Meet U.S. poet laureate Arthur Sze
A video introduction to U.S. poet laureate Arthur Sze, the 25th poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, appointed in 2025.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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Transcript
Hello, I'm Arthur Sze and I'm the 25th US Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. My personal story is my mother and father were immigrants from China, and like many Asian American families, there was a lot of emphasis on doing something safe and pursuing a career in science and technology. And as you may know, I started writing poetry as a freshman at MIT.
And who would have imagined 50 years later I would become the 25th poet laureate? I hope to pursue a theme of poetry and translation, and that's a theme and an arena, and a way into poetry that hasn't been fully explored before. Translation is how I learned my craft as a poet. Instead of going to a master of Fine Arts degree program for graduate school.
I apprenticed myself by studying ancient Chinese classical poems and writing them out and thinking about how they were constructed and why they were so present-tense. Hence why a thousand years later, they felt like they could be happening today. So for me, translation is really the crucial vehicle in which to approach language. It's not intimidating because you don't have to start from scratch.
You can take someone else's language and you can try and translate it yourself, and use your own voice in your own words to create a semblance of that kind of poem. And that is so valuable as a source for going on to discover and create your own work. So I hope to encourage people to think about how all languages come together, how language is an important source of inspiration, and to use that as a vehicle to may be translated a poem and to also write their own poems.
And I think the other thing I want to say is, it's important for readers to not seeing the poetry has to be difficult or esoteric, or that you have to get it all at once. Another way to approach a poem is to say the poem aloud. Think of the moments that are surprising, sad, or unusual, where one discovers something we hadn't seen before, and to let those moments be like seeds that coincide you.
Then you can reread the poem again and again and live with it. And then you really experience what poetry can do.
And who would have imagined 50 years later I would become the 25th poet laureate? I hope to pursue a theme of poetry and translation, and that's a theme and an arena, and a way into poetry that hasn't been fully explored before. Translation is how I learned my craft as a poet. Instead of going to a master of Fine Arts degree program for graduate school.
I apprenticed myself by studying ancient Chinese classical poems and writing them out and thinking about how they were constructed and why they were so present-tense. Hence why a thousand years later, they felt like they could be happening today. So for me, translation is really the crucial vehicle in which to approach language. It's not intimidating because you don't have to start from scratch.
You can take someone else's language and you can try and translate it yourself, and use your own voice in your own words to create a semblance of that kind of poem. And that is so valuable as a source for going on to discover and create your own work. So I hope to encourage people to think about how all languages come together, how language is an important source of inspiration, and to use that as a vehicle to may be translated a poem and to also write their own poems.
And I think the other thing I want to say is, it's important for readers to not seeing the poetry has to be difficult or esoteric, or that you have to get it all at once. Another way to approach a poem is to say the poem aloud. Think of the moments that are surprising, sad, or unusual, where one discovers something we hadn't seen before, and to let those moments be like seeds that coincide you.
Then you can reread the poem again and again and live with it. And then you really experience what poetry can do.