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Photo credit: as posted on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/arthur-sze
"Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950, and educated at the University of California-Berkeley. Known for his difficult, meticulous poems, Sze’s work has been described as the “intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation” by the critic John Tritica. The poet Dana Levin described Sze as “a poet of what I would call Deep Noticing, a strong lineage in American poetry...Sze’s many honors include a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and a Western States Book Award for Translation. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. "
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/arthur-szeLive Readings
Live Readings
Poems
Poems
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.
--from Sight Lines (2019)
The Negative
A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever.Inside a temple, instead of light
a slow shutter lets the darkness in.I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it,
see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds,a dead pig floating, bloated, on water.
I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliffand his photograph is in each room of the apartment.
I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her motherbut who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law;
they live in three rooms and watch a color television.I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant
who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolutionhad risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards.
I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needlebut instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma.
A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and Westis that in the East an individual does not believe himself
in control of his fate but yields to it.As a negative reverses light and dark
these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor,an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light,
laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater,lovers in the Summer Palace park.
-from The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998
A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever.Inside a temple, instead of light
a slow shutter lets the darkness in.I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it,
see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds,a dead pig floating, bloated, on water.
I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliffand his photograph is in each room of the apartment.
I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her motherbut who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law;
they live in three rooms and watch a color television.I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant
who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolutionhad risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards.
I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needlebut instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma.
A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and Westis that in the East an individual does not believe himself
in control of his fate but yields to it.As a negative reverses light and dark
these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor,an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light,
laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater,lovers in the Summer Palace park.
-from The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998
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