“To pull the metal splinter from my palm/my father recited a story in a low voice./I watched his lovely face and not the blade./Before the story ended, he’d removed/the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.”

The excerpt from “The Gift” by poet Li-Young Lee represents the humble appreciation that he has for his father. Lee visited CHS on March 17 after Wydown English teacher Kathryn Pierce made arrangements for him to visit both the high school and middle school. He was in town to speak at the convention of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society.

English teacher John Ryan took Lee for a tour of St. Louis after picking the poet up at the downtown Hyatt.

“I planned a route to Clayton High that took us past City Garden and Union Station,” Ryan said. “We talked and laughed the whole way. I remember him saying ‘wow’ a lot as I pointed out landmarks like the Dred Scott decision and Forest Park. We talked like old friends catching up after years. He was disarming, philosophical and humble. It was a really quite transcendental experience.”

Lee came to the United States when he was about seven years old. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.

In his writing, Lee is very interested in the interplay of western religion and eastern thought as separate “dimensions.”

“Homelessness is a bit of an issue for me,” Lee said. “I’ve been told that by my readers.

At CHS, Lee met with two groups of teachers and students during second and third hour. Senior Grace Davis attended the second hour session in the library.

“I thought Lee was very polite, and I liked how he was interested in who we were,” Davis said. “I was expecting him to walk in, open up a book and start reading some poetry. I definitely wasn’t expecting him to come in and say ‘I don’t really have anything planned, what do you guys want to talk about?’ I really appreciated that because it was interactive and he was interested in what we thought too. He seemed like a person who always wanted to learn, discuss and expand his way of thinking.”

Davis felt that though the topic matter felt philosophical, Lee always managed to relate it back to poetry.

“He told us about his way of deciphering the world and portraying it in the most honest and sincere way,” Davis said. “We talked about how poetry is a two-dimensional creation from a multi-dimensional world. He saw that as one of hardest things to overcome as a poet. He believes that the job of the poet is to transcend the personal perception and actually try to portray reality.”

Davis and her friend Chelsea Embree went to the session together and left with long-term impacts.

“We are both interested in creative writing,” Davis said. “I left, and the first thing I said was ‘I think I’m going to major in creative writing.’ It’s scary, but I think that’s what I want to do. She [Embree] responded to me, ‘I think I’m majoring in philosophy.’ I thought [a career in creative writing] was probable, but still dangerous and unsound. The amount of level of investment he had in this higher level of thinking made an impression on me how it really is and how it can be incorporated in many aspects of life.”

Ryan had met famous authors such as Tim O’Brien and T.C. Boyle before, but was still excited to meet Lee.

“I get a charge from celebrity or fame like anyone, but some reflex kicks in and I become very cool, relaxed, myself in their presence,” Ryan said. “I don’t control that, and it just happens. I think I could have driven around St. Louis with him for hours, with perhaps a stop at Ted Drewes later in the day.”

Ryan’s favorite poem is by Lee is “The Gift,” a poem about fathers and sons.

“I’m a sucker for it as a son and also as a father, albeit of two daughters,” Ryan said. “I use [the poem] in my AP English Lit class. Also, his collection ‘Book of My Nights’ is terrific, sublime. Although he mentioned that he has revised all the poems in the collection and he no longer feels comfortable reading them publicly. His work possesses that surreal, time-standing-still quality of Zen poets.”