Arthur Sze: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s]

Arthur Sze (1950–present) is a poet, a translator, and an editor with 11 published books of poetry, including Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), winner of the National Book Award, and Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Sze’s work has been described as clear and compassionate and a “nourishing tonic for the mind,” according to Naomi Shihab Nye. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award.

You have a characteristic equanimity that has always grounded me and served as a kind of model for my own aspirations as man and artist. 

The influence your work has had on contemporary poetry is vast, not only through your support of writers at IAIA and your signal translations of Chinese poets, but also in how your body of work has helped foster what is now called ecopoetry and, in philosophy, object oriented ontology. Philosophically and sensorially alive, your poems have been for me and for so many readers a codex of thought and imagination for our time.

—from “Letter to Arthur Sze from Penngrove,” by Forrest Gander, published in Poetry, April 2023

Arthur Sze’s selected poems in order of publication

1990s

Before Completion(1998)

“What is it like to catch up to light?” Sze asks in this opening poem of his collection The Redshifting Web (1998). What does it do to notice? What then to do with all this noticing? These questions drive Sze’s poetics; his shifting, spanning gaze; his juxtapositions of the sublime with the mundane: “is this the little o, the earth?” He serves the enormity and ephemerality of observation: “we are / living the briefest hues on the skin / of the world.” He explains, “I want to get readers to—I like to call it ‘read with one’s nerves,’ which is where they aren’t just reading intellectually, but they’re reading viscerally.”¹

“What is it like to catch up to light?” The question is rhetorical, an impossible response to the astrophysical concept of the redshifting web, in which everything is moving farther and faster away, and there is no catching up. The poem longs for impossible duration, a way to stretch out observation on the page, to transfer this sublime and passing light from writer to reader. The poem arrives at an image of its impermanence: “as a cotton fiber burns in an s twist / and unravels the z twist of its existence, / the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light.” 

What is in an act of notice? A poetics/z of notice? Unraveling and raveling, suspending and shifting, letting in and letting go.

2000s

“Island (#2)” (translator, 2009; see translator’s note by Arthur Sze)

You’re right in life’s chamber music
either listen with total attention or else switch off

In addition to his prolific work as a poet, Arthur Sze is a renowned translator of Chinese poetry. In interviews, Sze describes how his translation practice is emblematic of and instrumental to the broader philosophy from which his poetry springs. 

I want to use Chinese and English as two language systems that, moving back and forth, show how we see and experience the world in different ways … with plurality and polyphony, a reader can begin to recognize the limits of one’s individual experience and perspective and also sense that it is a part of a larger, simultaneous whole.²

Yang Lian’s imagery is complexly interwoven, requiring both an unwavering, “total attention” and a plural, wave-like sensibility. One can see what drew Sze to translate this particular poem. In his translator’s note, he is attuned to the poem’s ebb and flow: “I tried to resist making sense or connecting the images too soon. Rather, I tried to suspend the images and trust the unfolding motion and rhythmic charge to the lines.” ³ Following Sze’s lead, readers can simply sit with the poem’s elements (the speaker, the sea, and the girl) and the ways they fold over and under and unfold one another. How does this experience of the poem contribute to the work of translation—from Chinese to English, from life to page, from part to whole?

2010s

“Water Calligraphy” (2019)

“Water Calligraphy,” Sze describes, is inspired by a recent phenomenon in China:

old men (there must be women too) go into public parks at sunrise with a bucket of water and a jerry-rigged foam brush. They write characters—lines from ancient poems, poems of their own—in water on the slate walkways. The characters are dark and wet, but then they evaporate in the sunlight.⁴

In sequence and scope resembling “Before Completion,” the first poem in this sampler, “Water Calligraphy” takes up where the earlier poem leaves off. It also spans and shifts. It opens with a “green turtle” that transitions into an “irregular formation of rocks,” and just as smoothly, “the moon slides from partial to full / to partial and then into emptiness; but no / moon’s in the sky, just slanting sunlight.” Compared to his earlier work, Sze finds “that juxtapositions here are more fluid.” ⁵ He explains that “it has to do with wanting to be clear-eyed and accepting, even of difficult matters, and to place more attention on continuity and a search for provisional peace, rather than merely highlighting or amplifying breakage.” ⁶“Before Completion” is concerned with breakage, pursues a sublime whole beyond mundane partedness; “Water Calligraphy,” alternatively, is clear-eyed and accepting. Rather than catch up to light, light itself catches up. Sze writes, “though people murmur / at the evaporating characters, I smile, frown / fidget, let go—I draw the white, not the black,” “I find / a constellation that arcs beyond the visible.” 

2020s

“Papyrus Pantoum”(2022)

“You burn me,” torn off papyrus wrapped around a corpse—
rain makes quicksilver strikes on the surface of a lake;

With this poem, Sze makes an idiosyncratic, ideographic contribution to the pantoum tradition. The pantoum, a poetic form consisting of recycled lines, generates a cyclical movement counter to (or circular to) a more conventional sequence. But is sequence a convention across the board of poetry? Sze, drawing from Chinese ideographs, would answer no. He explains in an interview: 

if, for example, you want to write the word for autumn, you write the character for plant-tips or tree-tips and then you juxtapose it with the character for fire. ... If you want to write sorrow, you put the character for autumn above the character for heart or mind. ... That simultaneous energy is there. … One isn’t prioritized over the other.⁶

Across his translation and original work, Sze is interested in translating, if not another language, a way of languaging: “how certain characteristics of Chinese characters can create a kind of tension which I’m trying to duplicate in English.”⁷

How does “Papyrus Pantoum” translate the Chinese ideograph? Why is Sze so invested in this translation? The poem’s lines function like radicals, constituent parts that detach, recur, and recombine. Overall, they effect a hazy, unteleological whole. Rather than occurring in quick succession, staggering, Vs, lithium, burn, claret cup, and quicksilver suspend in direct, indistinct relation. Sze states, “for me, that idea of simultaneity is also about immersion. How can you pull a reader into a world that may be disorienting but may also have particular richness and rewards?”⁸

From the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

“Pe‘ahi Light” (2023)

Now, as a gecko darts across eucalyptus flooring,
as I strive to make a poem that scintillates
in the dark, scintillates in the dark

Translation, a running theme in this sampler, could be said to be a major running question of Arthur Sze’s career. The question of how to translate life to page—and across related fractures, individual experience and plural being, and linear sequence and expansive simultaneity—is taken up in “Pe‘ahi Light” in ways novel to Sze’s considerable oeuvre. The poem begins with images of language’s immateriality—“a writing desk: no incense” and “ends of each stroke flare into the void.” The poem then turns to considerations of language’s mere materiality—the succession of palms, or in italics, “Drizzle, rain, downpour,” followed by the admission, “I have no words for these kinds of rain,” followed by the enunciation of a more materially accrued “regn.” In this poem, Sze’s writing reflects on itself and its goals: “I strive to make a poem that scintillates / in the dark, scintillates in the dark.” The poet notes his tendencies: “I focus on the spackled // ceiling and, finding contours of mesas / and arroyos from the air, know I overlay // these shapes onto emptiness.” He articulates his desires—“we want // to see the empty sky fly into pieces, / to incorporate three systoles // in writing heart and bloom / through lifetimes within a single lifetime” and his workings through—“in the space / of not-knowing, I float joy when // the body mind unfolds and tolls flowers / from inside the bell gong of silence.”

Important here is not final emendment but active language in which the words are not their struckthrough opposites, nor themselves, nor not either. Important throughout the poem is that this languaging of language, the unfinished fullness of the writing activates the writer’s—and, it follows, readers’—being. Translation is often figured as the problem of crossing from being to writing, from individual to whole. In this poem, translation is refigured as the simultaneity of being and writing “through lifetimes within a single lifetime."

^{1“Assembling the Bones: A Conversation with Arthur Sze”}

^{2“Weaving Luminous Particulars: A Conversation with Arthur Sze”}

^{3“Translator’s Note: ‘Island (#2)’ by ​Yang Lian”}

^{4 Interview with Arthur Sze in the Kenyon Review}

^{5 Interview with Arthur Sze in the Kenyon Review}

^{6Sight Lines: Arthur Sze in conversation with Tony Leuzzi}

^{7Sight Lines: Arthur Sze in conversation with Tony Leuzzi}

^{8“Assembling the Bones: A Conversation with Arthur Sze”}

^{9“Assembling the Bones: A Conversation with Arthur Sze”}