Arthur Sze ’72 speaks in a key that quiets the room. During our conversation, the newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, Cal alum, teacher, and translator, answered with the unhurried care of someone who believes that precision is a form of generosity. The portrait that emerges is at once intimate and expansive: a poet shaped by Berkeley’s mentorship and cross-disciplinary spirit; a translator who treats languages as meeting places; a naturalist whose fieldwork is attention itself.
A campus of images, a practice of listening
Ask Arthur Sze for his first Berkeley image and he walks back into place: a modest campus building where the student literary magazine Occident once lived; eucalyptus trees close about it; a stream running through the trees; an IBM typewriter waiting by an open window. As a student editor with a key, he wrote there at night with the scent of eucalyptus in the air and water as metronome. That ritual, solitude, sensory detail, and a tool that answers to touch, prefigures the poet he became.
Berkeley also gave Sze a mentor of rare devotion, Josephine Miles. When a 50-plus-student poetry workshop proved too large for the close attention he needed, he went to Miles after class. Her solution was characteristically humane: “Come to my house for tea, and I’ll go over your poems.” Saturday sessions in her small courtyard, Bird of Paradise in bloom, turned into a private apprenticeship. Miles then sponsored Sze’s individualized major in poetry, effectively letting him design a course of study that fit the art rather than the other way around. “She believed in me very early on,” he says. “She allowed me to create my own path through the UC Berkeley system.”
That path had already required a decisive turn. Sze transferred from MIT to Berkeley, entering as a junior, convinced that his life belonged to poetry. He didn’t discard science; he re-situated it inside lyric imagination.
How a poem begins
“The poem begins in a spell,” Sze explains, sometimes a musical phrase, sometimes an image, sometimes a pressure that won’t be ignored. As a young writer, poems came quickly. Now “the process is slow and arduous.” Drafts first expand, messy, exploratory, before he compresses them to “charged moments,” then re-opens spaces so the poem can breathe. That breathing matters: many of Sze’s mature pieces move in single-line fragments separated by deliberate silences. Those silences are not vacancies; they’re invitations that enlist the reader as collaborator.
He imposes a quiet rigor that most readers will never see: a given line might carry a word or sound from the line before, a subtle linkage that keeps the music continuous without announcing its method. Titles and endings often circle back, completing an arc felt more than diagrammed. Discovery is the point. “If I control everything, the poem is dead,” he says. “The poem should shape me as I shape it.”
Attention is the ethic under the craft. Sze looks for “silence inside of sound,” on campus it was the creek, in life it might be a café table or the bark of a eucalyptus. The discipline is to notice until noise yields texture.
Translation as apprenticeship and public project
Sze didn’t learn the art in an MFA program. He learned it partly by translating classical Chinese poetry while at Berkeley. In the mornings he took language; in the afternoons he worked through poems character by character with a teaching assistant, discovering how lineation in free verse can still create inaudible pauses that carry rhythm and thought. Translation taught constraint and juxtaposition, but most of all it taught how silence and implication do work that exposition cannot.
As Poet Laureate, Sze has chosen translation as his national initiative, “I think I’m the first Laureate to do so,” he notes. He’s assembling a personal guide built around 23 poems from 13 languages, organized not as chapters but as 15 “zones,” arenas for discussion rather than a lock-step syllabus. Early zones focus on the untranslatable. Sze offers an example from Navajo: hozho meaning balance/beauty, set against hóchxo meaning imbalance. In a visual poem a former Native student made, hóchxo is printed upside down, so the eye links the O’s even as meaning inverts. The point isn’t to settle on a single English word; it’s to show how a poem can dramatize meaning that footnotes alone cannot carry.
Sze then places multiple English versions of a Chinese poem side-by-side and asks readers to try their own hand. The guide is meant for schools, libraries, community centers, and for anyone curious about how language crosses into language. “English is a composite tongue,” Sze says. “Translation acknowledges that our literature is a chorus.”
Science, structure, and the lyric
The transfer from MIT didn’t sever Sze’s relation to science. It recalibrated it. He keeps scientific vocabulary nearby, but more importantly he borrows structures. A poem might be organized like a spectral line, where recurrence and shift register across a sequence; an elegy might hinge on earthshine, the faint glow of the unlit moon from sunlight reflected off Earth. Science isn’t ornament in his work; it’s a way of knowing.
So is fieldwork. “I’m an avid mushroom hunter,” Sze says, recounting six summers of foraging with his son and a local naturalist. The practice sharpened his sense of timing and ecology, what blooms when, and what its absence means. In a single lifetime he’s watched mushroom species vanish in places where they once thrived. The lesson is as ecological as it is poetic: pay attention to change, not just to beauty.
Feeling the music before the meaning
Sze is often called a “difficult” poet. He counters with Wallace Stevens’s line, poetry must “resist the intelligence almost successfully.” By that he doesn’t mean exclusion. He means the poem should not yield everything at once; sound and rhythm reach us first. “You read a poem, you don’t understand it all, you read it again, and live with it,” he says. He invokes Apollinaire’s long poem Zone, a work often labeled cubist, fractured, globe-spanning. Beneath the surfaces, its structure is simple and rhythmic. You can feel coherence before you can paraphrase it.
This faith in the image and in music shapes his teaching. Sze makes a case for image as more than description. Image is a vehicle for emotion, the thing that carries feeling into the reader without insisting on a single interpretation. Trust the image and its patterning; entrust yourself to where it leads.
Lineage and a Berkeley lesson that endures
Sze’s lineage runs through classical Chinese poets, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and through modern mentors who marked him at Cal and beyond. As a teacher, Sze often points students first to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, “a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity,” and to Stevens’s Adagia. He believes in the image not merely as a clear picture but as the vehicle for feeling, the thing that carries emotion before paraphrase.
One memory he returns to comes from Lillian Hellman. Sze first met Hellman at MIT, where she taught a small, invitation-only fiction class to which Denise Levertov, a visiting poet at UC Berkeley the year before, had recommended him. After the first class, he told Hellman the course wouldn’t work for him, and she agreed. Later, after Sze transferred to UC Berkeley, Josephine Miles let him know Hellman would return to teach a six-week invitation-only fiction class on campus. Sze asked to audit; Hellman vaguely remembered him from MIT and welcomed it. He sat in on every session, and during one of her office hours she offered the counsel he still passes on: write, and don’t ever stop writing.
Stewardship as the first Asian American U.S. Poet Laureate
When asked how he holds the distinction of being the first Asian American U.S. Poet Laureate, Sze widens the frame. He wants his project to feel all-encompassing, honoring the United States as a chorus of languages while drawing on his vantage point as a Chinese American poet who has lived in the Southwest for five decades, and who knows “a few words of different Native languages.” Translation, for him, is both craft and civic practice, a way to welcome readers who feel outside poetry and to show working methods that demystify without flattening complexity.
What Berkeley still gives
So much returns to Berkeley. The creek by the old magazine office; the smell of eucalyptus; the walk up Telegraph; the courtyard at Josephine Miles’s home; an education designed around curiosity. Asked to imagine a walking reading on campus now, Sze would likely trace the places that listened back: Wheeler Hall, Durant Hall’s old library rooms, the spot where the Occident magazine building once stood. He’d open a window, if there is one, and make room for the water’s sound. Then he’d begin again.
What does he hope a first-time poetry reader feels at a reading this year? Discovery without anxiety. The sense that a poem can be entered through sound, through image, through a single surprising moment, and that returning deepens the experience rather than correcting it. What kind of national conversation would he like to move from the margins to the center? One where translation isn’t an afterthought but a way in, where classrooms and community centers treat multilingual readings and side-by-side versions as normal, enlivening practice.
And for Cal writers starting out, those who recognize in his campus memories their own? The counsel he credits to Hellman: write, and don’t stop. Keep your attention tuned to the world, trees, streams, scientific terms, kitchen scissors; attend to the silence inside of sound; let the work surprise you. Over time, the fragments learn to speak to one another. Over time, the music finds its current.
