U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze writes in service of multiplicity
Sze: “What are the phrases that are mysterious, that are resonant, that I can pursue?”
Photo courtesy of Shawn Miller / Library of Congress.
Before being named U.S. Poet Laureate earlier this month, Arthur Sze attended MIT, left for Berkeley, worked in construction, translated ancient Chinese, taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, picked mushrooms, and befriended Nobel Prize winners. His body of work, spanning five decades and 12 collections of poems, is accordingly diverse.
On Sept. 22, The Tech interviewed Sze on his poetics, personal history, and goals as Poet Laureate. The following has been edited for clarity and length.
The Tech: You’ve said that you wrote your first poem in a lecture at MIT. What was it about?
Sze: The poem was inspired by a painting by Modigliani that was up in my dorm room. I liked this artwork. I started in MIT in the fall semester of 1968 and I placed out of the first semester of calculus, so I was in the second semester. There were all these equations upon a huge whiteboard. I suddenly just turned away, I flipped to the back of my notebook, and I started writing phrases. The phrases, fragments, images were inspired by this painting: later that afternoon, I went back to my dorm room, and I remember looking at the painting. It helped me coalesce the little bits.
TT: I’ve heard you described as a science writer as well as a poet. How do you view the role of new technologies in your work?
Sze: The roles of technology and science are definitely very important. My background at MIT helped me, years later, when I moved to Santa Fe, have some great conversations with Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, who are both particle physicists. There are phrases of their conversations in my poetry, and a phrase from one of my poems inspired Murray Gell-Mann’s book on complex adaptive systems, The Quark and the Jaguar.
So there’s a close connection between science and poetry for me. Because I live in northern New Mexico, and for many years, lived in the valley below Los Alamos, the legacy of the atom bomb, the nuclear age, and plutonium are in my poetry. Technology may be a little less direct than science, but it is there.
TT: Do you ever quote without obviously quoting in your poetry?
Sze: Yes, I do. That’s an interesting aesthetic position. In the opening poem to my book of collected poems, The Glass Constellation, there’s a sequence of six poems called “Before Completion”, which is the name of the last hexagram to the Chinese divination text the I-Ching. Certain sections have one-line fragments, and one of them is, “Where does matter end and space begin?” It’s not put in quotation marks, but it’s word-for-word what George Zweig said to me once over dinner.
He said, “Arthur, one of the fundamental problems or issues of 20th century particle physics was, ‘where does matter end in space begin?’” The atom was supposed to be solid, and then it was the nucleus, and then there was the proton, and then it was the quark, and the search for fundamental particles kept going, and each thing that was supposed to be solid turned out to be hollow and contain empty space.
I thought that was such a wonderful statement, I didn’t want to change a single word. On the other hand, as I was writing the poem, it felt right to have it as plain text. If I put it in italics, it would be saying, “Oh, this is coming from another source,” or something different is happening with it. I felt it had more power as if it were coming out of the blue.
TT: Later in that section, there’s a quote: “We’re dying.” Was there a reason that you put that in quotation marks?
Sze: Yes, because that was an actual statement by someone who had picked poisonous mushrooms. That’s like the tip of an iceberg, something below the surface. I found it so moving for someone who had eaten Destroying Angels, who was dying in the hospital with his partner, to say the very simple fact “we’re dying.” In that case, putting it in quotation marks was hopefully my idea of showing, “This is coming from another source, another world.” It’s not the speaker saying “we,” like the speaker and someone else, are dying. There are two characters.
TT: Your poems often use the second person. Could you elaborate on this technique?
Sze: When I first started writing poetry in the late 1960s, what’s called the confessional movement of poetry was very strong in American poetry. When I was a student at MIT, Anne Sexton was teaching at Boston University. There’s a whole tradition of Robert Lowell, Sylvia, Plath, Anne Sexton, where the self was foregrounded again and again. Angst and personal challenges and difficulties were the main stuff of poetry, so to speak.
Maybe because I come from a Chinese background, I always felt uncomfortable with putting I, I, I in a poem. It’s like, “Who am I to be asserting that kind of ego or that kind of presence of self?” I’m not quite comfortable with that. My eyes may be more of an observer, or certainly I don’t see that as my primary material.
So I started to play around with pronouns, because it changes the point of view. I like the “you”, because the “you” could be the reader, it could be someone the poet or the speaker is talking to. It could also be an aspect of oneself, where one is addressing part of oneself and reflecting. The “you” seemed to have many different uses to me. I got interested in what happens when you start the poem saying, “You’re walking down”, then it’s like, “What’s going on” for the reader. It changes the whole point of entry and perspective to the poem.
TT: Recently, you said that poets should “resist all forms of coercion.” How does resisting coercion translate to formal choices in your poetry or your plans as Poet Laureate?
Sze: Two questions, I guess. The first one in terms of my own poetry. I feel poetry is ultimately about freedom, and the best poems are where I discover things as I’m creating. If I sit down and think, “Oh, I have a poem in mind and I’m writing it out”, usually those poems aren’t that interesting, because they’re conceived, and then it’s almost like executing. There’s less surprise, there’s less discovery.
If I write, then I say, “Wait a minute, that’s not done, that’s just a really rough, rough, rough draft,” are there certain elements there? Can I write beyond the edges and boundaries of that poem? What are the phrases that are mysterious, that are resonant, that I can pursue? Then those become, oftentimes, the seeds to the real poem.
In a political poem, if you’re writing and you’re trying to persuade somebody about being angry about what’s happening in a situation, and they want to go out and do something, that can work up to a point. But oftentimes that boomerangs, because it seems to me, you’re trying to coerce or push the reader in a certain direction. Poetry works best by affirming our shared humanity, then letting the reader decide for themselves what they want to do or not do.
In that regard, when I say poetry must resist all forms of coercion in terms of an aesthetic stance, it means, if somebody says, well, “Write a political poem”, or “Write a poem that’s a sonnet or a sestina,” it doesn’t work very well. You can try it, but the real poem is oftentimes about shedding control and losing all sense of where you’re going. It’s scary, but the real poem is often there waiting to be discovered. If you have an agenda, you’re cutting yourself off from those possibilities of discovery.
In terms of my role as a U.S. Poet Laureate, I love what previous Poet Laureates have done. They’re all wonderful projects. Because I learned my craft through translating classical Chinese poetry, I didn’t go to graduate school, I didn’t get an MFA like almost everyone I know, I thought, “Well, here’s an opportunity for me to champion another way of celebrating poetry,” which is through translation. It was perfect, because I could take a classical Chinese poem, lay out the characters, put words in English underneath, put the pinyin sounds and the tones. I could say, present three different translations in English of the same poem.
I could talk about them not to say, “oh, one’s better than another,” but to show how each translator found something in the original to translate or carry over. Then, what if I invite the reader to make their own translation? You might know classical Chinese, you might not. Even if you can’t read a single Chinese character, with the characters laid out with discussion with three different translations of the same poem, that’s a platform where a reader could say, “Hey, I’m going to just play with language,” which is one of the key things the poet needs to do, and see what might happen.
There’s no form of coercion there. The person who picks up the pen and makes their own translation has to discover how to use their voice, their facility with language, their syntax, and make it theirs.
TT: Do the rhythms of Chinese influence how you write in English?
Sze: Yes, absolutely. The traditional Tang Dynasty poems were chanted, and I’m told they’re closer to Cantonese in sound than Mandarin. The sense of tonality, the way the tones move from character to character in Chinese is like a weaving. One line has a set of tones and the next line is contrasting. That sense of tension, playing with different tonal sounds is important to me. Even though I’m writing in English, I use the idea of tonal counterpoint, the idea of contrast, and the sense of silence.
In Chinese poems, with a five-character line, you read one, two, and you have a caesura, then three, four, five. With seven-character lines you’re reading one, two, pause, three, four, pause, five, six seven. Those silences aren’t just empty spaces. For classical Chinese, they help define the linguistic units so you don’t connect the wrong characters across that divide. The idea of using silence inside of the motion of the poem, that’s huge, and it’s something I love to do with my language in English,
TT: How do you see your poems as both auditory and visual objects?
I think of the one-line stanzas as in music, so they’re not just a blank space. I’m reading a line of poetry, and then in silence, I’m counting one, two, then the next line. There are a number of reasons for that. One is because they’re really rich, vivid images. If I let them go, one after the other, after the other, it’s an overload for a reader. If I have one rich line of poetry, and then a breathing space, that silence is crucial to allow the reader to take in or absorb or hold that moment before the next stream hits. It’s a continual dialectic.
TT: I’m reminded of Whitman, whom you’ve cited. Could you speak about the poets you’re descended from?
Sze: Walt Whitman’s sequences are supremely important for me. In high school, I feel I was given the worst, easiest poems of Whitman, which I didn’t relate to at all. They felt sentimental, or they felt posed. It actually took me a long time to discover the Whitman of the big sequences like “The Sleepers” or “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which are huge. At a certain point in my own evolution, I wanted to go beyond writing a kind of classical poem in English, 18 to 20 lines, and writing something really long and modulating those tonal shifts. The Whitman sequences were important to me.
Wallace Stevens is the American poet I quote most often. Sometimes I get aggravated with him, with the long sequences like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” There are moments in it where I say, “Wait, this is just an essay. Is this really a poem?” Still, I love Stevens’ poems like “Sunday Morning,” it’s a sequence in very compact stanza form with a lot of power. One famous phrase, “Death is the mother of beauty.” Very simple, but so powerful when you see that inside of this meditation for Sunday morning. Sometimes when I’m stuck as a poet, I will rummage through Stevens, I will struggle with him. I also have philosophy in my background when I was a student at Berkeley, and there’s a lot of philosophy in Stevens.
It’s not a simple sort of absorption, emulation. There’s a kind of push and pull. I’ve translated many Chinese poems. Probably the sources that I haven’t translated that are most important to me are the Taoist texts, the Chuang Tzu more than the Lao Tzu, and it’s been said for Chinese poets, every Chinese poet has to contend with the Chuang Tzu.
The other ancient source from Chinese poetry that’s really important to me is the Tianwen by Qu Yuan. It’s a poem with questions and no answers, and they’re baffling questions like, “What is composed of brightest bright and darkest dark?” I have that in a poem called “After a New Moon.” It’s in the collection Compass Rose. And I ruminated on that question for a long, long time, and I suddenly had two ideas. One, the moon is brightest bright and darkest dark, and two, it’s also the human mind and the imagination. In this particular poem, I’m pulling from Qu Yuan. An American reader isn’t going to know that the source is coming from ancient China. I haven’t italicized it; I haven’t put it in quotes, but it’s there.
TT: You’re an adept namer, counter, and measurer. How do a singular outlook or a multitude of outlooks influence precision?
Sze: They work in different ways. I’m a firm believer in the precision of language. So I want to, like William Carlos Williams, “harness particulars,” and make them not just particulars, but vehicles for something much larger. You can have multiplicity and you can have a singular point of view; they serve different purposes. I personally like the idea of a poem, what I call polysemous, that has many meanings, that is operating on many different levels. I know sometimes my poetry is seen as difficult, but I hope that the poems have something in the sound, in the rhythm, the imagery, the musicality, that pulls a reader back so that each time one reads, one sees more or experiences more, and then the multiplicity begins to emerge.
TT: When you reread your old poetry, what kinds of emotions does it evoke?
Sze: I can probably track my whole life looking at those different poems and knowing where I was as a struggling, poor poet in my early 20s and where I am today. One of the things I like to do is lay out poems on the floor — poems I wrote in my 20s, poems I wrote in the last nine months — and I’ll ask myself, “What are the patterns? What are the repetitions? Are those repetitions serving me well? Are they just repetitions?” For me, that’s not a good thing. I want to write a different kind of poem. Or if the repetitions are deepening like music, if there’s a certain theme that comes back, so the return is not just a return, but adding something, that sometimes helps me think about how to construct a book. These are elemental concerns that are happening here. This is part of the structure of this piece. It’s endless.
TT: What advice do you give young poets?
Sze: I don’t have any particular writing advice, other than to point to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Those ten letters are wonderful. The young poet says “Rilke, how come I can’t get published? I’m writing like this. Editors should like them.” And he says, “Forget about all that. A work of art, if it’s good, if it’s sprung from necessity, and if it’s given you to be a writer in your life, build your life according to that necessity, and that’s what really matters.”
Young poets are oftentimes in a hurry, and I understand it. You went to graduate school, you may owe money, you may have loans to pay. You need to get a teaching job. To get a teaching job, you need to have your first book published. But that’s all parts of a career for teaching and publication. The real energy needs to go into, “I’m going to take as long as it takes to write the best poem I can. And if I only write two poems in a year, that’s okay. That’s the way it is. If I can write 10, that’s fine. I’m not counting.” The important thing is to pursue that singular vision. And ultimately, that’s a lot of hard work. One has to put aside the trends of the moment and say, “What is the kind of poem that is most important for me to write?”
TT: How do you plan to balance the roles of poet and Poet Laureate? How did you balance roles when you were teaching?
Sze: I have to discover how that’s going to play out. When I was teaching, I only taught Wednesday through Friday, so I had Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, to write, write, write. Always, no matter what menial job I had, I was always trying to buy time. In my early 20s, I did construction work. I had barely published. I couldn’t get a teaching job. Even when I was doing construction, I got the owner of the house to let me work four days a week instead of five. I had Saturday, Sunday, Monday. When I was teaching classes, it would be afternoon and evening. I like to write first thing in the morning before sunrise, that’s my most creative time.
I want to have that. I’m in transition right now. This is maybe the 12th interview I’ve done, so it’s already quite demanding. I have to see how I can carve out that time.