LINES OF SIGHT, AND BEYOND: A LECTURE AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Arthur Sze

I believe poetry has a crucial role to play in our lives. It helps us slow down and deepen our attention; it helps us uncover, discover things we didn’t know and things we didn’t know we already knew, things that we couldn’t articulate until we experienced them in a poem. A poem communicates first through sound and rhythm, and it is understood viscerally in the body before it can be articulated by the intelligence. Poetry speaks to our deepest selves and connects us all, and it also speaks to the exigencies of our time. Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing. As a poet, I want to proceed with care but I am not bound by reality. I want to use the pressure and urgency of reality to affirm the power of the human imagination and the emotional range and depth of human experience. Although I like the facts in my poems to be accurate, I am willing to change details and invent new ones in pursuit of emotional and imaginative truth. We can have black tangerines in a poem, if that’s what is needed. And this allegiance to the deeper truth is manifested in the different forms and kinds of poems I have explored and developed over time. Poetry can claim and reimagine the deepest meanings of “exploration” and “freedom” as part of the American experience.

I’d like to begin with a poem that references Thomas Jefferson. 

BLACK CENTER

Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans

in an arroyo but catch the budding
tips of pear branches and wonder what

it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon

skeleton on the White House floor but,
with pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;

when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.

Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red, blue, and white lights along the road—

a wildfire in the dark; though no one
you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,

an arrow struck a bull’s-eye and quivered
in its shaft: one minute gratitude rises

like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.

“Black Center” was created through an associative process, and the generative spark was driving at night and passing an accident on the other side of the highway. I saw red, white, and blue lights of police cars as well as an ambulance, and I immediately connected those colors to the American flag. I changed the order of colors to “red, blue, and white” so that the reference to America would be more indirect. As a poet, I need to explore and play with language. I need to lose my way and, disoriented, discover, reorient, and envision new possibilities. As a poet, I need to be able to go into the dark, into the darkest regions of experience, and write, as needed, from those places. “Black Center” touches on some dark themes, but, instead of unfolding through linear narration, it makes associative leaps. 

I was born in New York City in 1950 and grew up on Long Island with Chinese immigrant parents who spoke Mandarin as well as English. Exposure to two languages was formative for me. As a child, I remember going to Chinese language school on weekends, where I sat at a desk and, given a sheet of paper with lines that formed a grid of empty, square boxes, wrote Chinese characters again and again, trying to get the stroke order and proportion of each character right. Out of fifty attempts, a parent-teacher often circled one or two as decent. Maybe that repetitive act of writing, which carried an implicit reverence for language, was a seed that came to later fruition. As an Asian American growing up in Garden City, I felt enormous family pressure to do something safe and professional: scientist, doctor, engineer, investment banker were all possibilities. For high school, I moved to New Jersey and was a boarding student at the Lawrenceville School. I was good at math and science but I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. My father was a chemical engineer who got his PhD from MIT, so I applied, was accepted, and started college there. In my first semester, I sat in a large lecture hall with over a hundred students and stared at white boards where the professor wrote out calculus equations. One day I stared at the equations and turned away. I flipped to the back of my notebook and started to write. Phrases came to me. I wasn’t sure what was happening, where it was going, but I felt exhilarated. I couldn’t have articulated it then but, in that rush, I subconsciously understood that if I continued down the road set up for me I would live what Henry David Thoreau called a life of “quiet desperation.” I could have pursued a career in science but I would have always had a gnawing hunger inside and would have yearned to know what would have happened if I had pursued a life of writing.

After jotting down a jumble of phrases during class, I remember sitting at a desk in my dorm room that evening and working the phrases into a poem. That was a moment of awakening. And it was irreversible. The next day I wrote another poem. And the next day, another. Soon I was writing all the time and realized that’s what I wanted to do. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I enrolled in a poetry workshop with MIT and Harvard students with visiting poet Denise Levertov. Denise had recently taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and she made the Bay Area sound exciting. I had never been west of Pennsylvania but I decided to apply as a transfer student to UC Berkeley, and, at the end of my sophomore year, I hitchhiked from Boston to Berkeley. It took me six days to cross America, and I still remember crossing the Sierra and coming down the highway and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay. As I got situated in Berkeley, I began to understand what an immense gift of freedom we have in our country. On an elemental level, one can think of freedom as not being bound, confined, or detained by force; one can think of freedom as self-determination, as personal, civil, and political liberty. During my first days in Berkeley, I felt such joy at being able to move, without hindrance, in any direction I wanted to explore. And I glimmeringly saw this gift of untapped possibilities as an essential part of the American experience. I was able to pursue my dream of becoming a poet.

It may seem odd to jump now to a poem written decades later but I am pursuing a hopscotch path rather than linear chronology. I want to propose that one thing poetry can do, by making us slow down, is to help us notice deeply, to even see beneath and behind appearances. I think of how William Carlos Williams can harness minute particulars and make those particulars vehicles for insight and emotional resonance. Here’s

FIRST SNOW

A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:

      imbibing the silence,
      you stare at spruce needles:

               there’s no sound of a leaf blower,
               no sign of a black bear;

a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
      against an aspen trunk;
      a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.

           You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:

when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;

      the world of being is like this gravel:

           you think you own a car, a house,
           this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.

Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
           and stood at Gibraltar,

           but you possess nothing.

Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
      and, in this stillness,

           starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

Poetry is an endless source of wonder and discovery. I wrote this poem in perceptual clusters, with dropped lines and indented stanzas, and I wanted to use the form to delineate and even enact, through silences, the process of exploration and finding unexpected connections and insights. Poetry to me is also organic and embodies “living at the edge of a new leaf.” Each day I like to write, before dawn, into and through sunrise, when I am not fully awake and not fully in control of my language. At this liminal edge, there is inherent freedom and exploration: here all things are possible, and in the process of writing toward what might be strange or not understood but intuited as necessary, the willingness to take risks is crucial. One of the great things about writing is that you can have a disaster, a total disaster, but it is not fatal. You do not slip off a high wire and plummet to death; instead, you can toss the words aside and start over, another day, another time. But when the process of writing is going well, I feel like I am working with shards, with snippets, with musical phrases, and that the poem accrues through luminous concretion. One day I happened to step out of the shower and noticed a piece of lichen growing on a wood ceiling beam. I suddenly thought, What would that lichen say to a person? I had never experimented with voice in that way before, and as I wrote, I thought, this lichen will not follow rules of punctuation; it will speak, under emotional pressure, in one stream:

LICHEN SONG

—Snow in the air     you’ve seen a crust on the ceiling wood and never considered how I gather moisture when you step out of the shower    you don’t care that I respire as you breathe     for years you’ve washed your face gazed in the mirror shaved combed your hair rushed out while I who may grow an inch in a thousand years catch the tingling sunlight    you don’t understand how I can dive to a temperature of liquefied gas and warm back up absorb water start growing again without a scar I can float numb in space be hit with cosmic rays then return to earth and warm out of my sleep to respire again without a hiccup    you come and go while I stay gripped to pine and the sugar of existence runs through you runs through me you sliver if you just go go go     if you slowed you could discover that mosquitoes bat their wings six hundred times a second and before they mate synchronize their wings you could feel how they flicker with desire    I am flinging your words and if you absorb not blot my song you could learn you are not alone in pain and grief though you’ve instilled pain and grief     you can urge the dare and thrill of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post but you cough only look yes look at me now because you are blink about to leave—

When I was a student at UC Berkeley, I wanted to explore so many different arenas that I didn’t know how I could fulfill the requirements to graduate. I wanted to learn enough Chinese so that I could translate poems by Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei into English. I thought that I could learn my craft by apprenticing myself to those poems. I also wanted to study philosophy and English literature. I enrolled in a poetry workshop with Josephine Miles, and she quickly became my mentor. When I explained my dilemma, she offered to be my faculty sponsor so I could create my own self-directed major in poetry. Over tea at her house on a Saturday afternoon, after she had gone over my poems, she smiled and said, “You can take Swahili if you want; one day you’re going to be a poet.” Her mentorship and generosity of spirit gave me the courage to continue on my path. Nearing graduation, I told Josephine that I wanted to go somewhere in America I had never been before. Josephine suggested I try Santa Fe, New Mexico. She gave me the name of a friend, Stanley Noyes, and I set out.

When I met Stan, he suggested I apply to the newly formed New Mexico Poetry-in-the-Schools program. I applied, was accepted, and spent the next ten years working all over the state. I met Native students at Jemez Pueblo, Spanish-speaking students in Ojo Caliente and Bernalillo, and I worked at every junior high school in Santa Fe. Then, sponsored by the Santa Fe Council for the Arts, I became a visiting poet at the New Mexico School for the Deaf and worked in classes with the aid of a sign translator. At the end of my residency, the students gave a poetry reading, and I will never forget how after each student signed their poem in complete silence, there was thunderous applause. And after the worst prison riot in New Mexico history, I taught a poetry workshop with incarcerated women, and a year later, with men.

I was excited to be living in a part of America that was outside of the America I knew. When Walt Whitman writes, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” the assertion applies not just to poetry but to America. For twenty-two years, from 1984 to 2006, I taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I taught students of all ages from over two hundred tribes. It was not an easy situation. The institute seethed with intertribal tensions and rivalries. Originally funded through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the funding was precarious from year to year. People came and quickly left. I stayed on, and when the institute was taken out of the BIA and had its own funding from the federal government, I oversaw the transition from a two-year associate of arts degree to a four-year bachelor of fine arts degree program in creative writing. During my time there, I tried not to write about any students but when I left in 2006, I wanted to write a sequence to remember and honor them.

When I start a sequence, I usually write a poem and recognize that it’s part of something larger and deeper. That first poem, though, is never the beginning section of the sequence; instead, it’s somewhere inside the field of energy of the larger poem. I have to explore, discover, and work from the inside out; I like how, in a sequence, one can change place, time, voice, rhythm, emotional pitch from section to section. I believe the poetic sequence is the form of our time, because it enables one to develop a complexity that intensifies as well as enlarges scope and resonance. And it can extend as long as needed. For my sequence inspired by the institute, I thought about how, at graduation, there was a tradition to name each student and then their tribe, so I started by drawing up a list of students I was privileged to teach. Emerson once said, “Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.” As I stared at the list, I thought, this is too literal, but suddenly I saw that if I substituted the name of each tribe for each student, the list would become a roll call. I then played with the sound and rhythm of the tribal names to create an order. I also drew on my science background and thought how each star in the night sky has a unique signature of light. The bands of light are called spectral lines. I decided to treat the institute as my star, and then I had a viable structure to work with. I say all this because writing poetry is an essential practice of freedom, where the unfettered imagination can use the wretched and the beautiful, the mundane and the astonishing, anything and everything. I believe no word is inherently more poetic than another, that “scissors” can be used as readily as “trash,” that “phlegm” can be used as readily as “blood,” and that, structurally, “simultaneity” and “synchronicity” can be as effective as “succession.” There isn’t time to read the manifold sequence of “Spectral Line”—it’s in nine sections—but I want to share the spine, the central fifth section:

Acoma Pueblo,
Diné,
Crow,
Oglala Lakota,
Menominee,
Northern Ute,
Zuni Pueblo,
Kiowa,
Muckleshoot,
Standing Rock Lakota,
Muscogee,
Ojibwe,
San Ildefonso Pueblo,
Comanche,
Tlingit,
Mescalero Apache,
Siberian Yupik,
Jemez Pueblo,
Pawnee,
Chugach/Alutiiq,
Mohawk,
Swampy Cree,
Osage,
Taos Pueblo,
Arapaho,
Jicarilla Apache,
Paiute,
Haida,
Onandaga,
Cochiti Pueblo,
Sioux,
Eastern Shawnee,
Caddo,
Santa Clara Pueblo,
Northern Cheyenne,
Prairie Band Potawatomi,
Choctaw,
Chickasaw,
Tsalagi,
Inupiat.

This simple list comes out of personal experience but the literal has been transformed. For me, the path of poetry is the path of liberation. Poetry must resist all forms of coercion. I can try to direct a poem in a certain direction—other people can promulgate a certain kind of poem—but I know that when I write, I must suspend all that and pay deep attention to where the poem itself wants to take me. I enter a space where I am leading and am also being led. I enter a space where I explore and discover things I don’t and can’t yet understand. It is scary to not be in control and not know where the writing is going but this is where the poem is most alive. In not knowing too soon what is going to happen, in resisting finalizing phrases, I find this place one of intense vulnerability and also at the heart of freedom. Exercising this inner freedom to create a poem requires courage and stamina. When the poem is provisionally completed, I usually experience exhaustion. I have no idea if the writing is any good and don’t care about that; instead, if I know that I have given all I can to the poem, that is what matters. And, by extension, I find that this care I have for language leads me to speak and act more thoughtfully and to care and respect all other people and all living things.

I mentioned at the outset that poetry can and must speak to the exigencies of our time. In doing so, it is good to remember Emily Dickinson’s advice, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” In the last decade or so of my writing life, I have liked composing poems in one-line stanzas, or monostichs. In this form, each one-line stanza ends in a dash and is independent. As the microcosm of each one-line stanza accrues through juxtaposition, a macrocosm is formed and resonates. Here’s

VECTORS

First extinction in the Galápagos Islands, the least vermilion flycatcher—

Hopis drill a foot deep and plant blue corn along a wash—

Danger, a woman brushed on the side of a napalm bomb—

in an oblong box emptied of firewood, a black-widow web—

shaving, he nicked himself and stared in the mirror in a moment of blood—

out of a saddlebag, a teen pulls a severed goat’s head—

before signing his name, he recalls hotel rooms were once used as torture chambers—

in Thessaloníki, the beach attendant made a gun of his hand and fired at him—

prisoners cackled when the inmate onstage said, “Is it not time for my painkiller?”—

weighing mushrooms, the Tibetan cashier grins, “You suffer from suspicion; I suffer from kindness”—

a mercenary turned car mechanic spilled a pile of Krugerrands onto the table—

looking up from a tusk under the lamp, the carver smiled, “It’s butter in my hands”—

In my journey as a poet, I have tried to keep evolving and not get stuck writing one kind of poem. I like Theodore Roethke’s line: “I learn by going where I have to go.” Yes, I learn by going, by trying and failing, trying and failing, again and again, and I want the poem to be sprung from inner necessity. I still have so much to learn, and I can genuinely say that I am as excited about poetry now as I was at the beginning. In this final poem, I employed monostichs but added a stricture where each line has to pick up a word or words from the previous line. Within this stricture, there is complete freedom: any image, place, time, voice, fragment, query, assertion is possible. I developed this form by wanting to deepen musicality. I wanted repetition to move through the poem but not in any predictable way. I’ve called this invented form a “Cascade.” My hope is that the stricture gives rigor and intensity to the language and that the lines enact what Wallace Stevens might have called the poem in the act of finding “what will suffice.” The poem is set in Jacona, New Mexico. Many people who visit that area are struck by the beauty of the high desert landscape. Yet, if you walk in that terrain and look west, you can spot a small water tank on top of a mesa. That water tank marks the site of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb, so, suddenly, there’s also danger. In this final poem, Jefferson once again makes an appearance. Here’s

SIGHT LINES

I’m walking in sight of the Rio Nambe—

salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—

at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—

the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—

a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—

no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—

Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves—

during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—

a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—

when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—

I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—

I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—

I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—

though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—

though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—

the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—

I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—

fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—

though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

NOTE. As the recipient of the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for lifetime achievement, I delivered this talk at the Library of Congress’s James Madison Building in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2024. “Vectors” is from Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), and the other five poems are from The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).