Introduction
Arthur Sze (/ˈziː/; Chinese: 施家彰; pinyin: Shī Jiāzhāng; born 1950, New York City) is a Chinese-American poet.
Background
Sze attended the University of California, Berkeley.His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish. He has authored eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). This latter volume was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
He has been included in anthologies such as Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 1994), Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, (Kaya Production, 1995),I Feel a Little Jumpy around You(Simon & Schuster, 1996), What Book!?: Buddhist Poems from Beats to Hiphop(Parallax Press 1998), and American Alphabets (Oberlin College Press, 2006).
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University.He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe and has won three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
in 2012, Sze was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Reviews
The poet Jackson Mac Low has said: "The word 'compassion' is much overused, 'clarity' less so, but Arthur Sze is truly a poet of clarity and compassion." Albuquerque Journal reviewer John Tritica: commented that Sze "resides somewhere in the intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation."CriticR.W. French notes that Sze's poems"are complex in thought and perception; in language, however, they have the cool clarity of porcelain. The surface is calm, while the depths are resonant. There is about these poems a sense of inevitability, as though they could not possibly be other than what they are. They move precisely through their patterns like a dancer, guided by the discipline that controls and inspires."
Awards
- Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers’ Award
- Guggenheim Fellowship,
- American Book Award
- Lannan Literary Award for Poetry,
- Two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships
- George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship
- Western States Book Award for Translation.
- Jackson Poetry Prize, 2013 (awarded by Poets & Writers)
- National Book Award for Poetry, 2019