Words Matter

Two of the most interesting artists I’ve had the good fortune to interview are the poet Arthur Sze, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the prolific translator and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, a young 90 when I caught up with him last year. Some time before that, Sze and Tanahashi had joined hands in a form of calligraphy called zuihitsu, or “following the brush.” Tanahashi proposed “two-minded calligraphy,” so together they held one brush, making stroke after stroke, one taking the lead before giving way to the other. “It was this continual process of revelation,” Sze told me in a recent podcast interview, “and together we created this one Chinese character, the character for emptiness.”

It is this process that spins the thread running through Sze’s latest collection, Into the Hush, itself a bit of a revelation, taking the reader “to the edge of what can be said,” as Sze says of one of his poems in the series. Leaves speak (their movement, he adds, is syntax); a jaguar vows vengeance on the human world; and one poem gives voice to an object as mundane as an eraser. Civilizations pass, ecosystems are lost, and languages die even as Sze’s poetry gives new life to our own, playing with fresh forms while cleverly adapting others to our modern idiom. (He takes creative liberties, for instance, with the Malaysian pantoum, a poetic form that sent me googling.)

“Poetry helps us slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” Sze told fellow poet Kenji C. Liu in a Tricycle interview in 2020. At a time when the very notion of truth is in contention and language a tool of crude manipulation, poetry can also wake us up to what is: “Words matter,” Sze tells us, “and they need to be used with care…. Poetry absolutely has a role to awaken us and to ignite that passion for language.” (See “The Edge of Language”)

Last year, I spoke with Sze about his collection of translations in The Silk Dragon II, which included poetry from the classical period to the 20th century, when poets made a sharp break with the past. They turned to the vernacular to meet the challenge of describing a new world for which there were not yet words while maintaining continuity with earlier forms. A similar task faced Buddhism itself in the tumult of the 20th century, although Buddhists in China were split on which direction to take. While there were those who fought hard to return to the fundamentals of the religion, others were radical reformists: “What was needed,” the scholar Benjamin Brose writes in “Investigate!”, “was not a renewed commitment to past precedents but a new vision better suited to the current reality.”

Brose’s article, adapted from the just-published Buddhist Masters of Modern China, focuses on the revered Chan master Laiguo Miaoshu (1881–1953). A strict disciplinarian who presided over grueling meditation retreats, Laiguo is known for his singular focus on the question, “Who recites the Buddha’s name?” Following Brose’s compelling introduction to the period is a dharma talk that Laiguo gave during one of his ten-week retreats, which often included twenty-two hours of daily practice. With this piece, Brose, a professor of Buddhist and Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, introduces to many for the first time one of the great Chan masters of the last century.

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In the rush to adapt, we can forget how easily knowledge can be lost, especially if we are unaware of the cultural riches we hold. “Knowledge,” George Eliot wrote, “slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down”; ignorance “gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations.”

The Chinese poets and teachers of the early 20th century saw the pressing need for change while also preserving their traditions. Both Sze and Brose capture for us moments in time when, amid a disruptive and sometimes discontinuous break with the past, a few people taught us new languages without losing the wisdom of the old. They understood the value of what preceded them, and so might we.

–James Shaheen
Editor-in-Chief