Letter to Arthur Sze from Penngrove

To Arthur Sze, dear friend, Keeper of the Acequia, now I remember discovering your poems in 1985 in Tyuonyi, that small literary magazine published by the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). The magazine’s name, the Keresan word for meeting place, was an apt venue for your work, which, already in the early eighties, derived its energy from the meeting of unlikely assemblages of natural description, conceptual statements, scientific observation, questions, and exclamations. I tracked down your first two books, Two Ravens and the revised edition of The Willow Wind, both from Tooth of Time. Your poems and translations made reference to reservations, desert, aspen, New Mexican Native tribes, but also to Mexican history, intimate relationships, and classical Chinese poets. To wit, your roots may have been local, but your cultural perspectives were, from the start, international.

The poet CD Wright, my wife and coeditor, and I were both so keen for your work that we wrote you in 1985 to solicit the manuscript of River River, which Lost Roads Publishers brought out in 1987. That collection includes your first long serial poem, boding the modality that would define your later work. The title for the book was a reduplicative, a signal feature of many Asian languages. We agreed to your striking choice for a calligraphic cover, and we sold out three editions.

And so, dear Arthur, began a friendship that has lasted for forty years, during which time we’ve hiked through Anasazi ruins in Chaco Canyon, picked blackberries in the hills of Petaluma, gone quiet together at the feet of a giant wooden Buddha, taught side-by-side, eaten meals, yammered about poetry, and met with wildfire scientists. I can’t forget the image I have of finding you asleep one early morning in our guest bed—lying on your back with your hands folded over your stomach in transcendent peace like a trim, reclining bodhisattva. You have a characteristic equanimity that has always grounded me and served as a kind of model for my own aspirations as man and artist.

The influence your work has had on contemporary poetry is vast, not only through your support of writers at IAIA and your signal translations of Chinese poets, but also in how your body of work has helped foster what is now called ecopoetry and, in philosophy, object-oriented ontology. Philosophically and sensorially alive, your poems have been for me and for so many readers a codex of thought and imagination for our time. A cornucopia of rendezvous. Seductive, endearing, alienating, vibrating structures, your poems have come to be models for processing—as feeling, as sensorial, intellectual, and linguistic experience—our brief, shimmering encounter with others and the inscrutability and legibility of what we call the world.