In a world that moves faster every day, Arthur Sze says poetry offers something increasingly rare: a chance to go slow.
“You can’t speed-read a poem,” he explains. “You have to read it, hear the sounds, the rhythms, reread it, not be in a hurry. Slowing down helps us realize that for our speed, we sacrifice things.”
Mr. Sze, the 25th U.S. poet laureate, first found poetry “intimidating and esoteric” in high school, only discovering its joy while scribbling lines in the back row of a calculus lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. That early exploration led him to author more than a dozen published collections, culminating in his appointment as the official poet of the United States.
Why We Wrote This
Arthur Sze, the new U.S. poet laureate, hopes you’ll take time to read a poem today – slowly. Within it, he says in an interview, are words and phrases that can be “seeds that nurture you.”
Ahead of his inaugural address at the Library of Congress Thursday, Mr. Sze, who is also a National Book Award winner, spoke about not being afraid of being perplexed by poetry. “It’s OK to read a poem and be baffled by it,” he says. “Maybe there’s one phrase that astonishes or surprises you. Make those moments the seeds that nurture you.”
His forthcoming book is “Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In this current age of technological disruption and distraction, what can poetry teach us about presence and attention to the moment?
In our digital age, when things are moving so fast, people are oftentimes very disconnected. Poetry has a vital role to slow us down.
We’re on the surface too often. And when we slow down into our bodies, we can really connect more deeply to the language and the experience of a poem. And ultimately, to other people in the world around us. That’s a huge important thing that poetry does.
Greg Allen/Invision/AP/File
You are the first Asian-American poet laureate. How has your background as a second generation Chinese-American shaped your poetic voice or sense of rhythm?
Like many Asian Americans, I was brought up to do something safe and professional. That’s how I started at MIT. When I started writing, I was so excited about poetry, I felt like I was discovering parts of myself that I didn’t know existed.
When I first started writing poetry, I wanted to draw on the Chinese tradition and learn from classical Chinese poetry. In doing that, I heard sounds I would hear in household conversations, you know, the way Chinese is spoken. I learned how, in ancient Chinese poetry, the silences are choreographed, as well as the sounds. That was a revelation to me.
How do you encourage readers who might feel intimidated by poetry?
My advice is to listen to the sound and to the rhythm. Don’t worry too much on your first reading about trying to get it or feeling like you’re inadequate if you don’t get it. Because poems can have many meanings. Different readers can have different insights into a particular poem.
If a poem is good – if it’s strong and alive – it exists on many levels. It has many layers. And I feel like different readers can bring their intuition and their experience and appreciate the poem. It’s not like a math equation where there’s a correct answer.
You’ve described poetry as “a way to slow down the speed of the human heart.” How do you hope to help readers discover or rediscover that pace?
Each recent poet laureate has a particular project in mind to raise the appreciation of poetry. I’ve chosen 23 poems from 13 different languages for a book that will be published next spring. Then, I present three different translations of the same poem into English.
By presenting three different translations, I’m trying to show that there are many ways of looking at poetry. I want to slow down and deepen the process of engagement. Each translator finds something of value to translate, and then as an innovation at the end, I invite the reader to make their own translation of this poem and to carry it over into their own voice.
I hope to use this book as a vehicle that can go into high schools, colleges, community centers; that it can be a vehicle to help people read, to appreciate poetry, and again, to really slow down and pay more attention.
Who are some poets today who give you hope for the future of the art form?
Forrest Gander, Carol Moldaw, Kevin Young, Layli Long Soldier, Adrian Matejka, and Sherwin Bitsui. I pick poets that continually interest me. Two of them are Native American writers and former students of mine. But these are all poets, who I think, are evolving, and I’m always interested in what they’re going to do next.
Do you think that there’s an inner poet in all of us? And how do we tap into that?
I do think there is an inner poet in everyone, and there are different ways to tap into it. Sometimes it’s when people find little oases of stillness inside of the commotion of their daily lives. It might be a moment where you just sit down and you close your eyes and listen to your breathing.
I used to tell my students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, “Don’t think you’re writing a poem because then you’re gonna freeze up. Just open a page, write with intensity and with your imagination, and don’t worry about whether it’s prose or poetry. Whatever it is, just write one word after the other.” There are opportunities each day for everyone to discover something.
