Acclaimed poet Arthur Sze on bridging Western and Chinese traditions

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Arthur Sze, one of the most acclaimed poets of our time, is celebrated for exploring the natural world, the human condition, and connections between cultures.

Geoff Bennett: A second-generation Chinese American based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sze’s work invites readers to deepen their sense of place and reflect on the world around them.

Our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, talked to him there about his life and work for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Arthur Sze, Poet, “Into the Hush”: When a black butterfly flits past, when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees…

Jeffrey Brown: The poetry of Arthur Sze contains wonders and losses.

Arthur Sze: When Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s there in his latest collection, “Into the Hush,” in a poem titled “Anvil,” the natural world and our place in it, human dramas, history.

Arthur Sze: When the time of your life is a time of earthquakes. When a woman hit by a car while crossing the street recovers, then slides into pain, when a matsutake emerges out of the rubble of Hiroshima.

I’m trying to, like, lay one world on top of another on top of another. I’m hoping to make a reader see that or experience that. I’m trying to like lay one world on top of another on top of another. I’m hoping to make a reader see that or experience, that in that when, in that moment of time, so many different things can happen.

Jeffrey Brown: For the young Sze, poetry happened in an unexpected way. The child of Chinese immigrants, he was expected to go into science or medicine. And he did make a start at MIT. But then?

Arthur Sze: It was a breakthrough in revelation for me to be sitting as a freshman at MIT in a calculus lecture, getting suddenly bored with it and turning to the back of my notebook and starting to write. I could feel a thrill of language that I think was latent there. So it just kind of erupted.

Jeffrey Brown: You know, I don’t think I have ever heard that. Sitting in a calculus lab at MIT is where poetry started for you?

Arthur Sze: Yes. A year later, I’m starting my sophomore year at MIT, telling my parents, guess what? I’m going to leave MIT, transfer to U.C. Berkeley and pursue poetry.

Jeffrey Brown: How’d that go over?

Arthur Sze: You can imagine.

(Laughter)

Arthur Sze: It was like, we can’t believe you’re doing this.

Jeffrey Brown: Now 74 and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, fellow poet Carol Moldaw, Sze is one of the nation’s most honored poets, author of 12 volumes of poetry, as well as books of translation and essays, winner of the National Book Award and other major prizes.

He first studied the Chinese language in order to read and then translate ancient Chinese poetry. Translation was his way into his own writing.

Arthur Sze: One of the amazing things about ancient Chinese poetry is how present-tense they are, that you can read a poem by a poet such as Tao Yuanming, who died in 427 Common Era. He’s got this great image of truth, and he says, I wish to tell you but lose the words. He can’t put it into language. He can’t convey it.

That sense of immediacy to me was astonishing as a young poet that someone who lived at that time period, you can read the poetry and it could be happening today.

Jeffrey Brown: Later, Sze would use that line in his poem in the form of a letter to the ancient Chinese poet.

Another important influence, the Native American culture he encountered in New Mexico in his years of teaching at the Institute of American Indian arts, where he worked with a number of young Native poets who’ve gone on to prominent careers.

Arthur Sze: And a whole generation of native students really have come through the institute.

Jeffrey Brown: Something you’re quite proud of, I guess.

Arthur Sze: I am.

Jeffrey Brown: Sze writes often of the natural world around him, Santa Fe’s high desert landscape, his daily hikes through the hills.

So, this is how you get your water.

Arthur Sze: Yes, and then it runs downhill. It’s all gravity-fed.

Jeffrey Brown: The acequia, or community irrigation canal, that provides water to him and his neighbors and becomes subject of a poem. He plays over and over with the sounds, meanings and order of each word in line. He showed us a poem that resulted from some 88 drafts. And he gathers fragments and images wherever he goes.

Arthur Sze: I start to accumulate images that maybe don’t necessarily appear to have anything to do with each other. And then that becomes really exciting.

It’s like the poem is emerging and taking me somewhere. I’m discovering something new.

Jeffrey Brown: Are others? In a time of divided attention spans and politics, does poetry still have something to offer? Sze says being at the margins might be the perfect place for an art form.

Arthur Sze: My argument is that a culture is always growing from the margins, that the real creativity is where people are willing to take risks and make new things, whether it’s with language and poems or in paintings or music. All of these endeavors connect in the human endeavor of trying to find — I’m quoting Wallace Stevens — what will suffice? What will sort of give us an existence that’s meaningful and worthy?

When, under summer stars, you have built a cabin in the wilderness.

Jeffrey Brown: Here’s how Arthur Sze’s poem “Anvil” ends.

Arthur Sze: When in our bodies, we ride the waves of our earth, here is the anvil on which to hammer your days.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Santa Fe, New Mexico.