"I try to find settings for these sappy feelings," poet Li-Young Lee explained at his reading last Thursday afternoon in Rapaporte. Lee, who came to Brandeis through the Creative Writing program's School of Night and the Creative Arts Festival, read about a dozen poems and answered questions from the 70-person audience with a smile.Born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia to Chinese parents, Lee moved with his family to the United States in 1964. He is the author of "Book of My Nights," "The City in Which I Love You," which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection, "Rose," which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, and "The Winged Seed: A Remembrance," which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Lee's selections were culled from a variety of his publications, including recent poems which have not yet been published, and some of which were even unfinished.

After being introduced by Raphael Campo, Brandeis poet-in-residence, Lee began with an unfinished poem, expressing his memories of lying to his father when he was a child about whether he had prayed. Many of Lee's poems dealt with father-son relationships, either about him and his father or him and his two sons. His father was a personal physician to Mao Tse-tung while in China, and when he relocated to Indonesia with his family he helped found Gamaliel University.

Lee's reading of the poem, "Have You Prayed," was slow and halting, yet gentle and soothing. This style was sustained throughout the evening. Lee continued the father-son theme with a poem about himself as a father. "Words for Worry," was a beautiful description of a parent's concern for his children. Lee articulated, "Another word for father is worry / Worry boils the water for tea in the middle of the night," sharing his personal feelings of fatherhood.

The next poem, "Every Wise Child is Sad," was prefaced by Lee explaining, "I'm obsessed with childhood." This poem verbalized real life, as do many of his poems. He communicated the confusing point in childhood when a child is "Old enough to pray / He doesn't always know who to pray to."

Lee also read several poems about birds, explaining that "birds are the masters of space," and when one writes poetry one is using not just a "language of speech, but its silence . we experience silence as inner space," Lee explained. In "Praise Them," Lee read, "The Birds don't alter space / They reveal it."

After reading a few more poems Lee paused to answer some questions. "The longer I write poetry I'm aware that I don't know anything, that I'm groping in the dark," Lee said before attempting to answer the audience's queries. When asked about what kind of poems he enjoys, he said that a good poem to him "somehow is a perfect negotiation of randomness and chaos and probability." He explained that this phenomenon is encountered in life as well - there can't be too much chaos or too much probability, or else life is too crazy or too boring.

One of the more beautiful things Lee said was when he was explaining how poetry is a dying breath. He explained that whenever we speak it is on an exhale, on a dying breath, and "the moment we start writing, we're engaging that dying breath," he said.

After about a half-hour of questions, Lee read two more poems, "The Shortcut Home" and "The Hammock."

"The Hammock," was a particularly stunning look at the bridge between childhood and parenthood. The lines, "When I lay my head in my mother's lap / I think how the day hides the stars" and "When my son lays his head in my lap / Do his father's kisses keep his father's worries from becoming his" connected these stages of life. The poem ended with "Between two unknowns I live my life / Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me / And between my child's wishes, older than I am, by living after me," verbalizing the positions we find ourselves in within childhood and parenthood.

Lee is able to express what so many are feeling in beautiful language that flows with metaphors and lyricism. Lee is a premier poet of our generation and easily proved this to his audience on Thursday.