A Review by Forrest Gander

The Poems of Arthur Sze

I first saw his poems in Tyuonyi, a literary magazine whose title is a Keresan word meaning "meeting place," and it seems an appropriate introduction to Arthur Sze's work which is, itself, a meeting place of aesthetics and physics, of Chinese and American poetics, of classical and modernist impulses, where asymptotic equations of events are balanced by the verb "is," where sentences suddenly change direction and blossom into questions, where the darkness of a line like "He hanged himself from the flagpole" might be, and is, juxtaposed between "Go kiss a horse's ass" and "I just do what I'm told."

I ordered a copy of his 1982 book, Dazzled, and in the memorable wake of reading it, I was ready to indenture myself to him for always. I fell in love with his mind, with the music of his mind, with his language. There is as much of an ars poetica in Dazzled as Arthur Sze has tendered us. In "Viewing Photographs of China," he writes

    . . . instead of insisting that
    the world have an essence, we
    juxtapose, as in a collage,
    facts, ideas, images:
                              the arctic
    tern, the pearl farm, considerations
    of the two World Wars, Peruvian
    horses, executions, concentration
    camps; and find, as in a sapphire,
    a clear light, a clear emerging
    view of the world.

I learned the word ristra from Arthur's poems. And lac. And cinchona. I learned that one might collect herring eggs by dipping spruce branches into calm water. I learned that a radar echo set off an explosive that drove a uranium-235 wedge into the nuclear bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Arthur Sze's poems aren't averse to facts. Nor to quotation, I-Ching throws, or Pueblo ceremonies. He never averts his gaze. The beautifully distinct natural world and the world of human suffering pour into Arthur's poems like those rivers Herakles re-channeled to clean out the Augean Stables. And what is it his poems need to clean? Perception. "A clear light," he writes, "a clear emerging/ view of the world."

Sze has asked us to look beyond an actor to the act itself. As in certain classical Chinese poems, no egos are specified. No one is there; we are all there; I is a verb.

It is that sense of emergence, of emerging perceptions, that Arthur Sze's line and rhythm so characteristically enact. The first line of "The String Diamond," for instance, is a complete sentence. One sentence and one act: "An apricot blossom opens to five petals." But the next line introduces two elements, cause and effect-"you step on a nail and even as you wince"-which continue into the third line and a linked sequence of seemingly random and specific incidents. The increasing enjambment heightens the readerly tension and almost prepares us for the way that some first cause, stepping on a nail, has radiated so deeply into the world of other events, into the world of others.

The next poem in the sequence is written in a series of couplets and begins with an imperative, one of Sze's signature gestures: "Pin a mourning cloak to a board and observe," he begins. Elsewhere he tells the reader:

    Notice the peculiar/ angle of light….
    Be amazed at the shine and the wet…..
    Set a string loop into a figure of two diamonds….

In their contexts, connected often to meditative tonalities and perceptual gestures, these imperatives hardly sound like commands. In fact, they seem to me radical acts of humility, where rather than extending a dialectic between reader and writer, between I and you, between any distinguishing pronouns, Sze has asked us to look beyond an actor to the act itself. As in certain classical Chinese poems, no egos are specified. No one is there; we are all there; I is a verb.

Working increasingly toward the poetic sequence, Arthur Sze has come to generate some of the most delicate and sensual formal structures of any of his contemporaries. While each of the poems in "Six Persimmons," one of his most recent sequences, looks similar on the page-each is a single stanza of eighteen lines with a ragged right margin-readers notice a gradual tonal shift through the poems. From the harsh opening word, "Cabron," through the non- grammatical lapidary densities, through Hawaiian words that stress vowels, and Latinate words that stress letters at the end of our alphabet--Isaacs, Vegas, Xanthodermus, x--we connect fragments of a narrative of erotic love as they concentrate into the last two poems. Incredibly, the tone of the poem enacts the persimmons ripening!

For those who don't already have it, one sure new year's pleasure is Arthur Sze's The Red Shifting Web, handsomely published by Copper Canyon Press in 1998.


    Forrest Gander is the author of several books of which Science & Steepleflower (New Directions, 1998) is best and most recent. This year he is Visiting Writer at Brown University.