Santa Fe poet Arthur Sze becomes US poet laureate

The Library of Congress this past week named Arthur Sze the 25th poet laureate of the United States. The longtime Santa Fe-based poet called the honor “a bit of a shock and also exciting.”

Over the course of his career, Sze has published 12 collections of poetry, including “The Glass Constellation,” which received a 2024 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award. He is also a renowned translator of classical Chinese poetry and a committed educator.

Sze’s poet laureate appointment comes just months after President Donald Trump fired Carla Hayden, who had served as the Librarian of Congress for over eight and a half years. It also comes the same week that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met virtually on Friday to come to a deal to spin off social media network TikTok to an American consortium and negotiate a state visit by Trump to China.

But Sze said he does not anticipate the larger political situation impinging upon his mission to increase the appreciation for poetry across the country.

“I’m appointed by the Library of Congress, and it’s not a political appointment,” he said. “I’m not worried about political interference, because I’m free to do what I need to do as a poet. And I want to approach that through language and through translation. That seems to me a way that we can harness some of the difficulties of our time, but in a really positive way.”

Each poet laureate undertakes a special project during their tenure, and Sze wants to focus on translation as a social practice.

“Obviously, I’ve just been appointed, so it’s in its early stages,” he said, “but I want to create an unconventional, very personal guide to translating poetry where readers will be invited to make their own translations.”

Sze has taught poetry at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) for 22 years, filling a vacancy left by Joy Harjo in 1984. Harjo subsequently served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2019 to 2022.

“We worked as poets in the schools (junior high and high schools) in 1974, ’75, ’76 and ’77. So, we knew each other over 50 years ago,” Sze said.

Sze said he got his job at IAIA on the strength of Harjo’s recommendation.

“The president (of IAIA) at that time, Jon Wade, called me in and said, Arthur, we have an opening at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Joy (Harjo) is leaving... But there are two problems. You’re not Native — we have Native preference — and you don’t have a graduate degree,” Sze said. “And I thought, Oh well, that’s it. I got up to leave. And he said, sit down. He said, Look, we believe in you. The students love you, and Joy has spoken highly of you.”

During his time at IAIA, Sze estimates that he has worked with students from over 200 Indigenous tribes across the United States, some of whom have gone on to become acclaimed poets in their own right.

“I think there were 16 students who are now professional poets, from Layli Long Soldier, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, to dg okpik, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,” he said. “It’s amazing. I had the privilege and honor of mentoring a whole generation of younger Native poets who have emerged.”

Sze’s own journey into poetry had an unconventional start, writing his first poem while sitting in a math class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“As an Asian American, growing up in New York, I had a lot of family pressure to do something safe and professional, like scientist, doctor, lawyer, right? Poetry was too risky or scary,” Sze said. “In my very first semester at MIT, in a calculus lecture, I was bored by what was happening in the classroom, and I just started to write. Pretty soon I was writing all the time.”

Having caught the poetry bug, Sze transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970, where he pursued both poetry and translation. After graduating, Sze wanted to move to a part of the country he’d never been to before, and his mentor, the poet Josephine Miles, suggested New Mexico.

“So, I came to Santa Fe. I didn’t know anyone,” Sze said. “I had my knapsack and my curiosity.”

While the mix of cultures in New Mexico was unfamiliar, Sze said he felt at home.

“The first people I met were a Pueblo photographer and a Navajo jeweler. I had never met Native Americans before, but as an Asian American, I felt an affinity with them,” he said.

Over the course of the next 50-plus years, Sze observed many parallels between Chinese and Indigenous cultures.

“There’s a close relation between the cultures, although it’s never been explicitly stated. And I say that because, during the time I taught for 22 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I created a particular class that was foundational, that all the emerging Native poets took. It was called ‘The Poetic Image,’” Sze said. “Native students immediately tuned into the connection between man and nature, and that sense of reverence and being a small part of a larger cosmos.”

Although nature and ecology are important to Sze, and recurring themes in his work, he avoids cliches about the beauty of nature.

“Ancient Chinese poetry had too many beautiful nature words. You know: moon, river, wine, blossoms. Why not have garbage or scissors in a poem?” he said. “The beautiful and the ugly need each other. If a poem is just full of beautiful things, it becomes too precious. And if it’s just loaded with ugly things, I think then there’s the hunger to find beauty. So, they’re interdependent.”

Sze also looks for ways to disrupt straightforward, linear narratives in his work.

“I have been dissatisfied with the traditional poem that just tells a linear story with a beginning, middle and end,” he said. “I like to have what I call microcosms in macrocosms — little snippets, where they jump around, because they reflect the kind of worlds in collision that we, frankly, live in today. So, I could be writing about something beautiful in nature, and then suddenly there’s the recognition that every five minutes, an elephant is shot for its tusks.”

That particular line about poaching springs up in the middle of Sze’s 2019 poem “The White Orchard,” which lends its name to the title of Sze’s most recent book — an anthology of interviews, essays and poems, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

“One of the things I like to do in my more recent work is to layer the poem to allow surprise, to allow juxtapositions and switches that you don’t initially understand, but that intuitively, you can trust that they’re touching on something deeper,” he said. “So, I like to think of those sort of phrases like tips of icebergs. There’s a lot below the surface, or behind the language, that’s hinted at.”

While some of those “icebergs” represent social and political realities, Sze does not consider himself a political poet, as such.

“I have difficulty with the sort of overt political poem that tries to tell a reader what to do or how to feel or how to see. I think poetry communicates and moves through its humanity,” he said. “So, if you’re just haranguing a reader, it boomerangs. It doesn’t really serve the purposes of the poem.”

“On the other hand, I like to say that poetry must resist all forms of coercion. It needs to be free to find what works best as a work of art, as a poem,” he said. “And I’m not trying to say my work isn’t political. But I think you can look at politics in so many ways. You can think of a politics of language, for instance. Every writer, in choosing the words and choosing the syntax — the way the sentences are constructed — has a politics behind it. And I’m comfortable with that.”

But part of what makes poetry special, according to Sze, is its ability to communicate beyond the literal meanings of words.

“I think poetry communicates, fundamentally, through sound and rhythm, not through the intellect,” Sze said. “So, you’re feeling it in your body, in the language. And sometimes you have to slow down. You can’t be in a hurry. You need to live with the poem. Then, that process of unfolding — or the intelligence coming to terms with the poem — happens. And then it becomes really exciting.”

Editor’s note: Logan Royce Beitmen’s full interview with Arthur Sze will be published this week on the Journal video podcast, “Work in Progress: Conversations with Creators.”