I used to love big fat books of collected poems, the way they seemed to bring whole universes of thoughts, feelings, experiences together and make them ready to hand. Not so much anymore. For a long time now, I’ve been intimidated by them. Now I prefer those nice slender volumes poets put out one by one. I like the feeling they give that poetry, at least, won’t overflow and drown you in its excess, that you can take it in slowly, according to the rhythm of life. That explains why, as excited as I was to see half a century of Arthur Sze’s poetry gathered in one volume—and The Glass Constellation is not even that thick, just a bit more than 500 pages—I decided to space out my reading of it, not devour it straight through. I would read, first of all, the poems he’d written in the 1970s and ‘80s, before I knew his work. And, most avidly, I’d read the new poems subsequent to those in his last book, Sight Lines, which came out just two years ago. Everything in between—the poetry I already know and love—I’d save for another go. I can imagine that if I come back to those later, after having digested the things that are new to me, I will see new things in them, things I’d only notice having learned more about where they came from, and where they turned out to be going. What’s curious in the earlier work is how much it already has in common with the poetry I already know, and how important what’s different about it seems to me. Amazing from the start is the precision and concreteness of everything; nothing is blurred, nothing out of focus. “You carry flowers in a jug of green wine, / and the smell is that of the first fires in autumn / when the leaves are blown into the reds and grays,” begins “Strawberries in a Wooden Bowl,” a poem from Sze’s first book, The Willow Wind (1972). Visually and sensorially, this is so direct—it etches itself into the mind. But it’s also surprising. First I was thought that verb “blown” was a bit odd, in an interesting sort of way—but that’s because what it describes is not what I thought. The red leaves, I thought, were the autumn leaves that had turned color, but then it probably should have been “reds and browns,” not “reds and grays.” Leaves don’t turn gray in the fall! But of course, that’s not what’s meant: These are burning leaves that flare red and then turn gray as they become ash, and then they quite literally blow, as Mr. Dylan said, in the wind. The poem constitutes a brief sequence of such concrete perceptions, and these are held together by their reference to a “you” who is the thread around which they crystallize: In the second stanza, “you reach across the table,” and in the third, “You stand now, silent.” That’s enough to suggest a scene, a situation, a relation that gives personal meaning to the welter of natural phenomena, from “The sunlight rains through the glass” to the strawberries that “are half-covered with curdled milk.” In Sze’s later poems, this attachment of perception to a particular situation populated by particular people is often absent. There may still be an “I” and a “you,” but they are discontinuous with themselves. Each line is like a new beginning, perceived from a different time and place, and they refuse to be unified by reference to a single consciousness. The poems have incorporated time and space in such a way that if they are the content of a single mind, it can only be across a long stretch of time, or if they are simultaneous, they can only be the thoughts of different minds. In other words, this poetry incorporates the subjective and transcends it. Here’s the beginning of “The White Orchard,” the poem that lends its title to the collection’s last section of new poems:
Under a supermoon, you gaze into the orchard— a glassblower shapes a glowing orange mass into a horse— you step into a space where you once lived— crushed mica glitters on plastered walls— a raccoon strolls in moonlight along the top of an adobe wall— swimming in a pond, we notice a reflected cottonwood on the water— clang: a deer leaps over the gate— every fifteen minutes an elephant is shot for its tusks—
The orchard, the glassblower, the pond and so on do not come together to form a scene; each is its own scene. The “you” in the first line and the “you” in the third line may not be the same person and may not be part of the “we” in the sixth line. The apparently direct perceptions such as that of the sound made by the deer leaping over the gate coexist with the statistical information about the elephants. Something as minute as a bit of crushed mica and an astronomical event like a supermoon are equal. The poem suggests the possibility of a greater-than-individual consciousness.
❂
Arthur Sze, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems is published by Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2021.
❂
BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.