“When a black butterfly flits past,
when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees,
when you smell the sprig of sunrise and walk up to the ditch …”
ARTHUR SZE’S NEW BOOK OF POEMS leads off with a simple image or two. It’s easy to track the course of their imprint on the mind, how they nudge open new doors of perception. Close your eyes after reading the first bit of the opening poem, “Anvil,” and you might see a burned impression of the inky butterfly drifting by.
The second line uses the movement of wings to propel you to apple trees silhouetted against a sky. As with the butterfly, you might picture the branches like a photographic negative. Maybe they’re casting long shadows on the ground below, extending the possibilities of the line. You can almost smell their sweet blossoms.
The poet knows it, because he segues into scent. Now you’re wondering what “the sprig of sunrise” truly smells like, if it’s different where you live than for the “you” of the poem, who seems to be the poet. This is where he takes over, luring you into an imaginative web.
Suddenly you’re walking in predawn light with the 74-year-old Sze to an acequia to turn on the spigot and irrigate an orchard while he meditates on an internal past and present juxtaposed with external flashes of both minuscule and global events, like “a matsutake emerges out of the rubble of Hiroshima.” The branches of being—seeing, smelling, walking, feeling, thinking, remembering—become simultaneous.
Arthur Sze, outside his home, often references his surroundings.
Placing a reader in the immediate realm of the poem, Sze wields the ancient tool of the image to produce ever richer sensory places and ideas. A master practitioner of such conjury, he has been at it for some time, writing calm, structured lines that use universal ways of seeing to reveal boundless scientific and spiritual depths. On April 1, Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press), his 12th poetry collection, shares a publication date with The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press), the latter of which illuminates the creative practice the poet, editor, and translator has honed over the past 52 years in Santa Fe.
Sze served as the city’s first poet laureate and helped to establish the renowned creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where he is a professor emeritus. While teaching for more than two decades at IAIA, he nurtured a cohort of Indigenous poets—Sherwin Bitsui, Santee Frazier, Layli Long Soldier, dg nanouk okpik, James Thomas Stevens, and Orlando White, among many others—that has since bedazzled the literary world. When a poet has been at it this long, it’s expected that they might garner more eminence in their last quarter-century or so. But the steady stream of high-profile awards Sze has won over the past several years is still staggering.
After his collection Sight Lines won the National Book Award in 2019, a series of lifetime achievement honors rolled in: He received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2021; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2022; and the Bobbitt Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress in 2024, when he was also recognized by the National Book Foundation with a Science + Literature award for poems that “deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology.” In February, Sze won the whopping Bollingen Prize from Yale Library, which includes an award of $175,000. Previous recipients include Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.
His works have been translated into 15 languages.
HOW DID THE MANHATTAN-RAISED, science-oriented child of Chinese immigrants arrive at a career of contemplating natural wonders and figuring out how to imprint their images in words? For much of that career, Sze woke at 5 a.m. in northern New Mexico to write poems while working full-time and raising a daughter and a son. In one White Orchard interview, he recounts the first time he remembers composing a poem, during a boring calculus lecture in his first semester at MIT.
“I liked the compression and musicality of poetry,” he reflects. “I knew no other form of writing that was so thrilling and compelling.” Before long, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied classical Chinese, poetry, philosophy, and the intersection of the three. With the help of his advisor, poet and critic Josephine Miles, Sze designed and completed an individual major in poetry.
“You should try Santa Fe, New Mexico,” Miles told him when he was about to graduate from Berkeley and wondering where to move next. “It’s really beautiful there.” On a January morning in his sun-drenched writing studio on Santa Fe’s Historic Eastside, where he lives with his wife, poet Carol Moldaw, Sze reflects on his first years in the city. “I literally came with my curiosity and a knapsack. I didn’t know anyone.”
Arthur Sze’s collection Quipu uses the traditional Peruvian knot hanging in his studio as a central metaphor.
His parents didn’t necessarily approve of his new home. During the early ’70s, while living in a series of downtown Santa Fe “hovels that are all torn down now,” he remembers, “at one point I had a desk, some cinder blocks and some shelves and some books and a chair and an electric typewriter. And my father came in and he was like, ‘You left MIT for this?’ ”
He scored a job in the incipient New Mexico Poetry-in-the-Schools program, which employed several writers to teach all ages across the state, cobbling together an income from construction jobs and teaching. “I worked for 10 years in the program, at Jemez Pueblo, Santo Domingo Pueblo, Española High School, Las Vegas, Ojo Caliente,” he recalls. “It was this whole world that I didn’t know existed in America, and it was so exciting.”
The varied perspectives of his students expanded his range as a teacher and showed him the further reaches of poetry. “One of the most powerful experiences for me was to go to the New Mexico School for the Deaf, teach a poetry workshop in total silence, and have someone sign for me,” he says. “At the end of 10 weeks, the students did a poetry reading in the library. There would be total silence, a student would sign their poem, and then there’d be thunderous applause.”
A stack of selected works.
At the pueblos, he was thrilled to be working with Native students who knew at least some of their own language and whose lenses on the world were markedly different from his own. In 1983, when future U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo left IAIA to teach elsewhere, Sze saw an opening. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which ran the Santa Fe–based college at the time, had “two strikes against me,” Sze says—not being Native and not having a graduate degree—IAIA found a position for him teaching linguistics, playwriting, and English composition.
By the spring of 1989, after the institution faced life-threatening budget cuts and was pulled out of the BIA, Sze was the only creative writing faculty member left. As the new director of the program, he rebuilt it, overhauling the curriculum, hiring new faculty, introducing a valuable visiting writers component that brought international literary luminaries to IAIA, and eventually expanding it from an associate of arts degree into a four-year bachelor of fine arts program before he retired in 2006.
The cornerstone of Sze’s vision was an introductory class called The Poetic Image. In it, Sze used his translation expertise to walk students, character by character and word by word, through image-heavy ancient Chinese or Japanese poetry and its English translations. He then encouraged writers to work out their own Indigenous translations, to filter the pictures through their own Native tongues, and to take them in new metaphorical and lyrical directions.
Sze's 2019 National Book Award.
“We’d understand the image before we’d word the words,” says Iñupiaq Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who studied with Sze at IAIA. “In the Native culture, most of our storytelling is oral, and we listen,” she adds. “We don’t specify written language as being something to tell, because there’s so much loss in translation. So you have to be able to see something. Arthur tells stories, and those stories were the basic building blocks of our experience at IAIA.”
These days, he continues to work in his studio before sunrise. “You sort of see things emerge out of the darkness and become figurative. Carol likes that too. So we’ve gotten in a rhythm where we feed our dogs at five in the morning and five at night, and we alternate weeks of feeding them,” he says. “It’s the sense of not being fully awake that has become really important to me.”
The reader learns to pay close attention to the natural imagery that proliferates and permutates in his poems. Into the Hush tracks the minute and global proportions of climate change via its varying mentions of mushrooms—the matsutake after the Hiroshima blast, the red-capped boletes Sze has been foraging in the Santa Fe ski basin for decades that are hard to find now.
“Because of the drought,” he says, “the window is much shorter than it was in the ’90s. Some mushrooms, I think, have died out. I don’t see them anymore, really. The laccarias used to be gigantic, and they’ve completely vanished. So I wanted to weave it through the book—you can’t escape it.”
FAROLITOS
We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then place
a votive candle
inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,
the flickering lights
form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?
We sight the flames
and, swaying within, know the future’s fathomless;
we grieve, yearn, joy,
pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlight
brighten craters
on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, try
to light a match, fail,
fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike
a tip one more time
when it bursts into flame— now the flames
are lights in bags again,
and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunar
promise of spring.
From Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Used by permission of the author.
IN HIS FREQUENT DEPLOYMENT OF NORTHERN New Mexico flora (Apache plume, piñon, Russian sage) and fauna (deer, owls, coyotes) to round out his images, Sze is now the most prominent literary ambassador of the region’s beauty. “Intellectually, I can say, ‘Oh, I want to put the Southwest on the map of contemporary American poetry,’ ” he speculates when I ask about his tendency toward place-based images that project the look and feel of New Mexico. “But that’s not what’s driving my poems.”
In 2021, he introduced many New Yorker readers to a Santa Fe–specific tradition in “Farolitos,” where he recounts the wonder of an evening spent lighting the traditional paper-bag lanterns in an Upper Canyon Road driveway. Describing the December occasion that sparked the poem, he says it had been a few years since he and his neighbor collaborated on the holiday display. He had forgotten how tricky they can be to light, especially in a chilly wind. “We lined the bags and lit them,” he says. “I was just looking at that. And then I thought, I should just write and see what happens.
“There’s this idea in Zen Buddhism that you can have a revelation, an insight, but that’s not the end. It’s supposed to inform or change how you live in the world and connect with others. In writing that poem, it started with the simple image of the farolitos. But not being Catholic or any other denomination, I just thought of it as, What are we leading?”
I picture the poem’s farolito flames flickering upward into the night air. “It’s like a spirit way,” he says.
Managing Editor Molly Boyle graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2011 with an MFA in poetry.
