Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze 2004

Arthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.

Background

Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review,^[1] and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish. Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)^[2] He has been included in anthologies such as Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 1994), Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, (Kaya Production, 1995), I Feel a Little Jumpy around You (Simon & Schuster, 1996), What Book!?: Buddhist Poems from Beats to Hiphop (Parallax Press 1998), and American Alphabets (Oberlin College Press, 2006).

He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe and has won three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.

Reviews

The poet Jackson Mac Low has said: "The word 'compassion' is much overused, 'clarity' less so, but Arthur Sze is truly a poet of clarity and compassion." Albuquerque Journal reviewer John Tritica: commented that Sze "resides somewhere in the intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation." Critic R.W. French notes that Sze's poems "are complex in thought and perception; in language, however, they have the cool clarity of porcelain. The surface is calm, while the depths are resonant. There is about these poems a sense of inevitability, as though they could not possibly be other than what they are. They move precisely through their patterns like a dancer, guided by the discipline that controls and inspires." ^[3]

Awards

• Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award
• Guggenheim Fellowship,^[4]
• American Book Award
• Lannan Literary Award for Poetry,^[5]
• Two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships
• George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship
• Western States Book Award for Translation.

Books

• The Willow Wind, Rainbow Zenith Press (Berkeley, CA), 1972,
• The Willow Wind: Poems and Translations from the Chinese, Tooth of Time Books (Santa Fe, NM), revised edition 1981.
• Two Ravens, Tooth of Time Books (Guadalupita, NM), 1976,
• Two Ravens: Poems and Translations from the Chinese, revised edition 1984.
• Dazzled, Floating Island Publications (Point Reyes, CA), 1982.
• River River, Lost Roads Publishers (Providence, RI), 1987.
• Archipelago, (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) (Port Townsend, WA).
• The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, (Copper Canyon Press, 1998).
• Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).
• The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
• Chinese Writers on Writing. Ed. Arthur Sze. (Trinity University Press, 2010).

Translations

• The Silk Dragon: Translations of Chinese Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).

References

External links

• Profile at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile and poems at Poets.org
• "An E-view with Arthur Sze", Rebecca Seiferle, The Drunken Boat
• Lunch Poems: Arthur Sze, UCTV, 4-28-08 (30 mins, audio)
• "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Arthur Sze participated in
• Sze reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on 1 April 1997. Video (30 mins)
• "Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe". The New Yorker. May 26, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/26/080526po_poem_sze. 
• "Aqueous Gold". Boston Review. February/March 2004. http://bostonreview.net/BR29.1/sze.html.