Earlier this month, the Library of Congress named Santa Fe poet Arthur Sze the nation’s Poet Laureate for 2025-26. Sze will officially begin his term on Oct. 9 with a reading in the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Auditorium.
KUNM recently spoke with Sze about a variety of topics, including his plans as Poet Laureate, the way that Sze’s work as a translator has informed his relationship to poetry, and some recommendations for readers and writers.
KUNM: How has Santa Fe and New Mexico affected you and your work?
ARTHUR SZE: There are so many aspects to New Mexico that have been important and influential to the evolution of my work. When I arrived in Santa Fe, I was excited, because it was a part of America I didn't know existed, and was so different from the East Coast and West Coast.
So obviously, the landscape and the life were astonishing and amazing. And also, I had never met Native American artists before. The first two people I met, in fact, were a Navajo jeweler and a Pueblo photographer. And I felt an immediate affinity to Native Americans and to the culture. It was, of course, very different from anything I'd experienced in New York City or on the West Coast.
But I felt an immediate affinity and the cross-cultural, how to say, just the way New Mexico brings together so many different cultures and points of views and lifestyles was really exciting and important for me. And over time in Santa Fe, I met a great physicist and anthropologist, a nature ecologist, a Native artist – the variety of creative people in northern New Mexico just astonished me. I loved being here, and still love being here.
KUNM: Are there any parallels between indigenous North American cultures and the cultures of China?
SZE: I think so. You know, I taught for 22 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I was the director of the creative writing program. And over that time, I probably worked with Native students from over 250 tribes across the United States. So I had a lot of personal experience working with Native Americans. It wasn't just like meeting one person, and that was it.
Working, teaching with Native students, meeting Native artists. I could see there are enormous similarities. When I taught a class on classical Chinese poetry, the sense of landscape, the sense that a person is small in the larger scheme of things, fit right into Native perspective. The way prayers or ceremonies happen in a Pueblo, for instance. Whereas I think in the West, we tend to be more sort of self-assertive, and we think of the self first, you know, in the landscape. And in Asia, it's really like this tiny, of a person inside this gigantic landscape. So that sense of the relationship between man and nature, man's place in the world and the cosmos, the Asian perspective and the Native perspective are very similar.
KUNM: How did you come to be a poet?
SZE: Poetry really came as a surprise. In junior high school. In high school, that was the subject that scared me. Poetry was approached as, “oh, it's going to be difficult, esoteric, challenging. You're going to have to look for hidden symbolism and meaning.” So it's the last thing I thought I would do but in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. In life, I was good in math and science, and as a dutiful Asian American son, I applied to MIT. I got in and in the very first semester in a calculus lecture, it's kind of a mythic story. The professor was writing equations on these whiteboards, and I just tuned out. I just thought, “you know, I can do this, but it was like, do I want to spend my life doing this?” And I flipped to the back of my notebook, and I just started writing. I tuned out for the rest of that lecture, and I went back to the dorm that evening, and I wrote my first poem, and then a few days later, I wrote another poem and another poem and another poem, and very soon I knew that's what I wanted to do. And so of course, you can imagine what it was like to go home and tell my parents that I'm going to leave MIT, transfer to University of California at Berkeley and pursue a life in poetry. They thought I'd gone crazy.
KUNM: Who do you like to read when you need to be refreshed and renewed?
SZE: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I like to draw on literature and philosophy from all over the world for American poetry, certainly Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I love their work. An interviewer recently said the poet I most often quote is Wallace Stevens, which really surprised him. So there's a strong tradition of American poetry. But, you know, I've translated classical Chinese poems. Those poems stay with me all the time because they're so compressed, so musical and so present tense. I love the Irish poet [William Butler] Yeats. There are just so many poems.
KUNM: How does translation inform your poetry?
SZE: I learned my craft, how to write poems through translation. I'm an anomaly. Almost all the poets that I know went to graduate school, got a Master of Fine Arts degree, spent several years in poetry workshops, writing, critiquing each other's poems.
I didn't do that at all. I came to Santa Fe after I graduated from Berkeley. I worked a lot of odd jobs, but I turned to translating ancient Chinese poetry, and I discovered many things. First, that translation is really the deepest form of reading, so that when I started to translate, instead of reading a four-line poem and just saying, “Oh, I read it, I'm done.” If I had 20 Chinese characters and I had to think about, “how do I create the experience of this poem using words in English?” It was a revelation to me. Suddenly, I could think of 15 different words for a single Chinese word. I mean, you know, this is true of Spanish or Navajo too. So then it made me engage on a very creative level with language.
And as I started to see how these ancient Chinese poems were composed, how did this poet choose this image or this character after the previous one, I started to learn how I could use juxtaposition, how I could take certain things that didn't appear to go together, but like metaphor, bring them together and create new linkages and new ways of seeing. I was constantly excavating through those texts and thinking about as I was translating the poems, also asking myself, “what can I learn while I'm translating? How can this feed my own growth as a poet?” So I learned to foreground visual images. I learned to try and keep the verbs present tense, to make them immediate. I tried to play with syntax. I learned how to work with simultaneity and juxtaposition.
KUNM: What are some texts that would be a good starting place for someone who’s curious about Chinese poetry in English?
SZE: There are many just from my personal background, my expanded edition of Chinese translations, “The Silk Dragon II,” was published just a few years ago, and it includes a poem as earliest Tao Chen from 400 Common Era to a poet writing about maybe 2010, so it's a very personal, quirky anthology. But in the introduction, for instance, I go through character by character a very famous Tang Dynasty poem, and I share drafts and show how I created the translation. So that's a source. My other really favorite book to send people to is Chinese poetic writing by a French Chinese sinologist, Francois Cheng, and the book went out of print. It's been reissued by the New York Review of Books. And the book is a set of essays and then a set of translations, and the essays are the best introduction to Chinese poetry in the Chinese worldview that I know of.
KUNM: What are your plans as Poet Laureate?
SZE: I have very little time, so I just started, and I have until April 30, and I want to assemble a collection, a book that could be used in high schools, colleges and communities, that does on a larger scale what I just talked about. I have in mind assembling a book that draws poems from 13 different languages, and it'll include a two word Navajo poem that's a visual poem, and the words are Hozho, which means balance, beauty, centering. It's a cornerstone to Navajo language and culture, and Orlando White, my former student, wrote the opposite imbalance in Navajo, and he turned the word upside down, and he connected them with the letter O, which is how the two words end, and he tilted it so that's like a visual poem. And what I'm going to do is, in a bunch of different zones, pick a particular translation, a poem from a particular language, and then talk about it. So like in that case, here's a poem from Navajo, and I'm going to talk about the meaning of balance and imbalance, and a reader will be invited, say you're a high school student, to make your own poem in the shape of an object. So rather than just an anthology where it's like, “oh, Arthur's picked 50 poems from around the world he likes,” I want to engage the reader where it's like, I talk about this poem in Navajo, and then I say, “Okay, now let's put it to work. If you were writing a poem in the shape of an object in English or in Spanish, for instance. So, what would that be?”
KUNM: What else might you do, in addition to the book?
SZE: As the U.S. Poet Laureate, my focus, again, is to recognize, celebrate and appreciate the power of poetry, and I'm free to do that however I can. So that will mean doing a lot of my own readings around the country. It will mean I'll probably go back to Queens, New York too as I get further along, and assemble a draft of this book, do a workshop with college students, high school students, people in the community, where people bring in poems from languages that they like, and during the course of two hours, try and make their own translation. Or if they don't know another language, that's fine too, because part of the way translation works is it builds bridges. It builds community. I'll be bringing in two Chinese poems where people could do their own first translation with Spanish. I have two different translations of Pablo Neruda, his very famous “Solo La Muerte” poem, which I just love. And the two translations, one is very literal, but it's a little lifeless. It's absolutely correct, but just doesn't come alive. And the other one is really alive and strong, but it takes liberties with the original text. So in that zone, I get to talk about translation and saying, you know, you want to be faithful to the original, but it has to have life. It has to have force. So how do you do that with your own language?
KUNM: What would you say to someone interested in becoming a poet?
SZE: I think the important thing is to look at “Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet,” where the young poet is writing, Rilke in Paris, saying, you know, “I'm a young poet. I want to get my poems published. What do I do?” And Rilke says, “Forget about that.” He says, “a work of art is good if it's sprung from necessity.” Meaning, write, write a lot, write deeply. And Rilke says, “and if it's given you to be a writer, build your life according to that necessity.” So I believe in taking the long run, meaning you write and you write and you write, you discard, you shed, but you keep evolving. And you find reading, you find friends who can inspire and challenge you, and they don't have to be other poets. They could be musicians, they could be painters, they could be scientists, but other creative people who can help you grow. That's the important thing.
The interview questions have been abridged for brevity and clarity.
