Three Questions and Three Responses by Arthur Sze, Poet Laureate of the United States
Arthur Sze’s work has long invited readers into a poetics of attention. It is one that listens closely to the natural world, scientific inquiry, history, and the fragile, luminous moments that bind them together. As the Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of twelve books of poetry, Sze has shaped contemporary American poetry through a body of work that is at once expansive and precise, meditative and urgent. From Archipelago to The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems to his latest collection, Into the Hush, his poems trace networks of connection, such as ecological, cultural, and ethical, asking how we might live more fully within complexity rather than retreat from it.
We at Chapter House have a special place in our hearts for Arthur Sze, because he was a faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1984 to 2006. In this role, he had a profound impact on so many IAIA students, staff, and faculty. He is also the second U.S. Poet Laureate with ties to IAIA. Joy Harjo (Mvskoke Nation) ’68 was the United States Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022, serving three terms. Harjo was the first Native US Poet Laureate.
In addition to his poetry, Sze’s deep engagement with translation and literary conversation reveals a writer committed not only to the making of poems, but to thinking rigorously about how poems come into being and how they move through the world. His many honors, including lifetime achievement awards and major national prizes, speak to the breadth of his influence, but his work remains grounded in careful seeing and sustained listening.
This brief three-question interview offers a focused window into Sze’s thinking at this moment in his long and distinguished career. In this email exchange, Sze reflects on the challenges of writing a particular poetry book, the responsibilities of the poet writing across knowledge systems, and the role that poetry plays in cultivating moral attention in a world of distraction and speed. Sze chose these three queries from a series of questions that Chapter House provided to him.
1. Which of your books were most difficult for you to write and why?
Compass Rose (2014) has been the most difficult book for me to write. The title poem is a suite of ten poems, and it took me an entire year to harness the field of energy that is at the emotional core. I didn’t know where the beginning or ending was, but I trusted that, poem by poem, the shape of the suite would emerge. It did, though I ended up discarding several poems or parts of poems in the process. In the tenth section, when I started with a line from a poem I translated from the Chinese poet Du Fu (712-770 CE), “Shaggy red clouds in the west,” I knew I was approaching the end. In the ancient poem, that image opens into a vision of reunion and reconciliation; in making that allusion, I knew that I was at the threshold of discovering my own ending, but it was an arduous process.
Also, the final poem in the book, “The Unfolding Center,” was the longest poem I have ever written. I wrote it in collaboration with a sculptor, Susan York. Instead of a sculpture, Susan made drawings with graphite lines, where the graphite had fifty to sixty layers to create a very deep black texture. As I watched her work and thought about how her process was visible and embodied in her artwork, I decided to write a section of the sequence as a monologue with strike-through lines, where the speaker revises what he says. Months after I finished that sequence, I discovered the German philosopher Martin Heidegger advocated for the use of strike-through lines. Heidegger said,
“Because the words are necessary, they remain legible. Because the words are inaccurate, they are struck through.”
That was exactly how I used my strike-through lines, and I have used that technique in other poems, but it’s interesting to me that I came to this discovery through collaboration with a visual artist and not through reading Heidegger’s statement in a book.
Finally, the structure to the book Compass Rose was extremely difficult. I tried organizing the book in sections, and that didn’t work. I tried to organize the book in one continual flow, and that didn’t work. One day, I took all the poems and laid them out on the floor in my writing studio. I moved poems around and suddenly saw that one poem, “Sarangi Music,” inspired by travel in India, and composed of one-line stanzas, could be threaded between other poems and sequences and provide a through-line to the book. I then had to discover how those lines could work. I couldn’t, for instance, use two lines at a time; that kind of format was too regular. I eventually found that when the poem appeared without title or comment in the following configuration—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and then 9 lines—the untitled passages had momentum that threw light on the unfolding progression to the book. That orchestration and use of juxtaposition was very difficult, but it was also a break-through for me. I used a different set of untitled lines in my books Sight Lines (2019) and Into the Hush (2025), but the discovery of these possibilities came first with Compass Rose.
2. Your poems often braid Indigenous ways of knowing with scientific observation, creating a poetics that feels at once ancient and urgently contemporary. How do you approach research and lived experience as sources for lyric discovery, and what responsibilities do you feel when writing across knowledge systems?
Lived experience is the marrow to my poetry. Research can help me discover unanticipated connections, and scientific observation can provide rigor, but there’s no substitute for the emotion and imagination at the blood-making core of a poem.
Here’s an example. If I thought that the ginkgo leaf had an interesting shape and that I should research the history of the ginkgo tree and put that into my poetry, it would never work, because the research is ahead of the poetry. Instead, here’s how creativity and research are entwined in the poems in The Ginkgo Light (2009). In my poetic practice, I like to periodically lay out on the floor in my studio all the poems I have written over the last six to nine months to see how the poems are in conversation. I ask myself, “Are there common threads? Am I overusing a certain phrase? What are the strengths and weaknesses? Are these poems separate or part of a sequence?” In 2007, when I did this, I noticed that several poems had the image of a ginkgo leaf. I’ve always been fascinated by the shapes of leaves, and I started to research the biology and history of the ginkgo leaf.
I discovered that the ginkgo leaf has a unique structure: the vein that attaches the leaf to a branch splits and splits again without ever forming a network. This accounts for the leaf’s fan-like shape, and this structure is called “dichotomous venation.” When I discovered this scientific fact, it made me think of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” We are always having to make choices in our daily lives, and we can never return to that moment where there’s a split in the road and we have to choose one path and not another; but, unlike the Frost poem where the speaker thinks of one crucial split in the road that “has made all the difference,” it seems to me the splits can occur every day and accrue over a lifetime. I suddenly envisioned a poem where lots of terrible things happen to people over the course of their lives. I started writing fragments of poems, fragments that later found their way into my sequence, “The Ginkgo Light.”
As I was working on the sequence, written over seven months, I continued to research the ginkgo and discovered that after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a temple in the city was obliterated, but a ginkgo tree not only survived the blast but bloomed shortly afterwards. That fact astonished me, and I had a vision of how we are all living in the nuclear age with the shadow of the first atom bomb in the sky. Living in Santa Fe, I am always remembering that Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb, is not far away; but, instead of writing large, I chose to write small and use luminous slivers, details, that invoked destruction, personal and social, to create a fragmented journey where the speaker comes to recognize that “to recoil from darkness is to feed the darkness” and that we have to find ways to move through darkness, even as we may bear scars from that experience.
In writing across knowledge systems, I believe care and respect are fundamental.
I often think that in our contemporary world, we have the illusion and delusion that we are more “advanced” than indigenous cultures because of our technology. Just because we have cars, cell phones, and satellites doesn’t mean we are more advanced than indigenous people who depicted the supernova explosion of the Crab Nebula in 1054 CE on a wall at Chaco Canyon. Einstein once remarked that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I am continually in awe of the power of imagination of indigenous peoples across the globe. With that in mind, if I draw on the Incan use of knotted cords to record events, as I did in my book Quipu (2005), I try to do it with great care, respect, and even reverence.
3. Your work frequently moves between intimate moments and global crises, such as climate change, extinction, and political violence. What role do you believe poetry plays in cultivating moral attention in an era of distraction and speed?
Poetry communicates viscerally through sound and rhythm and in the body before it is apprehended and comprehended in the mind. When you slow down and say the words of a poem aloud, you deepen your experience and live more fully in your body. In our fast-paced world, our attention is often fragmented, and we become more superficial because we are moving so quickly. Poetry stands in resistance to superficial motion. A poem often has to be read and reread and lived with. Poetry, by requiring deep attention and care, helps us treat others with that same care, attention, and respect. In this way, poetry has a crucial role to play in our lives.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City. His poetry collection, Todos Somos Sagrados/All Are Sacred (El Martillo Press), will debut in May 2026. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and the Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.
