AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Arthur Sze and Forrest Gander on Silence, the Importance of Blank Pages, and How Every Poem Written Shines a Light on Every Other Poem

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Arthur Sze: (READS FROM THE POEM “KINTSUGI”)

picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells in the mist — 

Adrian Matejka: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Adrian Matejka, editor of the magazine. The April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. But this year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected. This is a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He’s authored eleven books of poetry, most recently The Glass Constellation out from Copper Canyon Press. We asked his friend, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, to speak with Arthur for this episode of the podcast. Not surprisingly, they led us directly into the cosmos—into emptiness, and interconnectedness. At one point, Arthur introduces the ancient Sanskrit idea of “Indra’s net”—everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. If you imagine the cosmos as an immense chandelier and shine a beam of light into it, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of the other. “That’s what poetry does,” Arthur says, “When we create poems, they’re all shining light on each other.”

Arthur Sze: “Can I tell that story?”

Adrian Matejka: Here’s Arthur, talking about how he first met Forrest.

Arthur Sze: So, in 1984, I was hired to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts. And the head of the creative program then was Phillip Foss. And Phillip, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and I were the three poets. And in 1985, Phil Foss said to me, I want to start a literary magazine called Tyuonyi.

Adrian Matejka: Tyuonyi is the name of a huge circular ruin in the Bandelier National Park in New Mexico. It was part of a communal pueblo and dates back to the 1300s. The ruin contains subterranean rooms called Kivas, or communal meeting places.

Arthur Sze: And I thought that’a a perfect image and title. Phil was interested in showcasing Native American poetry that wasn’t cliché Native poetry, and I thought this would be a wonderful way to make it international as well. So, Phil—this is back to the memo revolution. He typeset every line of every poem in this literary magazine in the first issue. And Mei-mei and I proofread it and if we found an error, he typed in that line and he cut it out and he ran it through a wax machine. That’s how primitive it was.

Adrian Matejka: The first issue of Tyuonyi featured six poems by Arthur.

Arthur Sze: And I thought, oh, there are only 250 copies, 300 copies. Nobody’s going to see this. And then I thought, well wait a minute, I should not be a snob about this. Phil has a vision for a very small magazine. I’m a believer in small presses and small magazines.

Adrian Matejka: At this point, this was 1985, Arthur and Forrest had never met or read each other’s work.

Arthur Sze: And then a few months later, I went into Phil’s office and he said, I just got a letter from Forrest Gander you have to read this. Maybe you can take it from there, Forrest.

Forrest Gander: Oh, Arthur, I can still remember reading those poems for the first time and thinking, oh man, we’ve got to publish this poem. At that time, CD Wright and I were running Lost Roads publishers and we were both so thrilled. I wrote a letter to Philip Foss, and wanted to get in touch with you. I knew right away that I really wanted to publish your book.

Arthur Sze: All I remember is when I walked into Phil’s office and he said, “Read this letter from Forrest Gander.” I believe it said something like: “I have no idea who Arthur Sze is, but these are wonderful poems. We want to publish a book of his.” And I did have a manuscript, and that was River River.

Forrest Gander: That, that quick?

Arthur Sze: Yeah.

Forrest Gander: Yeah.

Arthur Sze: It was quick.

Adrian Matejka: That book, turned out to be Lost Roads bestselling title.

Forrest Gander: River River sold out three editions really quickly, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (SILENCE).

Adrian Matejka: Here’s Forrest Gander, and Arthur Sze.

Forrest Gander: First, let’s give the audience a little traction about where your work has come from. Some of the springs that lead to these rivers running through 50 years of your poetry. Early in your career, you studied with a poet who is also a scholar of quantitative and computational methods for understanding literature. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to work with Josephine Miles and how that mentorship might have influenced your poetics?

Arthur Sze: Josephine Miles was hugely influential for my evolution as a poet, and I want to back up because there’s a long sort of lead up to when I actually met Josephine that I think would be really helpful for listeners. I grew up outside of Manhattan, on Long Island, in Garden City. And as an Asian-American, I grew up with a lot of pressure to be good at math or science. It was like, what are you going to be a scientist or an engineer? That was like the two options available. And, you know, in high school I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was good at math and science and so I applied to MIT and I was accepted. And my father and mother, who were both immigrants from China were, of course, thrilled. My father got his PhD at MIT. And so in 1968, I enrolled as a freshman the very first semester in a BC calculus class. I’ll never forget that the professor was putting equations up on a whiteboard, and I just thought, I don’t want to do this, I mean, I can do it, but I don’t really want to do it. And I flipped to the back of my notebook, and I just started writing phrases. A poem spontaneously came to me and a few days later I was writing another poem, and another poem and another poem. And very quickly I realized that contrary to parental expectation, what really excited me was working with language and creating poetry. Poetry just was such a thrill, it was like finding a voice deep inside of me. And so that second year at MIT, I enrolled in a poetry workshop with Denise Levertov. And frankly, there weren’t many MIT students interested in poetry, so it was a combined MIT, Harvard Radcliffe Poetry Workshop. There were 13 students in it. This was 1969.

Forrest Gander: So lucky. So lucky.

Arthur Sze: Denise had just come east from the University of California at Berkeley. I had never been west of Pennsylvania in my life, but Denise made the West Coast sound really exciting, and I knew I wanted to transfer somewhere to pursue poetry and I thought, this is it. I’ll go to UC Berkeley. And before I left, Denise said, oh, there are a couple of people you might contact and one interesting poet in the English department is Josephine Miles. So, when I, in the fall of 1970, signed up for a poetry workshop with Josephine, that first class, I was staggered to walk into the room and see like 50 other students. You know, UC Berkeley classes are large. Lecture classes were maybe 300 students. But I was like, oh my god. I sat in the back of the class and I listened. And after the second class I went up to Josephine and I said, you know, I really like what you’re saying, but I don’t think this situation is going to work for me. I transferred and I’m used to really small workshop, you might get to two poems by each student. And, you know, Josephine could have said, oh, well, this is the way it is and see you later. But to my surprise, she looked at me and she said, come to my house on Saturday afternoon for tea and I’ll go over your poems. So, that Saturday I went to her house and read my poems to her, she responded to them. I mean, her comments were inspiring and amazing. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. And she not only responded to my poems, she started to direct my reading. She said, well, have you read Pablo Neruda? I’d never heard of Pablo Neruda. So, I went and searched for everything I could find. And then the next week she said, have you read Rilke? And was like, this whole education outside of a normal class. Finally, I went to her office during office hours and I said, you know, I have a big problem, I’m never going to graduate. I have science credits from MIT. I’ve actually enrolled in conversational Mandarin in the morning and classical Chinese literature and English translation in the afternoon. I want to be an English major, but none of my classes, courses, fit. I want to take Blake, I want to take philosophy. And she looked at me, I’ll never forget, and she said, Arthur, you could take Swahili and political science, but one day you’re going to be a poet. And that was, you know, I was 20. It meant so much to me to have a poet professor who believed in me like that. And she then let me create my own major in poetry. So, I took whatever I wanted. It was really an incredible two years where I showed her poems. I showed her translations, she directed my reading. Poets would come through and she would say, oh, Arthur, you should come by the house and meet them. She somehow believed in me really early. And the last thing I’ll say is when I was getting ready to leave Berkeley when I was graduating, I wanted to go somewhere in the country I’d never been before. I knew the East Coast, I knew a bit of California, or at least the Bay Area. And Josephine said, try Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s really beautiful and a young poet can live cheaply there. She was very pragmatic. So, that’s how I came to Santa Fe, and I’ve been here 50 years.

Forrest Gander: So interesting that in a time so notably patriarchal in every way in literature, strong women were the ones who directed you, who believed in you, and who set you off on your career, where you didn’t have to give up any of those things you love so much. Math, science and art continued to appear in your poetry. So, when are you in Berkeley and when do you leave for Santa Fe?

Arthur Sze: So, I was a student at UC Berkeley from 1970 to 72. And that summer after I graduated, I traveled in Mexico and this was the early 1970s. People hitchhiked a lot in those days, and I hitchhiked from El Paso up to Santa Fe in one day in the fall of 1972, and I had the names of three people Josephine Miles knew and recommended to me. I didn’t know anyone else, I just literally came into Santa Fe with a knapsack and my curiosity, and one thing led to another so I’m here 50 years later.

Forrest Ganderr: Yeah, you end up making some very long-lasting friendships there with Chinese American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, with Navajo poet Sherwin Bitsui, with Nobel Prize physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and later with the very talented writer named Carol Moldaw, who becomes your wife. It was quite a company, wasn’t it?

Arthur Sze: Yes. And it happened over time. I think one thing I recognized about Santa Fe, besides the extraordinary light and landscape, one thing that really excited me was meeting so many interesting creative people. And in the very beginning, within the first month that I was in Santa Fe, I met (UNKNOWN) a Pueblo photographer, I met a Navajo jeweler. I mean Asian-Americans were the real minority in Santa Fe. I remember walking across the plaza and a Navajo guy came running up to me and stopped me and said, wait a minute, what tribe are you from? I mean, that just astonished me. But so, I felt like I knew I was outside of the America I was used to growing up in. And I was sort of exhilarated and excited to be there. And from 1973 to 83, during the ten years I worked as a poet in the schools, my fellow poets were John Brandi, who published my first two books of poetry, Joy Harjo, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. It was really a wonderful group.

Forrest Gander: So, from Berkeley you moved to Santa Fe, where you published two books, The Willow Wind in 1972 and Two Ravens in 1976, both from a publishing house Tooth of Time, named for a striking igneous rock that jets up from the sedimentary strata of a mountain about 2.5 hours northeast of your home. Who was it that ran that press?

Arthur Sze: John Brandi, who worked in Ecuador during the Peace Corps. And he moved to a small cabin which he built himself in Guadalupita, New Mexico. And on the topographical map there was a rock formation, as you just said, called Tooth of Time. This was the Mimeo Revolution, when poets created their own small press magazines, their presses, overnight, and they might have lasted three issues, four issues. But basically, poets took it upon themselves to print, you know, and edit their, and publish people they liked and were interested in. And it was John whom I met through the Poetry in the Schools program who said, I have this tiny press called Tooth of Time, but I’d like to publish your poetry.

Forrest Gander: They’re actually very beautiful editions, those books.

Arthur Sze: Oh, thank you.

Forrest Gander: So then, by the time your, that Dazzled, which is your 1982 collection is published, you’ve developed a really distinctive poetics that expresses your unusual mind’s method. Your sentencing begins to incorporate more fragments, you explore more flexible syntaxes, you abandon traditional punctuation for strikethroughs and dashes and incompletion. Different voices come up in your poems, cursing and shouting and speaking in multiple languages. And then, you also begin to write in shards, which is a word that becomes a key to your later poetry. What was it that was giving rise to these new trajectories in your work during this period?

Arthur Sze: I think in my very early poems, and certainly the first two books, the models were coming out of my work in translation. I looked at Tang dynasty poetry, which I loved and admired, but those are poems that are highly compressed, have a polished language, I admired how much they say in so few words, and in my first two books, I was writing a kind of beautiful artifact of a poem. And I think I just got to the stage in my own evolution, and certainly my experience in New Mexico, where I was meeting so many unusual, creative people. I just felt like the poems I had written in the first two books were inadequate to the kind of poetry I wanted to be writing in the future. I needed to figure out a way to put more of the world inside of the poems. I wanted the voice to be more alive. I didn’t want the poem just to feel like a beautiful piece of ceramic art, a pot, for instance. So, I started to learn about Japanese tea ceremony and some of those stories became influential. So, I was searching for a way to break apart or break open my own conception of what a poem could be.

Forrest Gander: Well, this seems like a really appropriate time for you maybe to read the poem called “Kintsugi,” and maybe you’ll tell us what the word means in Japanese too.

Arthur Sze: Kintsugi means golden joinery. So, let me just say as a preface, if you drop a pot in Japan or it breaks by accident, you know, in the West, we might try and glue it back together and pretend it didn’t happen or cover the breakage. In Japan, the tradition is to honor that breakage and in fact, take pieces of a broken pot and glue them back together with gold dusted lacquer. So, the breakage, the joinery is highlighted. So, in this particular poem, those, if you think of each line like a shard and together it makes that urn that might help. Kintsugi.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

(READS FROM POEM)

He slips on ice near a mailbox — 

no gemsbok leaps across the road — 

a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders — 

women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and germanium particles are washed downstream — 

once they dynamited dikes to slow advancing troops — 

picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells in the mist — 

as a child, he was tied to a sheep and escaped marauding soldiers — 

an apple blossom opens to five petals — 

as he hikes up a switchback, he remembers undressing her — 

from the train window, he saw they were on ladders cutting fruit off cacti — 

in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass — 

assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer — 

they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed — 

hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops — 

from the ponderosa pines: whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo — 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Forrest Gander: I’m thinking right now how Robert Creeley also came to the sort of same conclusion you did. He felt he was writing poems that were sort of artifacts and moves on to something that’s more in process in pieces, a book called Pieces, which is very much like your shards. We get a taste of your fabulously deep lexicon and these radical juxtapositions, gemsbok, gallium, germanium, that scientific language, ice, eagle feather, the erotics, undressing her, the voices of pines, soldier, psilocybin. It’s a very kaleidoscopic topography and tonality, discreet but simultaneous moments of suspension. So, it seems consistent in this trajectory that after 1987, when River River is published, your books begin to feature not only discreet poems but tessellated sequences. In fact, the structures of your books notably change as you emphasize this poetic series. How was it that the form of the serial poem comes to serve your evolving sense of what we might, might call the inner subjectivity between the world and the self?

Arthur Sze: What a fabulous question. I don’t know that I have an easy answer for it. I think of Theodore Roethke, who said, "I learn by going where I have to go." And I think as I started to think about the kinds of poems I was writing and the kinds of poems I wanted to write, even though I was opening up the poem, I also felt like I needed more space, more room. And the first sequence I ever wrote was the opening poem to River River, which you and CD Wright published in 1987. In River River, "The Leaves of a Dream are the Leaves of an Onion." And I’ll never forget that I wrote the first three poems as independent poems. And one day at I looked at them and I said to myself, I think these are interrelated. And I laid them out on the floor. And then this is one thing I love to do that when I’m teaching I tell students that it’s a good thing to do is, I laid out blank pages around the poems and I asked myself, Is this complete? Is there something in this empty space I can’t see that wants to emerge? And then that really excited me. I suddenly had these three poems and I thought, now, this is something part of much larger. And when I got to the sixth poem I knew that that had a kind of integrity to it and I stopped. So, over time those, as you call tessellated sequences became really important to me because from section to section I could change place, I could change time, I must see it with a lot of affinity to film, you know, I could change perspective, I could change voice. And it was a way of layering and deepening and enlarging the emotional and imaginative resonances to the poem. And as I worked on sequences, I was excited to realize that I never could write the first section first. I would write a poem and then just instinctively feel this is something part of much larger, like a stone in a Zen garden that is below surface connected to other stones. And so then, I would write and write and write and some of my sequences that are maybe nine sections long took me nine to 12 months to write, a very long time where I would write sections and discard them, or I didn’t know where the opening was or the ending was. But, you know, I want the poem to be an act of discovery. I don’t want to be writing a poem thinking, oh, I got it in my head, I just need to write it down. If you’re writing a poem like that, you’re not really opening yourself up to discovering where the true poem can take you. So, my process slowed over time. I would think, oh, I’m going to write about this, and then a phrase would appear on the page and I’d be like, I don’t know where that came from, but I could feel instinctively that’s where the real poem was. And to slow that down and give oneself the necessary time to really discover, then that process becomes slower, more arduous, but ultimately more rewarding. And so, my sequences happened with that kind of poetics that work.

Forrest Gander: And that’s continued into your most recent work. In fact, it might be a nice occasion right now to read a very recent poem that’s coming out in the next issue of Poetry magazine. This, is it pronounced Pe’ahi Light?

Arthur Sze: Yes. Just as a little background, my wife, Carol Moldaw, and I were invited by the Merwin Conservancy to spend a month living in William and Paula Merwin’s former home in Maui. And the invitation came totally out of the blue and at first we were like, wait a minute, we’ve got other plans here for the summer. And then we were like, oh, but what a wonderful opportunity to go and live in William Merwin’s former home in the middle of a palm Forrest on Maui with only expectation to write and see what we could come up with. That was an invitation and opportunity we just had to accept. And Pe’ahi in the Hawaiian language means a welcoming hand. So here, “Pe’ahi Light”:

(READS FROM POEM )

1

Half-filled with sand, a Karatsu tea bowl
placed on a writing desk: no incense

smokes the air; above, on a wall, heart,
brushed in three strokes, where the black

ends of each stroke flare into the void.
We zigzagged across a dry streambed;

that night, a breeze surged like incoming surf—
waves of rain crashed, subsided, plunged;

now, in Pe’ahi light, rain patters the fronds,
glistens the fishtail palms, the stilt root palms,

the white elephant palm, butterfly palm,
a palm, twenty inches tall, risen out

of a split coconut. Drizzle, rain, downpour—
I have no words for these kinds of rain;

I mark a conch shell doorstop, a dictionary
of etymology: rain, from Old English,

regn—a frond emerges out of the dark—
rain stops, water beads at the tips of ferns.

Forrest Gander: So wonderful to hear you read that. And I’m sure I’m not the only audience member to notice how you make links, image links and syntactical links and structural links that connect the various moments in the poem. For instance, you note that the calligraphic word heart has been, quote, brushed in three strokes unquote, on the wall of the house where you’re staying. That’s Merwin’s house, right? And later in the poem, you brush words of your own in three strokes. The rain, you write, quote, crashed, subsided, plunged, and you called the precipitation, drizzle, rain, downpour. You also mix up past and present tenses, sentences in which there’s no human agent and sentences describing the actions of people, you braid etymological, conceptual. I have no words and vivid, sensual registers, and meanwhile you manage to evoke a rich tropical landscape. You once told me something you derived from the Japanese poet philosopher Dogen. He supposedly says that to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion, that myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. Can you talk a bit about what this assertion means to you in terms of what we might call your eco-poetics?

Arthur Sze: Yeah, I’d like to respond to that Dogen quote. It’s been really important to me. The idea that a self goes out and maybe travels the world and gathers these experiences seems very egocentric to me. I was just thinking of Walt Whitman who says, you know, I am large, I contain multitudes, and I love Whitman. I mean, he’s an amazing, obviously foundational poet for American poetry. And yet there is that sense of, you might call it the egotistical sublime, the self that sort of aggrandizes, that gathers experiences and celebrates them. But I’ve always felt that such a Western way of looking at things. And if you’re coming from an East Asian or Chinese perspective, I always think of the great Tang dynasty landscapes where you have these huge mountains, waterfalls, trees, and you look in a corner of this, you know, scroll and you see a tiny human figure approaching, you know, a tiny bridge. There’s a sense of people being very small in the scheme of things. And Dogen’s idea, that sort of all things are alive and that it’s a delusion to just think the self sort of goes through and encounters everything. That’s really important to me, the idea that the whole world is alive. You know, in “Kintsugi” I’m putting the sound of a morning dove into the poem that I want all of the sort of sense of the myriad presences and existences in lives of the world to be entering the poem. That’s important to me, I feel like it’s part of a kind of opening up of what the poem can be. So yeah, that Dogen quote has been foundational for me.

(CLIP FROM “KINTSUGI” PLAYS)

with gold lacquer — 

they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed — 

hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops — 

from the ponderosa pines: whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo — 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Forrest Gander: And not just an opening of what the poem might be, but an opening of what human experience might be if it wasn’t so logocentric and egocentric, that if we saw ourselves as truly a part of mutuality with the rest of the world. Your poetry has been doing that from so early on, before people were talking about words like eco poetics, even in a poem from like 2009’s “Ginkgo Light, Pig’s Heaven Inn,” which ends with an image of a tour group hiking a canyon. You note that just like the erosional force of the water, you write, "we form a rivulet of people funneling down through a chasm in the granite." How is it that your ecological imagination links with or distinguishes itself from what you understand as now the terminology eco poetics?

Arthur Sze: Another great question, I don’t know where to start. I guess I want to start by saying I’m intensely interested in eco poetics. The engagement of human and non-human worlds, but I want to say I’ve been writing my kind of poetry years before climate change and global warming and eco poetry became, came to the forefront. You can look at Taoist roots, Buddhist roots in my poetry. Someone once asked me, how often do I practice zazen, and I laughed and said, you know, I’m not a practicing Buddhist, but Buddhist ideas are really important to me and I’m a poet. I’m like a magpie. I like to draw from creative sources wherever I find them. And ancient Sanskrit, this is 1000 before common era. OK. It’s over 3000 years old. But in the first, one of the four Vedas in Sanskrit has the image of what’s called interest net, and interest net is this idea that everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. And if you imagine the cosmos as a gigantic chandelier, immense chandelier of shining crystals, if you shine a beam of light into that space, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of every other. And to me, that’s one of the things that poetry does, you know, we’re not writing in competition we’re all trying to create poems, and they’re all shining light on each other. And the poems one writes in one’s lifetime are part of this, it’s an image of emptiness, it’s an image of interconnectedness. I mean, if I were to say, Oh, well, that’s an eco-poetic point of view, that just seems absurd, right? That’s someone creating that vision at 1000 before common era. Eco poetry makes sense today in the kind of parameters of endangered, extinct species. There’s a language lost every 14 days off the face of the planet. That’s horrifying. But we’re living in a convergence of increased heightened pressure and eco-poetry is trying to respond to that, it seems to me. So, I feel like I’m in conversation with that, but I don’t want to be bound or labeled at all by that. And as we said, I’ve been writing the kind of poetry I was writing before eco poetry became so strong in the 1970s. I just looked at a list of endangered species and I wrote a catalog of 30 of them. There’s no commentary, no explanation telling a reader look at what this is. It’s just pure vocalization and sound, and it starts like deltoid spurge, red wolf, ocelot, green blossom, pearly muscle, razorback, sucker, wire weed. I just wanted a reader to not necessarily know what was going on, but to hear the kind of spell of language and sound in rhythm and then be able to look and say, well, what is the thread that connects the species? And discover they’re all endangered vanishing species. To me, that’s so much more moving than to say, oh, look, you know, if you try and get polemical or political, it boomerangs. But to just be able to step into that larger experience of the world, then it says it all.

Forrest Gander: Yeah. The way that you’ve dealt with conception and philosophy, which is very much a part of your approach to poetry, has always been by enacting it, not as saying it. And though you include philosophical language, it’s always anchored to a sensual world.

Arthur Sze: There are a lot of references to mushrooms in my work, and again, you can take an eco-poetic view of that, but I just want to say I’ve earned my knowledge through lived experience, not through looking at some field guide. I remember looking, being interested in mushrooms and looking at a field guide thinking, I can never identify mushrooms like this out of a book. And when my son was young, he picked up a mushroom in the grass and I said, don’t eat it! You know, being a parent and saying, you know, I don’t know what it is, but don’t eat it. And then one day, Micah saw, there was a class at the Santa Fe Community College called mushroom identification, and I thought, oh, let’s take it together. Let’s, you know, it’s a great thing for father and son to do. And for the next six weeks, every weekend, we went all over the mountains of northern New Mexico hiking, collecting mushrooms. And Bill Isaacs, who was a phenomenal naturalist, would have everyone collect the mushrooms. And then, he would lay them out on the park benches or on the grass, and he would identify all of them, poisonous ones, edible ones, not so edible ones, you know, and early stages and late stages. And then I started to learn, OK, if you want to find the bolete mushroom, you have to be under spruce and fir because the mushroom helps certain kinds of trees. They are in a living, symbiotic environment. If you want to find an oyster mushroom you have to be at a lower elevation, hiking in dead and dying aspen because the oysters grow up the like, shelves up the dead trunks of aspen trees. So, it was like learning a whole landscape and hallway of entering a landscape and not just of nature, but also in a way of learning a new language.

Forrest Gander: Well, speaking of learning a new language after 50 years of writing remarkable poetry. I mean, we started this conversation in the 1970s, and here we are in 2023, half a century. What are the new languages that are feeding the work that you’re doing now?

Arthur Sze: Certainly the month in Hawaii has been really important to me. The sky is the ocean here in New Mexico, there’s so little water. So, to be living on an island in a tropical climate, that was a revelation and an expanse for me. So, I think that sense of, it isn’t just disorientation or learning a new language or being able to name palm trees and the palm Forrest, but I think I carry with me the sense of not wanting to repeat the kind of poem I’ve written before or be satisfied with it. So, “Pe’ahi Light” was an opening for me to explore a new landscape and language. And recently, I’ve been turning to some Asian forms. Let me say, for instance, the pantoum, which is written in a set of four lines where the second and fourth line become the first and third line of the following stanza. They have a very musical motion to them, the repetitions. But I’ve played with introducing a silence inside of each line. So, even though the words are the same, the silence shifts and shifts the meaning. So, I feel like I’m constantly working with new poetic forms or materials or finding a way to keep stretching. And I hope that “Pe’ahi Light” is going to be the closing poem to my next book of poetry.

Forrest Gander: Yeah, it’s maybe sentimental to say this and silly to admit it on a podcast, but I love you, Arthur Sze, and I love your work and how it’s been so important to me, in part because you’re an artist who has continued to change, to develop. You haven’t settled on, ever, on repeating yourself.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Arthur Sze: I want to keep extending that sense of being in a new environment, discovering a new landscape, new emotions, a new terrain. One of the wonderful things about inhabiting William and Paula Merwin’s former home was just moving around the house, thinking about what the rhythm of their day was like. And I sat at William’s writing desk and then I noticed there’s a meditation room right next door, right in the hallway, right next to his writing room. And I thought, oh, I can see this, he writes, he meditates, he writes, he goes out and he plants a few palm trees. He comes back and he writes, it’s a, it’s a life devoted to the practice of writing. And even maybe when he’s planting a palm tree, he’s like planting a poem. You know, he’s physically thinking about, he’s in between drafts of a poem. So, this third section takes place in the meditation room.

(READS FROM POEM)

“Pe’ahi Light”

3

Sitting on a round blue cushion in a room
with three white walls, where a fourth

has screened glass doors that open
onto a lanai, I focus on the spackled

ceiling and, finding contours of mesas
and arroyos from the air, know I overlay

these shapes onto emptiness. As warm air
flows in, I smell clusters of white ginger

flowering below; earlier, we walked
a trail down a bluff to where Papalua Stream

empties into Pilale Bay and saw divers
out among white-capping waves. Did they

dive for reef triggerfish? Octopi? In the space
of not-knowing, I float joy when

the body mind unfolds and tolls flowers
from inside the bell gong of silence,

and I spark when language love—1457,
sudden unexpected attack or capture—surprises.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Forrest Gander: So beautiful, Arthur. And again, listening to these poems, it reminds me what a democratic poet you are. Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, philosopher, talks about thick description. And it seems to me that’s what you’re such an expert at. That there are shifting places and agencies and perceptions and vividly particular experiences that all exist in a democracy of mutuality and interdependence in your poems. It seems to me, as a longtime reader of your work, that you’ve never been, you’ve never been struggling with periods where you aren’t writing poems. Has that ever happened to you, or has your practice been very continuous?

Arthur Sze: My practice has been fairly continuous. I write slowly and steadily, my daily practice, you know, now that I’m not teaching, is to work very early in the morning, I like to work at like five, be at my writing desk at five in the dark before sunrise. And as the light comes up, it’s not just literal but it’s figurative. It’s like things are emerging out of the darkness, out of my consciousness. Even if I’m traveling, when I was traveling in China, you mentioned Pig’s Heaven Inn, where all the poets are sort of walking and become like a stream of water. There are very late nights, but I always got up an extra hour early to just write phrases or passages that became part of a poem. And I’m coming back to Josephine Miles, when I was a student at Berkeley early on, I wrote that kind of small, compressed, beautiful poem. And I remember talking to her one Saturday afternoon saying, you know, I’m not sure what to do next. And she always, amazingly, had a kind of answer or a little nudge. And she said, Arthur, you have the images. Work on the structure. That’s going to take you a lot of time. And so when I always felt stuck, I thought, OK, I need to find, I can’t escape myself. You know, every poet, each of us we have our obsessions, it’s part of who we are and we don’t want to run away from them. We want to dig deeper into them and work through them. And I thought, I’m always going to have my particular concerns or images, but let me think about a way to restructure it or move things around. And so like what I said about the pantoum, introducing a moment of silence inside of each line, I don’t know that that’s ever been done before, but it’s a way for me to take a traditional Malay form and make it mine because I’m changing the rhythm by introducing a silence or I’m chasing point of focus. And the other thing I’ll say is sometimes when I’ve been stuck not just thinking about a new structure or a new orientation. That’s a wonderful time for me to translate someone else’s poetry. So, particularly when I’ve completed a book of poems, I’ve often felt just exhaustion, like I’ve put everything I can into this book. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, I don’t have a lot of energy, I don’t feel particularly creative. What can I do? That’s a really fertile time for me to say, OK, I should, I can immerse myself in Li Shangyin’s poetry or (UNKNOWN) poetry or a contemporary Chinese poet and work inside of their language. And so, I’m not trying to write a new poem, I’m trying to inhabit the emotional and imaginative space of the poet writing it. And as I do that, I feel like, OK, I’m, on the one hand, trying to translate a poem, I feel like readers in English should know. And I’m also selfishly thinking, what can I learn from this? How is this motion of language different from how I use language, vocabulary, syntax, voice, diction? You know, all these different things, structure and how can I renew myself through that act of translation? So, those are two of my key ways of approaching times when I feel like I don’t know what to do next.

Forrest Gander: Yeah, even in your pantoums, you’re creating a sense of silence, you’re adding this structural silence to it. In fact, in all of your poems, and what the audience hears as you read, is how silence is a part of your poetry, something that you build into it. The way that you respect those line breaks with the silence after them. How do you think about the importance of silence to your work? And maybe the importance of silence to poetry in a time and epic in which we’re bombarded by sound and sensation and incoming all the time?

Arthur Sze: I think poetry has a vital role to play in our lives by making us slow down to pay more attention, and silences do that. I used to get into arguments with fellow students at Berkeley and MIT. I noticed they would just race through language. It was like a bombardment, you didn’t have time to really process and think about, well, do I agree with that? Do I disagree with that? They were trying to convince you that their approach through this sort of torrent of language was the correct one. And I think poetry is resistant to that, it’s resistant to any kind of polemical message. And it really asks us to slow down and hear the sounds, hear the rhythm and trust that before we really understand what’s happening. And in many ways, you know, the best poems do that, they engage our bodies, they communicate through sound and rhythm in our bodies before we can intellectually understand or articulate what the poem is about. In terms of silence itself, I don’t know where to start. I’ve always been struck by and remind myself of the composer John Cage, who said, no matter what I do as a composer, I’m aware I can never construct a silence. It’s always there. He can make noises, he can make sounds, he can throw tacks into a piano and derail the intentionality. He can have an audience listen to bird sounds, but he can’t construct silence. And the other quote I would draw on is from the ancient Taoist text, which is it’s the empty vessel. It’s the empty spaces that make a vessel useful. To come back to the image of the ceramic pot, it’s the empty space that makes it a pot, that makes it available to hold things, and that makes it useful. And (UNKNOWN) also says, everyone knows the usefulness of what can be used, but how many people know the usefulness of the useless? And in a way, silence to me is like that. It’s like you have to let go, it’s you can’t control it. But when you let that silence happen, I think you find it’s not something to be feared or something that’s just empty, it’s really space that allows transformation to happen.

Forrest Gander: You also mentioned unknowing in your poems, and I think that’s part of what has drawn a whole younger generation to read your poetry in this time, is partly because of the unknowing that you allow in your poems and the silence for people to experience unknowing, that we need that especially in this time off of the spectacle. Thank you so much, Arthur. I love getting a chance to talk with you anytime I can.

Arthur Sze: Thank you, Forrest, for taking the time to have this conversation with me. And I so admire your poetry and translations too. So, I always look forward to having this kind of conversation with you.

Forrest Gander: You did a really great job. It was really wonderful. Thank you.

Arthur Sze: Just wonderful questions. I mean, we could talk for hours.

Forrest Gander: Yeah, we have and we will.

Arthur Sze: Great to see you. Yeah. OK. Take care.

Forrest Gander: Alright.

Arthur Sze: Thank you.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Adrian Matejka: A big thanks to Arthur Sze and Forrest Gander. Forrest has received the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. His newest book is Knot, out from Copper Canyon Press in 2022. Arthur Sze was an artist-in-residence at the Merwin Conservancy on Maui where he wrote “Pe’ahi Light.” His latest book is The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. You can “Pe’ahi Light” in the April 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time—be well, stay safe, and thank you so much for listening.