The Edge of Language

For poet and translator Arthur Sze, poetry offers a way to ask difficult questions without any expectation of an answer. “It helps us slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” he told Tricycle in a 2020 interview. “When one reads a poem, one has to pay attention to the sounds of words, to the rhythm of language, [and] experience the dance and tension between sound and silence.”

His twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe. In poems that push the boundaries of language, Sze conjures and inhabits the voices of jaguars, aspen leaves, and erasers in turn, expanding our awareness—and, in the process, forcing us to reckon with the devastating impact of the Anthropocene.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Sze to discuss the generativity of emptiness, how poetry stays present tense, and what it means for art to awaken us to what is.

To start, can you tell us about the backstory for this collection? The one time I met the translator and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, after we had dinner he said, “Arthur, we should do two-minded calligraphy.” I said, “What’s that?” He pulled out some paper on the dinner table and ground some ink, and together we held one brush. I had never done this before. I had the amazing experience of creating one character in unison with him, and in places where I expected to move the brush, he resisted and paused, and in places I expected a pause, he moved through. It was this continual process of revelation, and together we created this one Chinese character, the character for emptiness.

This form of calligraphy is called zuihitsu, which literally means following the brush. On the one hand, there’s a kind of rigor involved in creating the character, but on the other hand, there’s a sense of risk and discovery and spontaneity. I love that combination of having rigor, which is there in the language of the poems, but also a sense of not knowing what’s going to happen, of being open to exploration and enlightenment along the way.

The process of poetic creation is a theme throughout the collection, and in one poem, the speaker quotes a line from the classical Chinese poet Li Bai (701–762) and ponders “how a line written in 740 stays present tense.” So can you tell us about poetry’s ability to stay present tense? One of the things I love about classical Chinese poetry is that you can read a poem from 740 CE, and you don’t feel like, “Oh, that was written so long ago.” When I read those poems, I feel like, “Wow, it could be happening today.” There’s an immediacy; there’s a presence, a power of attention.

One of the tensions in the book is between the frailty of language and its perseverance and endurance in how powerful it can be. I think one of the ways that poetry can stay present tense is by foregrounding the image and not trying to make pronouncements but allowing the reader to engage with and see the world in fresh ways. When the language can do that through imagery and sound and rhythm, then it stays fresh; it stays immediate.

The collection explores the extinction and survival not only of languages but also of entire species and landscapes. The first poem includes a line about matsutake mushrooms emerging from the rubble of Hiroshima, and later poems survey the wreckage of wildfires, deforestation, and climate catastrophe. So how does poetry help you explore these themes of destruction and what survives us? One of the vital things about poetry is it helps a writer to ask difficult questions without coming up with easy solutions—to live in that moment of trying to find or discover what will suffice, what will be sufficient to allow you to go on to live fully and deeply. And so one can’t pretend that these catastrophes aren’t happening, but at the same time, one doesn’t need to be dominated by them.

Right, a number of the poems feature striking juxtapositions—grief and joy, beauty and terror, kindness and cruelty. In the poems, as in life, the sublime exists alongside destruction and decay. Can you say something about this? I think it’s something that evolved in my poetry over time. In the ancient cosmological Chinese view of yin and yang, of light and dark, the one needs the other. You can’t just separate one out. You can’t take the cosmos and cut it in half—the darkness has a point of light, and the swirl of light has a point of darkness. They’re constantly flowing and constantly transforming. I think over time, in the evolution of my own writing, I felt like I wanted to put more and more of the world into the poetry, to not exclude anything. In doing that, I found that these oppositions naturally became forces or motions or movements in my poetry without any easy resolution.

In one poem you write, “When you’ve worked this long, your art is no longer an art but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.” This seems to bear out in the collection, as the speaker of the poems attunes to different elements of the world around them, almost like tuning into different frequencies of existence. So what does it mean for art to wake our eyes to what is? I love what you said about different frequencies of existence. In a way I’m trying to expand the range of awareness. Often, when poetry is taught in universities, there’s this idea that a poem can be well-made, and certainly, it’s important that the language be well-crafted. But the poem isn’t just an object. It isn’t a vessel or container. Ultimately, I believe the language of the poem comes alive through voice. It gets activated, and then it becomes a living force. And then the role of poetry isn’t so much that there’s a beautiful construction in language—it does something more. Poetry enables us to see what is. It provides a pathway to a way of being in the world, not just experiencing art as something external and admiring it for its craftsmanship.

I think of Prospero’s wand, which casts spells of deception and illusion. Your wand here is to wake people up, but at the same time, there’s a great potential for language to put us to sleep. Do you ever think about that? Yes, and I think one of the tasks of poetry is to struggle against that, to make us pay attention to language. Words matter, and they need to be used with care. The meaning and force behind the language is supremely important. I feel like poetry absolutely has a role to awaken us and to ignite that passion for language.

Poetry enables us to see what is. It provides a pathway to a way of being in the world.

It’s often said that poetry is difficult, or that the audience for poetry is small. But poems are meant to be read and reread. I feel like with good poems, one lives with them. You don’t just read it and put it aside. It’s not like today’s headline or newspaper. A really good poem will call you back again and again. And if a poem is good, there are levels of meaning and depths of experience that you might not get in the beginning. You might be disoriented by the sound or the rhythm or think, “Gee, I don’t quite know what that means, but I trust there’s something important going on here.”  That creates an urgency to come back and reread the poem and relive it again and again. For me, that’s part of the urgent, necessary task of poetry.

In this collection you use a form called the pantoum, and one of the reasons I bring that up is that the same words take on different meanings in different contexts. That’s sort of the work of poetry, in part anyway, to put words together in new ways, because reading it in a new way wakes us up. Could you say something about that form and why you chose to use it? Yeah, this is the first time I’ve written in this form. It’s from [Malaysia], and I often think of gamelan music from Bali that has these processions of sound, and you can hear the changes happening progressively. In the pantoum form, poems are traditionally written in four-line stanzas, and the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and the third of the next. There’s a kind of procession, a kind of repetition and elegant variation as the phrases reappear.

The thing I found particularly exciting was, as I wrote the two pantoums in this book, I fulfilled those requirements, and then I thought I could add some silences, some white space inside of the lines. I still have the exact repetition of the same words, but if I shift the pauses, if I change the rhythm, I change the focus, and I make the reader experience the language in a new way. That was something I just stumbled onto. I didn’t say, “Oh, now I’m going to do this.” I just was working with the language, and I liked the repetitions, but I needed something a little more that would sharpen it, freshen it, and make the reader feel like, “I know the words are going to repeat, but I don’t quite know how.” I wanted to create that tension. For me as a poet, it was very exciting to see how silence and blank space could change the whole meaning.

The last time we spoke, you talked about how translating classical and contemporary Chinese poetry has influenced your own craft. When I read some of the poems in this collection, I couldn’t help but think of the 20th-century poet Wen Yiduo (1899–1946), whose work you translated in The Silk Dragon II. I’m wondering if you could tell us about how your practice of translation influenced this particular collection. I think when I’m translating, I’m working at my deepest level as a poet, and I feel the responsibility of how to bring a poem from, say, a thousand years ago from another language and culture into English. I want my translation to be alive and to work as a poem, so I might need to make a few changes here and there because English and Chinese are so different. Those moments in translating have been powerful in my own evolution as a poet.

I can’t say that Wen Yiduo specifically was on my mind when I was writing Into the Hush, but I can say that of all the translations I did in The Silk Dragon II, Wen Yiduo was really crucial to me. He was writing at a time when China was in such turmoil, and he thought, “I can’t just pretend and write these classical, beautiful verses. I need to confront the ugliness and the tragedies of what’s happening, and poetry needs to be able to break open and find a new way to do that.”

Those lessons of thinking about what Wen Yiduo did have been instrumental in helping me create the poems of Into the Hush, where I’m taking a form like a pantoum, but I realize that the form doesn’t quite give the kind of vitality or immediacy that I want or need. Then I work with that, and I put in a caesura or add in silences.

In “Architectures of Emptiness,” there’s an idea that leaves could be words and their movement a syntax. It’s like the poem brings you to the edge of what can be said, and then you as the reader have to go beyond it into a stage beyond language. That comes out of translation, that sense of working with finite things but searching for a way to work with the infinite.

Emptiness seems to run like a current through this collection. Can you say more about the role of emptiness in your work and in this book in particular? I feel like from an Asian perspective, emptiness isn’t just a blank; it’s generative. It’s allowing the speech and the sounds to be themselves, and it’s also going beyond that and allowing the listener room to think their own thoughts. That breathing space is extremely important.

With this collection, I’m really trying to create these unconventional spaces or moments where a kind of surprise or insight can happen. This is connected to the image on the book cover, which is bioluminescence. When the artist Erika Blumenfeld was researching phytoplankton, she discovered that the plankton would erupt in moments of light when they were disturbed, and each one is unique. I was thrilled to have that image on the cover of the book: Out of this darkness, there’s an eruption of light. For me, emptiness is like this rich, pregnant space that allows that moment of light to erupt, and you couldn’t have that eruption if you didn’t allow for that space.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full episode at tricycle.org/podcast.