On Arthur Sze
While Australia continues to dither about the establishment of a poet laureate for this land of many poetries, the United States——in the midst of a growing demonstration of what happens politically when the kinds of truth poetry speaks and the kind of values it speaks for are trashed and disparaged——has managed to find one of the great living poets, Arthur Sze, and appoint him its twenty-fifth poet laureate. I’m glad for Arthur, whom I have spent some time with in China, and whose work I admire, and I am glad for the States and the world, that such a humble, kind, fastidious man will be for the next two years one of the champions of the quiet revolution that poetry is. The poet laureate in the US is officially a consultant of the Library of Congress, and the executive branch has no influence, formally, over the appointment. So, well done to the library and to congress for this decision that so manifestly practises the independence of mind, the openness of heart, the courage that are being tested in the US and the world right now.
Arthur, born in New York to parents who’d immigrated from China, is known to most of us through his poetry and his accomplishments as an elder in this literature. He’s published twelve, I think, volumes of poetry and a recent selection of his prose on the craft. He served from 2012 to 2017 as chancellor of the American Academy of Poetry.
The role of the laureate is to promote poetry, its writing and reading and value, during what is mostly a two-year term. Arthur has let us know he’s concentrating during his tenure, on translation of poetry from many languages. Such a selfless and democratising mission. Which I share with him. Think how much poorer each of our minds and imaginations and morals would be already, notwithstanding the glory of poetry in our mother tongue, if poets and scholars had not dedicated themselves to bringing the poetries of other languages to us in our own.
I have many memories of meeting and travelling with Arthur (along with Carol Moldaw, fellow poet, and Arthur’s wife) in China in 2023. The first is of being introduced to him in a hotel lobby in Xining, in Qinghai Province and trying not to betray my star-struckness, only to find that all his conversation wanted to be about me and a new translation of my work into Chinese (his mother’s tongue but not his mother tongue). His energy is very gathered and his way humble but clear. Another memory is of hearing him speak so simply and succinctly, unlike some of the other scholars and poets from around the world, to the theme of “the first duty of the poet is to return home.” His dignity, humility and grace in the home of Jidi Majia, our host, an Yi man, and one of China’s foremost poets, encouraged me to contend somewhat with Jidi’s premise and to suggest “The first duty of the poet is to use one’s writing to see justice done to life as it is lived, to carry on traditions of life-affirming witness and wakefulness, and to return with one’s poems the gift of one’s own life.”
Then on a fast train through the muntains and across the many rivers of Sichuan, from Chengdu to Xichang, this memory. I am reading Arthur’s book Sight Lines, which he has signed for me, as ancient China streams past. In the seat in front, Arthur Sze rises to reach into the overhead lockers for an oranges for him and Carol. “Oh,” he says, seeing me looking up, “I have been reading your book” and he names a couple of poems and he quotes a line of mine back at me. And I hold up his book and quote a line of that to him, and he nods, pleased: Arthur Sze, chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, soon to be (as it happens) the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States, standing there on his seat, holding on to the overhead luggage bays with one hand, and smiling with oranges in his free hand, while the landscapes of his parents’ homeland tear past, smudged like a photograph taken in haste.
