part of me, so I learned to love them as one loves the trace of a voice during its instant in the wind— desperately. But just because I suffered through delusions of homicidal rage does not mean I swore allegiance to them. I walked the line between the worlds—a mysterious power guided me like a thread through the chance-music of explosive moments. I owe everything to the inspiring, historical people and particulars along the journey, and I owe everything equally to the ability to refrain from completely identifying with anyone or anything, even a homeland. For whenever one arrives “there,” one finds the desired place was always within. But even the identity of the self, in turn, may become a utopian elsewhere that is literally no place. Then one suspects that the deepest truth may be revealed more between perspectives that within any one. So I counterpointed the perspectives and voices within this poem against each other for a reason. Each voice memorializes specific realities; meanwhile, the juxtaposition of voices and their simultaneous, spontaneous harmony reveals a greater truth. -- Jeffrey Ethan Lee
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crossing walt whitman bridge the city rises all night like a galaxy poised burning throngs of strung lights with streaking traffic reds — but O so much more beautiful
She touches me and I am by my own hands amended. She rivers over my rage hot as glasphalt bleeding tar and breaks my parched husk to raise me in love’s shower, and no harm can come to me — She is in each thing that touches me and in my roots’ genealogy, one with the wilding city even dressed in derelicts and addicts with gasoline-flaming orange hair by polished brass poles and youths decked out in grunge, yet this is all I want — She pours electric lights across the wide and winding rivers overflowing with liquid neon — She nestles in the soft halogen fog of her scraped — but no purer — skies by towers straight as search lights rise — She holds my veins’ mortal wishes in her serpentine coilings and desires deeper than soil is — She is the light in the darkness the beacon still unbroken but O so much more beautiful
from identity papers
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