Arthur Sze: California Poets Part 5, Three Poems

Arthur Sze

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Arthur Sze

Three Poems

Circumference

Vanilla farmers in Madagascar sit in the dark with rifles; at two a.m., after a thunderstorm, I lurch down the hallway and check the oak floor under a skylight, place a towel in a pan. As if armed, waiting for a blue string to trip a thief, I listen in the hush at a point where ink flows out of a pen onto a white Sahara of a page. Adjusting the rearview mirror in the car before backing out of the garage, I ask, what is the logarithm of a dream? How do you trace a sphere whose center is nowhere? It is hard to believe farmers pollinate vanilla orchids with toothpick-sized needles, yet we do as needed; pouring syrup on a pancake, I catch the scent of vines, race along the circumference, sensing what it’s like to sit in the dark with nothing in my hands.

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

Ravine

Stopping to catch my breath on a switchback,

I run my fingers along the leaves of a yucca:

each blade curved, sharp, radiating from a core—

in this warmest of Novembers, the dead

push out of thawing permafrost: in a huge

blotch of black ink that now hangs, framed,

on a wall, Gu Cheng wrote the character

fate, and a woman shrugs, “When you look

at me, you’re far away.” Last night, gazing

at Orion’s belt and sword sparkling in the sky,

I saw how we yearn for connection where

no connection exists: what belt, what sword?

Glancing at boulders in the ravine, I catch

a flock of Stellar’s jays scavenging along

the ground; I scavenge among pine needles

for one to breathe into flame, gaze

at yuccas whose blades collect dew at dawn

and at dust floating in sunlight above the trail.

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

(Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

Pitch Blue

I can't stop—

Wading into a lake—

Skipping one flat stone after another across the surface of a pond—

In a sarcophagus,

lapis inlaid along the eyelids of a death mask—

Wool oxidizing when pulled out of the dye bath—

Like a deserted village with men approaching on horseback—

The moment before collision—

Never light this match—

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

(Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

Interview

January 3rd, 2026

Californian Poets Interview Series:

Arthur Sze, Poet, Editor, Translator, Professor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Congratulations on your appointment as the 25th US Poet Laureate. Not only your hometown, Santa Fe, where you served as the first poet laureate, but the entire state of New Mexico is thrilled by the news, given the deep impact you’ve made on the local culture. What do you enjoy most about working in The Land of Enchantment and how do you plan to bring these unique aspects into the greater conversation of American poetry?

AS: I’ve lived in New Mexico over fifty years and enjoy the confluence of cultures as well as the amazing high desert landscape and light. I’m going to make poetry and translation my signature project. I’ve assembled a book, Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, that Copper Canyon Press will publish in April 2026. It features 23 poems from 14 languages, and it is a personal guide to translating poetry that can be used in classrooms and in communities.

DG: What were you doing when you received the news of your appointment? And who was the first person you told?

AS: I was taking a break from writing in my studio when I received the call. The first person I told was my wife, Carol Moldaw, who also has poems and an interview in your California Poets Series.

DG: Not many poets are interested in translation, but you recognize its power. The paradox is that English is greatly shaped by other languages, yet the US remains largely monolingual when compared to other societies. Few people will know that ketchup is a word that comes from China, or orange from Sanskrit, for instance. Which poets outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition do you enjoy most and how will you bring wider visibility to them?

AS: I want to widen and deepen the appreciation of poetry through the lens of poetry in translation. My book, Transient Worlds, is organized into fifteen zones. I resisted calling the sections chapters, because, for me, chapters implies a kind of progression. Instead of chapter 2 building on chapter 1, I present a poem in the original language at the beginning of each zone, and then I frequently include several different translations of the same poem and discuss how each translator found something of value to carry over, translate into English. Because the book has a non-linear structure, readers can start at whatever zone most appeals to them. If a reader knows Spanish, they might go right to Pablo Neruda, and then move around. I have selected poems by poets whose work I admire, and I hope to bring wider visibility for the poets who lived in so many different times in history. Here are the poets, along with their languages: Najwan Darwish, Arabic; Mirabai, Braj Bhasha; Tao Qian and Laozi, Chinese; Inger Christensen, Danish; Guillaume Apollinaire and Aime Cesaire, French; Rainer Maria Rilke, German; Sappho and Homer, Greek; the Song of Songs, Hebrew; Kobayashi Issa, Japanese; Orlando White, Navajo; Marina Tsevetaeva, Russian; Pablo Neruda, Spanish; and Buffalo Conde, Tzeltal.

DG: In the introduction to The Silk Dragon you have written that translation is an impossible task. This is especially true for the Chinese language, which is a tonal language, and the effects it creates are almost impossible to carry over. In addition, the shape of the characters themselves produce visual meanings, such as the one for autumn, which represents tree tips plus fire, in a sense a burning field. How do translators deal with these issues?

AS: I believe translators begin with an initial sense of loss. There’s no way one can carry the sounds of Chinese over into English, and the complexity of Chinese characters defies translation. Nevertheless, we live in such a complex world that we need translation more than ever. Each translator will have to develop their own sense of how to best “carry over” (to “translate,” to carry over, comes from Old French, and, earlier, Latin) the experience of the poem in the original language into English. There’s no definitive way to proceed. Instead, I believe a translator needs to use fresh language, speak in a contemporary voice, and also have a sense of urgency.

DG: In Italian, there is a word, “culaccino,” which means the wet ring left on a surface from a moist glass. It can also signify the lower stem of a cucumber—cut off and rarely eaten because it’s bitter. Are there instances in the Chinese language where something very specific is described using one word?

AS: I was just in Japan and learned that the word “komorebi” means sunlight filtering through leaves onto the forest floor, and there is certainly no equivalent word in English. In Chinese, I think there’s often a very specific detail or combination of two forces that are inside of a single character so that the word in English feels insufficient. For instance, I’m not sure what the etymology of the word “think” is in English, but in Chinese, the character has a field at the top, and below it, the character heart/mind; so “to think” in Chinese is to put your heart/mind into a field. That kind of specificity and even physicality is lacking in the English word.

DG: It was truly an honor to reprint three of your pieces in the fifth installment of CA Poets. Indeed it was in California—more precisely UC Berkeley—where your formal study of poetry really began. Was this also the place where you discovered translation and how instrumental, in general, would you say those West Coast years were in shaping how you write today?

AS: I started translating Chinese poetry when I was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. I thought that I could learn my craft by translating some of the Tang dynasty poets whose work I loved—Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei. At the time I didn’t know how important translation work would be for the evolution of my own poetry. I did it at the beginning because I enjoyed the sheer pleasure of translating these poems into English. Over time I turned to poets from other time periods, and, later on, I discovered that sometimes when I was unsure about what to do next in my own poetry, translating someone else’s poetry was a wonderful way to be reinvigorated and get fresh ideas.

DG: The work you’ve done ranges from construction to teaching. There are many things, one might say, that poets learn from the latter activity, but was there perhaps an invaluable lesson from the former one that taught you something crucial about writing?

AS: I have to resist the temptation to say something like working precisely with construction materials helped me work precisely with language. That idea is just too pat. As a young poet, I did whatever I could to gain time to write, and I took whatever odd jobs I needed to pay the rent. I stumbled into a construction job and over time discovered I enjoyed working with plaster. As a plasterer working with my hands on building an adobe house, I was excited to be working in an arena that had nothing to do with academia.

DG: Let’s stay with the theme of work and talk about a question you once posed in a separate interview: “how many contemporary American poets have worked with their hands?” Could MFA programs, perhaps, produce greater generations of writers if they simply focused more on building real-world experiences instead of only on theoretical instruction?

AS: Real-world experiences are certainly crucial, but I’m not sure how one would restructure an MFA program to best incorporate life experience. I don’t know if MFA programs recommend that applicants work and travel for a few years before transitioning from an undergraduate to a graduate program. I’m an anomaly in that I didn’t go to graduate school and receive an MFA. I felt like I was learning so much through my practice of translating Chinese poetry that I wanted to keep going in that direction. I also worried that if I went to an MFA program I would learn a style that was trendy and that wasn’t my own.

DG: In the early '70s, when you began translating poets like Wang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po, you talked about the search for your own voice, along with how the process of carrying ideas from one language to another allowed you to “recognize the power and even primacy of sharp visual images.” Do you think the study of translation, or more generally even, the acquisition of a second language can be a way to bring greater creative dynamism to the poet’s own work—simply by virtue of being able to step back and analyze it from the perspective of another linguistic system?

AS: Yes, I believe the acquisition of a second language can be a way to bring greater creative dynamism into one’s own work. If a poet knows a second language, it enables the poet to see more clearly the parameters of the English language and how English can be shaped. One of my favorite poems in Chinese, by the poet Qu Yuan (some scholars question the authorship), is titled Tian Wen. Tian is heaven, and Wen is question, but the Chinese semantic field for a Chinese character is large: Tian Wen could be translated as Heaven’s Questions, Heavenly Questions, Questions Regarding Heaven, Questioning Heaven (whether Heaven exists) etc. In thinking about verbs and tense, it struck me that one of the secrets to Tang dynasty poetry is that the verbs are present tense, or tenseless; it gives the poems an immediacy so that a poem written in 416 CE by Tao Qian could be happening today. English of course has words that are both nouns and verbs, but thinking about Chinese verbs one day made me think about taking words in English that are clearly nouns and then treating them as verbs. In my sequence, “Quipu,” I have the phrase “salamanders the body,” and “lagoons the mind.” In another poem, I make a refrain, “it leopards the body.” These phrases may seem like oddities, but they were necessary for what was happening in those poems, and the seminal idea for this came out of thinking about noun and verb, object and action, in Chinese vs. English.

DG: You have talked about the importance of Taoism and the attempt to write poetry without any sort of hierarchy—not consciously, per se, but rather through the concept of Indra’s net. Do you feel the poetry world has become more hierarchical than when you started writing it, and if so, what can the contemporary art learn from the ancient Chinese literature you studied?

AS: I don’t know if the poetry world has become more hierarchical over time. I can say that I grew up with the “mimeo revolution,” where poets assembled magazines and even presses almost overnight. When I work with young poets, I like to advocate for small magazines and small presses. I’m not sure what contemporary art can learn from ancient Chinese literature that isn’t already articulated by Roethke’s “I learn by going where I have to go.”

DG: I’d like to touch upon your creative development from the perspective your parents’ role—something seemingly paradoxical. You have talked about how your father had a classical literary education in China, which, in the US, culminated in a scientific career. At the same time, you grew up in an American environment where Chinese was the first language you spoke, and to add, creative writing wasn’t encouraged. Yet your parents did nevertheless view writing as an important academic and even professional skill. Though, at first glance, scholarly and creative compositions seem to be at opposite spectrums, would you say there’s in fact a continuum between the type of writing your parents thought you’d do and the work you’re actually doing now?

AS: Rather than a continuum, I would say there’s a bifurcation or a leap. My parents, as immigrants, praised science, engineering, business, and, if one had to work with words, law, because words then were a vehicle for financial remuneration; so their view of writing was strictly utilitarian.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

AS: At the moment, I’m reading and reveling in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Author Bio:

Arthur Sze is the 25th poet laureate of the United States and author of twelve books of poetry. His latest books include Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025), The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award, Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award, Quipu (2005), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award, and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010) and assembled Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. Sze is recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for lifetime achievement from Yale University, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sze was the 2023– 2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.