Arthur Sze's Taoist Poetic

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Arthur Sze’s Taoist Poetic

Robert Grotjohn

I. Introduction

Arthur Sze is one of the most prolific of Asian American poets. He has

published eight volumes of his own poetry, The Willow Wind (1972, 1981), Two

Ravens (1976, 1984), Dazzled (1982), River River (1987), Archipelago (1995), The

Redshifting Web (1998), a selected poems that includes a section of “New Poems,”

Quipu (2006), and The Ginkgo Light (2009). In addition, he has published The Silk

Dragon (2001), a collection of poems he translated from the Chinese, and he has

edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010), a collection of translated essays. Sze has

won numerous awards, including a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book

Award for Archipelago, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Asian American Writers

Workshop Award for the Redshifting Web, and, most recently, the 2013 Jackson

Poetry Prize as “an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider

recognition” (“Arthur Sze Wins”), yet he has received little scholarly attention, even

within Asian American literary studies.

260 Robert Grotjohn

In this essay, I will begin by considering the critical context for Asian American

poetry and Sze’s place in that context, noting that he does not fit easily into the

oppositional perspectives that dominate current American scholarship. I will then

look at three of his translations of Tang Chinese poetry from the seventh and eighth

centuries to consider the poets as influences on his own contemporary aesthetic.

Those influences will lead to a wholistic reading of his poetic sequence “The

Redshifting Web,” followed by a closer reading of a single poem in the sequence,

both of which begin to reveal Sze’s Taoist aesthetic. I will conclude by considering

that aesthetic, particularly the importance of “wu” (無), a creative “nothingness” or

“emptiness,” and by suggesting possibilities for further research.

II. “Formal Intelligence” and the “Ethnopoetic”

While a few scholars have considered Sze’s work, he has received surprisingly

little critical attention for such an accomplished poet. Part of the reason may be that

he does not write poetry that foregrounds the politically resistant aesthetic privileged

in the American academy. While his poetry is well-marked by his Chinese ethnic

heritage, particularly by a Taoist aesthetic, it rarely invokes the discourse of Asian

American resistance to oppression. Rather, Sze’s aesthetic has evolved from the

short individual lyric giving an imagistic moment of personal perception in the two

seventies volumes to longer meditative sequences that use but do not privilege those

imagistic moments in the later volumes.

Sze’s development reflects and participated in the debate about Asian American

poetry that paralleled discussions of other American ethnic literatures. In that debate,

one side privileged the aesthetic and the other the ethnic or the personal. Indeed,

Josephine Nock-Hee Park sees that historical “politics-aesthetic divide” as

unresolved in current “theorizations of poetry” (128).1) Charles Altieri offers an

example of the “aesthetic” perspective, contrasting poems of “formal intelligence”

Arthur Sze’s Taoist Poetic 261

with those of “testimonial content” in an essay originally presented in Korea.2)

Altieri dismisses poems of “testimonial content” as outmoded expressions of the

autobiographical or lyric “I.” His choice of contrasting terms clearly indicates his

assumption that lyric expression lacks the “intelligence” of more disruptive,

experimental forms. Altieri claims that “[m]ost Asian-American poetry and almost

all criticism of that poetry now concentrates on images of content—as testimony”

by focusing on “an autobiographical ‘I’ plausibly connected to the author responding

to some actual situation or persistent pain” (72).

Shirley Geok-lin Lim held the position against which Altieri reacted, as she

claimed a paradigm for an Asian American “ethnopoetics” that privileges content

over form. She identifies three deepening levels in that ethnopoetic, the first, surface

level is “style,” which would be closer to Altieri’s formal concerns than her other

levels; the second level is linguistic, including use of the “original language,” a

phrase with complications for many multi-generational American-born writers of

Asian descent whose first language is English; the third and deepest level is

“contextual,” the primary feature of which is

a counter-tradition which is Confucianist rather than Freudian, in which the

individual is seen as receiving value and dignity in relationship to some

worthy others: conflict submits to familial and community integrity, and the

discovery of social/radical/ethnic strengths is paramount, not some easy cliche.

(56-57)

The “contextual” or “Confucianist” level, which for Lim is the deepest level of

understanding, indicates a kind of “testimonial content” dismissed by Altieri. What

1) Park offers a more insightful, extensive discussion of the history of that “divide” than I have

space to give here (126-29).

2) He published versions of the essay in the U.S. and in Korea, both of which I have included in

the “Works Cited.” I quote from the American version simply because it has an earlier

publication date.

262 Robert Grotjohn

is most “intelligent” for Altieri is least intelligent for Lim, and vice-versa.

At about the same time as Altieri made his evaluation of Asian American

poetry, Sze offered a similar perspective. In his introduction to Black Lightning, a

collection of interviews with Asian American poets about their processes of

composition, he writes: “Critical discussion of Asian-American poetry lags behind

artistic accomplishment. The discourse tends to center on race and identity, and it is

just beginning to address theory and practice and the polysemous nature of the

work” (1). This statement has several parallels with Altieri’s view, including a

suggestion that “artistic accomplishment” has passed by the lyric “I,” the poetry of

individual identity, and that the “accomplishment” is in the “polysemous,” or

experimental, “nature of the work.” Indeed, Xiaojing Zhou has noted that Sze’s own

work “decenters [. . .] the centrality of the self” (“Intercultural Strategies” 101).

In noting that critical discourse had yet to catch up to creative developments,

Sze and Altieri seem prescient, since critical attention to the experimental aesthetic

now far exceeds that to the first-person identitarian lyric. That attention is either the

sole or a substantial focus of recent studies of Asian American poetry such as

Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s Racial Things,

Racial Forms, Xioajing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American

Poetry, and Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s Apparitions of Asia.

While those four scholars focus, at least in part, on the experimental aesthetic,

they all also focus on the resistant politics implied or addressed in the poetry. For

Jeon, avant-garde Asian American poetry marks “the site of intersection between

aesthetic and political concerns” (xvii). Yu highlights “the inescapably political

ramifications of these poets’ negotiations with form” (18). For Zhou, “Asian

American poets open up the poetic space for the other and its alterity, highlighting

the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of otherness” (4). Park most insistently argues that

“the call to Asian American political resistance seems as crucial in the twenty-first

century as it was when it was first sounded in the late 1960s” (158) at the same

time as she privileges the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim for


their “experiments in verse” that “renewed American poetry” (159).

The experimental forms themselves become a sort of “ethnopoetics” in that they

offer a “counter-tradition,” although not of the “Confucianist” strain that Lim

imagined. Those forms are radical, political, resistant, or, in Lim’s construction,

“social/radical/ethnic.” They “counter” hegemonic American culture, creating bad,

however non-unitary, subjects of the sort that Viet Thanh Nguyen has recognized as

the privileged subject of Asian American Studies. A bad subject will “reject

dominant ideology” and is, therefore, “the dominant form of the Asian American

body politic in the imagination of Asian American intellectuals” (144). A writer who

does not privilege resistant politics is unlikely to be privileged by the Asian

American academy, no matter how highly he may be regarded as a practicing poet.

It seems to me that Sze may be in such a situation. Indeed, only one of the books

noted above even mentions Sze (Yu), and then, only in a footnote (165).

While Sze certainly includes progressive political comments in his poetry, his

work is not primarily or essentially political. His poetic is much more meditative in

a Taoist-influenced aesthetic, and in that way may be more interested in reconciling

opposites than in reinforcing oppositions. In parallel with that Taoist influence, each

of Sze’s first two volumes begins with translations of Chinese poets from the Tang

dynasty to the present, followed by a section of original poems, most of them short,

imagistic lyrics. In the translations, he seems very much concerned with identity and

contextualization of his own work as Asian American, and thus he seems to be

writing out of something similar to Lim’s ethnopoetic at the same time as he builds

toward more “formal intelligence.”

III. Translation

Sze’s translation of ancient Chinese poets indicates a kind of “Confucianist”

regard for his aesthetic paternity and an extended Asian (Asian American and/or

264 Robert Grotjohn

Asian Asian) community. Along with the translations, he writes poems in homage to

Li Po (WW, RSW 57) and Wang Wei (TR, RSW 75) in his first two volumes.3)

The first poem in The Willow Wind is a translation, “Return to Chiang Village

by Tu Fu,” in which the wandering poet describes his return home. The poem

begins by focusing upward to “Shaggy red clouds in the west” and then turning that

focus earthward: “the sun’s foot is down to level earth.” He follows that with two

other juxtaposed images: “sparrows [. . .] chirping” by “the wicker gate,” and “The

traveler return[ing] from over a thousand li.” Tu Fu connects the heavenly with the

terrestrial and juxtaposes the large and distant (the sky, the journey of a thousand li)

with the small and near (the homely sparrows). Those images resonate with the

human situation of the returning wander, who experiences a “miracle of chance”

even though he lives in an “age of turmoil” (WW 11).

Each of those things indicates some continuing aspect of Sze’s poetic. He often

juxtaposes the cosmic with the terrestrial and the immense with the minute. He

often sets apparently unlike images next to one another and asks the reader to work

through the connections, as Tu Fu does with the sunset, the sparrows, and the

returning traveler. Aspects of our own “age of turmoil” pop up throughout Sze’s

work, and he has a fine eye for the astonishing detail, for the “miracles” of the

world, and, in the structure of his later work, the “miracle of chance,” as when he

throws the I-Ching to generate structural principles (Elshtain 206).

While he sees those miracles, Sze is keenly aware of inevitable human

dissolution, as Tu Fu is in “Thoughts on a Night Journey” when he laments that his

“name will never be famous in literature,” that he has “resigned office with sickness

and age.” Even in that near despair, however, the poet makes miraculous

observations on the natural world, again connecting the cosmic and terrestrial: “The

stars are pulled down to the vast plain, / and the moon bobs in the river’s flow”

(WW 17).

3) I will use the pages numbers in The Redshifting Web for all poems collected there.


Again bringing the moon down to earth, Sze translates Li Po’s “Drinking Alone

with the Moon.” This poem has some of the sadness of Tu Fu’s “Thoughts on a

Night Journey,” as Li Po has no “companions” except for “the bright moon” and his

own “shadow.” He claims that “makes three people,” but he admits that “the moon

is unable to drink” and his “shadow just follows my body.” Nonetheless, he

celebrates with those “companions,” at least “for a time,” as he dances and sings

and says, “be joyous as long as it’s spring!” When he brings the moon down as his

companion, he uses the natural world to contemplate the human situation, and he

ends with a look at the even more distant cosmos: “May we be bound and travel

without anxieties. / May we meet in the far Milky Way” (WW 25). Like these

Chinese poets, Sze’s mind wanders from the local to the cosmic and connects the

two. While Sze often grounds his poems with references to his New Mexico

locality, he is also, like Tu Fu and Li Po, a wandering poet in moving from image

to image as well as from place to place in his poems.

IV. The Web of “The Redshifting Web”

The title poem in The Redshifting Web (223-34) recalls the Tang poets’

juxtapositions of the cosmic with the terrestrial, the immense with the minute. A

spider’s web is, of course, a small terrestrial thing. The title connects it with the

immense, cosmic “redshift,” as Sze explains:

In our understanding of the cosmos, it is now clear that, as Heraclitus once

said, “everything is in motion.” Galaxies that are traveling away from the

earth, which is of course also moving, send out sources of light that are bent

toward the red end of the spectrum. So, redshift is an image of the expanding

universe. I wanted to connect the infinitely large (cosmological redshift) with

the infinitely small (a web), so I created the phrase “the redshifting web” as

the title to my book. It connects the very far to the very near. It’s thus an

266 Robert Grotjohn

image of a poetics of an expanding cosmos, but also implies that the poet is

like a spider that creates webs with words.4)

Sze has expanded the cosmos of his Chinese influences. He builds on their

ancient wonder at the heavens with expanded scientific understanding, updating their

knowledge of the cosmos so he can connect it to the terrestrial with much more

scientific detail.

In “The Redshifting Web,” a sequence of nine poems in various forms, direct

references to redshifts and webs occur, sometimes separately and sometimes

together, in the third, fourth, and eighth poems:

A fly mistakes a

gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center

of a glistening web. (226)

You may puzzle

as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why

galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting

in all directions, but do you stop to sense

death pulling and pulling from the center

of the earth to the end of the string? (227)

I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor

of the greenhouse, sense a redshifting

along the radial string of a web. (232)

When the two terms are finally brought together in the eighth poem, Sze

suggests that the movement in a spider web can have the same significance for

understanding as the expansion of the universe. He introduces a similar idea in the

fourth poem when he compares the oscillation of a meson beam and redshift of the

4) This information was relayed in an 11 Dec 1998 e-mail to the author.


galaxies to the pull of death. Indeed, the redshift is significant, perhaps disturbing,

news of a universe getting ever further and further from where we stand on earth,

but that outward moving universe has little immediate impact on the individual who

feels the downward pull of his or her own death. That downward pull is felt

through a “string,” much like the redshift is felt in the web.

The ideas of the redshift and the web function in several ways. The sequence is

a kind of web in the multiple recurring motifs and images. With each recurrence,

the associations attending those motifs and images expand. Following strands of the

web from just the three quotations above would yield multiple expansions, or

“redshifts.” From the first quotation, one might follow the golden strand. In the first

poem, Sze reports a jeweler pouring molten gold (223); in the second, he combines

“iron 26, gold 79,” giving their atomic weights (225); in the third, just before

mentioning the gold spider, he notes “The gold shimmer at the beginning of

summer” (226); in the sixth, “a child drinking Coke out of a formula bottle / has all

her teeth capped in gold” (229); in the eighth, he addresses someone whom he sees

“wearing an onyx and gold pin” (232).

Each of those references to gold varies in its register. While most refer to the

metal, one refers to the color of a spider and another to the preciousness of the

fleeting days of summer, the latter including in its range of allusion the “gold

complexion dimm’d” of a summer’s day in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, the

“Goldengrove” for which Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Margaret grieves in “Spring and

Fall,” and “Nature’s first green” that “is gold” in Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can

Stay.” Even the references to the metal give very different connotations from one

another. One is simply a measurable weight; another suggests rotting teeth. Those

capped teeth are strange and disturbing in a child’s mouth, even vulgar, as is the

soda in a baby bottle, soda that may well have rotted the child’s original teeth and

made the gold caps necessary, a vulgarity that contrasts with the tasteful “onyx and

gold pin.” Among the other colors in the sequence, gold links to a similar color,

yellow, which appears in the “pupils of a saw-whet owl” (225), or in connecting

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“tips of chamisa” to a broken jar of mustard (228), or is implied when a woman

“places a sunflower head on the northwest / corner of the fence” (231).

In this webbing of colors, the poem shows many shifts of attention to hues of

red, as might be expected: “cochineal pickers” (224), a “cochineal-dyed flowery

dress” (226), “Red Cross plastic bags” (226), “roasted chili” (229), that “rufous

hummingbird” (232), and several other instances. The various colors along with the

references to webs blend into references to weaving, dyeing, and cloth-making, as

back and forth movement between the near and the far parallels the back and forth

shuttles of the weaving. In the first poem, he echoes chapter 25 of the Tao Te

Ching, tying Taoist allusion into the web, as he “see[s] to travel far is to return”

(223).5)

In the fifth poem, he writes of desire, “We think, had I this then that would.”

He leaves the phrase incomplete as he interrupts it with a comment that indicates a

back and forth emotional movement: “subjunctive form is surge and ache” (228).

In the seventh poem, he tells of a man who “turns” from examining the

intricate design on “the back / of the Tang mirror” to “watch[ing] her // pick

eggplant” (the man and the woman are identified no further than with the pronouns).

From this “turn,” the man gets an “underlying twist of pleasure and surprise.” That

turning and twisting makes the man see that “they flow and respond endlessly.” It is

not clear whether the antecedents for “they” are the mirror and the woman picking

eggplant, the pleasure and the surprise, or even the man and the woman themselves.

The lack of clarity seems richer than clarity could be here, since those three pairs

can themselves “flow and respond endlessly” (231), and the “twist”ing together of

pleasure and surprise marks Sze’s poetic.

The ninth poem combines the back and forth movement of weaving with the

back and forth movement between near and far:

5) In Waley’s translation, “going far away means returning” (Lao Tzu 174).


near and far:

a continuous warp; (233)

the character xuan—

dark, dyed—

pinned to a wall above a computer; (233)

weaving on a vertical loom:

sound of comb,

baleen; (234)

Sze explains the Chinese character “xuan” in a note: it “means dark, deep, profound,

subtle, and is etymologically derived from dyeing” (265), a meaning suggested by

the two-word line that follows the reference to the character. Because the character

is posted “above a computer,” Sze connects it to writing, creating another layered

reference to the web he weaves in the poem, a web with its own Chinese culturally

“etymological” derivations.

V. Redshift, Blueshift

The sequence is more than a web of intersecting references, as a brief closer

look at the eighth poem shows. That poem begins with the juxtaposed images of a

hummingbird and a redshift noted above:

I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor

of the greenhouse, sense a redshifting

along the radial string of a web.

You may draw a cloud pattern in cement

setting in a patio, or wake to

sparkling ferns melting on a windowpane.

The struck, plucked, bowed, blown

270 Robert Grotjohn

sounds of the world come and go.

As first light enters a telescope

and one sees light of a star when the star

has vanished, I see a finch at a feeder,

beans germinating in darkness;

a man with a pole pulls yarn out

of an indigo vat, twists and untwists it;

I hear a shout as a child finds Boletus

barrowsii under ponderosa pine;

I see you wearing an onyx-and-gold pin.

In curved space, is a line a circle? (232)

Because Sze gives little discursive connection between these various images,

observations, and ideas, the reader needs to start constructing connections, a

not-unusual permission for reader involvement in contemporary experimental or

exploratory poetries.6) A reader could just accept the statement that “The struck,

plucked, bowed, blown / sounds of the world come and go,” and enjoy the collage

as just collage by taking on a state of passive receptivity in which one could “sit

and [be] an absorbing form,” like the speaker of the first poem in the sequence

(223). On the other hand, Sze seems to suggest that we should do more unraveling

when he gives the image of the man who “twists and untwists” yarn. Perhaps a

reader should likewise “twist and untwist” the poem. As in the seventh poem, the

“twist[s]” might bring “pleasure and surprise.”

Part of that unraveling involves noting the musical parallel with the Zhuangzi,

the second major Taoist text, along with the Tao Te Ching. The reference to “The

struck, plucked, bowed, blown / sounds of the world” lists the four classifications of

instruments in a Western orchestra. Thus, Sze gives the world an orchestral quality,

a harmony. In the Zhuangzi, a sage named Ziqi makes the same connection between

the music of humans and the music of the world when he says to Ziyou, “‘You

6) See, for instance, Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy.


hear the piping of men, but you haven’t heard the piping of earth. Or if you’ve

heard the piping of earth, you haven’t heard the piping of Heaven!’” (Zhuangzi 31).

In Scott Cook’s translation, that “piping” creates “a small harmony (xiaohe 和)”

or a “great harmony (dahe 大和),” depending on the strength of the wind (Cook

67).

Sze further urges us to engage a process of thinking, not just observing or

absorbing, to create harmonies when he parallels seeing “a finch at a feeder,” and

“beans germinating in darkness” with seeing the “light of a star when the star / has

vanished.” The parallel develops from choosing to interpret the “As” that begins the

sentence to mean “similar to” rather than “at the same time as,” a choice that is

offered but not required in other poems as well. In other words, choosing to

interpret the adverb as “similar to” does not mean one must eliminate the other

meaning: the ambiguity increases the possibilities of understanding.

Seeing the light of the star is something like seeing the finch and something

like seeing the beans, but exactly like neither. It is like the finch because, in both

cases, one sees an image. The finch exists, for all practical purposes, at the moment

one sees it, but the star does not, so one cannot actually see the real star as it

exists, just as one cannot actually see beans germinating in the “darkness” of the

earth. The separation of the reality from the perception of it, and the imperfect

likeness of seeing stars, finches, and beans suggests the ways in which the processes

of the world are always just escaping capture or classification, like the expanding

universe can never be immediately observed but must be deduced from redshifting

light.

He presents a similar idea of the impossibility of seeing the thing itself in the

question of the last line of the poem, “In curved space, is a line a circle?” The

answer must be “yes,” at least in terrestrial space. Indeed, what we must perceive as

a line actually must be a circle—again a larger reality escapes a limited perception,

a point with which the Zhuangzi begins. Answering “yes” to the question also

reinforces the connection between disparate things that is one of Sze’s compositional

272 Robert Grotjohn

principles. The last “line” itself “circles” back to the “sounds of the world” at the

same time as it reverses their directions. The sounds “come and go,” but the “line”

of the last line first goes, seeming to move away, but then comes back as a circle.

It may be that there are no straight lines in Sze’s poems, and these lines, in their

comings and goings, curve back to the pattern of back and forth movement

discussed above.

Considering the ways in which various images and lines “reflect” one another in

the eighth poem, it should come as no surprise that circles and circular movements

abound in “The Redshifting Web,” as do images of mirrors and reflections, an

observation that leads me to reflect on the sequence in looking at the surprises of its

last line. The ninth and final poem consists of ten stanzas, alternating between three

and two lines. The final pair of lines reads, “hiding a world in a world: / 1054, a

supernova” (234).

The mysterious number before the simple noun phrase seems to have something

hidden about it, but when one discovers its relation to “a supernova,” several things

start to happen for the poem and for an understanding of Sze’s aesthetic heritage.

The number refers to the year that the supernova forming the Crab Nebula was

recorded. Choosing this particular supernova, or exploding star, is significant for Sze

because it was recorded by observers in China and Korea and, apparently, by Native

Americans in what is now the southwestern U.S. (“Supernova”); thus, 1054 connects

the near with the far both geographically and temporally as it connects Sze’s

ancestral Chinese location with his present New Mexico location.

The effect of a supernova suggests the kind of bright surprises that the world

gives to Sze and he gives to his readers: “When a star ‘goes supernova’” it can

“outshine its entire home galaxy.” A final surprise catches the redshifting of the

sequence in a reversal similar to the comings and goings throughout the eighth

sequence. When stars go supernova, “[s]pectroscopically, they show blue-shifted

emission lines” (“Supernova”). The blueshifted finish refuses to let redshifts define

perceptions. Redshifts suggest things are moving away from one another, blueshifts


that they are coming closer. Both are cosmological phenomenon, but they move to

opposite ends of the visual spectrum, suggesting the variety in a single world (or

cosmos), a world in a world.

VI. The Taoist Vessel

Sze’s reference to “hiding a world in a world” not only reinforces a connection

of Asia to the American Southwest but, echoing the reference to Lao Tzu in the

first poem of the sequence, it refers to the other foundational Taoist text, the

Zhuangzi.7) The bracketing of the sequence with those texts, circling back to the

beginning at the end, creates the Taoist texts as a sort of container for this

American poem—the world in which he hides the world. Indeed, Sze’s East Asian

influences and inspirations include much more than his translations of Chinese

poetry and allusions to Taoist texts. He has compared the juxtapositions in his

writing to Buddhist koans, and he has thrown the I-Ching and used go (baduk)

strategies to generate structural principles for some of his poems (Elshtain 206, 205,

206). Parallel to the hidden trans-pacific reference he embeds in “1054,” Sze often

juxtaposes contemporary China with other localities.

While some reviewers have gestured toward Sze’s Asian inspirations (Stalling,

Frumkin), his work is as often compared to William Carlos Williams’s, with its

insistence on an American locality for American poetry (Levin, Barnstone). The

comparison with Williams is a fair one, given that both poets often focus on precise

images, although often in very different ways. On the other hand, Sze may owe that

precision to the Chinese poets he has translated as much as to the influence of

7) “You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they

will be safe. But in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off

[. . .] But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this

would be the final reality of the constancy of things” (76-77).

274 Robert Grotjohn

Williams, to an Asian cross-cultural more than to an American influence. Of course,

as Josephine Nock-Hee Park shows, the basis of imagism itself lies in Ezra Pound’s

Orientalizing imagination, as she “read[s] Pound’s early and late interest in China

together as an American vision, one that transformed American poetry” (56). Sze’s

affirmations perhaps take a more de-orientalizing view, as he has not established a

mythologized China as some unattainable political ideal but has used his heritage to

create contemporary connections in a world of flux.

Sze himself has suggested another figure from the American modernist tradition,

however, and that suggestion may offer more possibility for exploring the

conjunctions of Sze’s Asian and American roots, although I do not have space for

that exploration here. He has noted that, “[f]rom a Western perspective, ‘nothing’

may appear to be a blank and feel disappointment; but from an Eastern perspective,

there’s a charged poetics of emptiness.” Sze identifies that “nothing” as the possible

“source of all creation,” and he identifies Wallace Stevens as creating from that

“nothing”: “In Stevens’s world, it’s where the imagination finds ‘what will suffice’”

(Baker 14).

Sze’s comments on emptiness suggest the idea of Taoism as container, since the

emptiness, the apparent “nothing,” inside a container is meant to be filled. Like Sze

creates connections between Eastern and Western aesthetics, Mario Wenning looks

for parallels between Eastern and Western philosophy. In considering the Zhuangzi,

Wenning argues that “nothingness [. . .] invites us to be creative,” that “[c]reativity

is the process of filling voids” (563). Wenning explains the importance for Taoism

of the Chinese “wu” (無), which he translates as “nonexistence,” “absence,”

“nothingness.” He continues, “While in most Western languages, these words come

with negative associations, this is not the case in Chinese.” Wenning prompts my

own depiction of Taoism as the “container” for Sze’s poem when he suggests, “Wu

can refer to the empty part of an object such as the empty space within a vessel”

(561).

Xiaojing Zhou has recognized Sze’s de-orientalizing gestures with the assertion


that “[h]is experiments with poetic forms are motivated by a world view that

decenters European culture and the centrality of the self” (“Intercultural Strategies”

101). Eun-Kyung Shin, in studying a Taoist-influenced Asian aesthetic, suggests that

such decentering is central to the aesthetic when she claims that “effacement of

subject has been one of the most influential canons in East Asian literary theories

both in composition and in evaluation” (266). Sze ignores the “American ambition”

of the poetic self-centering that Josephine Park Nee-Hock finds in the poets

Whitman, Pound, and Gary Snyder, who “dreamed of a bardic status” (159). Sze’s

anti-bardic voice appears in his permission for the reader to participate in the

creative act, as noted above. In the instance I considered, the comparison of the

starlight, the finch, and the germinating beans, the unfilled or “empty” comparison

gives readers the space in which to respond creatively to the poem. In noting Sze’s

anti-bardic, creative emptiness, my argument circles back to Altieri’s objection to the

“autobiographical ‘I’” (72).

In bringing together Eastern and Western traditions, in part by the “vessel” of

the Tao, Sze’s poems become “absorbing forms.” Sze “translates” the wandering

Tang poets and their juxtapositions of and connections between the temporally,

geographically, and astronomically minute and immense, or local and expansive, to a

contemporary, innovative aesthetic that honors the Taoist tradition, especially in

allusions to the Zhuangzi. In honoring his Asian heritage with a contemporary

poetics, he shows a kind of Confucianist respect for aesthetic, cultural, and ethnic

ancestors, and he manages to blend aspects of both “formal intelligence” and an

“ethnopoetic.” Critics may have a hard time placing Sze’s work, but it illuminates

the fruitful difficulty of positing any single specific privileged position for reading

Asian American poetry.

<Chonnam National University>

276 Robert Grotjohn

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September 2013. <https://www.pw.org/files/sze_jackson_prize_pr.pdf>.

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World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi.” Ed. Scott Cook.

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2004/5): 202-13.

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<http://www.bu.edu/agni/reviews/online/2010/levin.html>.


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Abstract

A rthur Sze’s Taoist Poetic

Robert Grotjohn (Chonnam National University)

Arthur Sze is a prolific, award-winning, but under-studied Asian American poet

whose work does not fit comfortably into any of the past or current paradigms of

Asian American aesthetics. This essay examines the ways in which Sze translates

Asian influences into his own Asian American aesthetic. He performs that

translation through actual translation of Tang Dynasty poets, through building into

his own poetry connections between the great and the small, the distant and the near

that parallel those connections in the Tang poets, and through a blending of his

American poetry into a Taoistic poetic. With a focus on the poetic sequence “The

Redshifting Web,” this essay illuminates ways to read Sze’s poetry through those

influences, the ways his poems create an Asian ancestral container for his American

poetic. The essay finishes by offering possibilities for future study of Sze’s ways of

gathering his American poetic forbears into his Asian-influenced aesthetic.

▸Key Words: Arthur Sze, Asian American poetry, ethnopoetics, “The Redshifting

Web,” Taoist poetics

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Arthur Sze's Taoist Poetic