Arthur Sze and Forrest Gander on Silence, the Importance of Blank Pages, and How Every Poem Written Shines a Light on Every Other Poem

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He’s authored eleven books of poetry, most recently The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems out from Copper Canyon Press. We asked his friend, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, to speak with Sze for this episode of the podcast. Sze shares the story of how he became a poet, which included encouragement from poets and teachers Denise Levertov and Josephine Miles, and the two recall how their friendship started through publication. Not surprisingly, they also lead us into the cosmos. Sze introduces the ancient Sanskrit idea of Indra's net: Everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. If you imagine the cosmos as an immense chandelier and shine light into it, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of every other. “That’s one of the things poetry does,” Sze says. “We’re not writing in competition—we’re all trying to create poems, and they’re all shining light on each other.

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