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By R.W. French
In recent weeks I have been reading through the poems of Arthur Sze, resident of Pojoaque and Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The poems are conveniently collected, at least through 1998, in "The Redshifting Web." This is a full and rewarding book; its 262 pages of poetry fill the mind and delight the sensuous imagination. It is also a book of compelling intellect; to summarize it in brief compass is no simple task. Fortunately, I am saved from having to make the effort, since the best introduction to "The Redshifting Web" has already - been written, by a man who-no mean feat-never read the book. That would be Henry James, who died in 1916. In "The Art of Fiction" James wrote this:
"If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions ARE experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only.' I should feel that this was rather a tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'" Arthur Sze is no novice-far from it; he is an accomplished craftsman-but in the poems of "The Redshifting Web" he follows, in his way, James's dictum to write from experience-remembering, always, that experience includes impressions, and that impressions can be imaginative as well as sensuous. This is a poetry of extraordinary attentiveness; like Emily Dickinson, Sze finds depths of significance in the small and the ordinary. Nothing is missed, nothing is beyond notice. Consider, for example, an older poem, "North to Taos," published in "Two Ravens" (1976):
The aspen twig A slight experience, one might say? Well, yes; but no. Poetry enhances. Poetry redeems the ordinary from insignificance and rescues the unobserved from indifference. In "North to Taos" there is an air of wonder, of astonishment, that characterizes much of the poetry of "The Redshifting Web"; there is also a deep attachment to the sights and sounds of the earth as well as a profound desire not to let anything pass unnoticed. In a poem from "River River," published in 1987, Sze writes in the tones of fierce longing apparent in so many of the poems. Here are the final lines from "Shooting Star," section 1:
The quotidian violence of the world
I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived Surprise and joy are evident throughout Sze's poetry. "Isn't this the most mysterious of all possible worlds?," he asks delightedly in a recent poem. The mystery, however, is not entirely joyous; it is tempered by an awareness of life's cruelty and loss. "The quotidian violence of the world" is never far away. There is much of the Romantic in Sze's works, but he is no sentimentalist: significantly, many of the poems in "The Redshifting Web" turn upon a technique of startling juxtaposition, in which varied possibilities of human life, dark as well as bright, are placed in close association within the narrow bounds of context. Look, for example, at the opening lines of "Before Completion," the first poem in the book, gathered under "New Poems":
I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula, From the cool and distant heavens to the dumpster to the bucolic imagery of the natural world-amazing! Similar juxtapositions of disparate elements occur throughout the book. To point out one more, an earlier poem, "Moenkopi," begins
Your father had gangrene and The poem concludes:
We walk back
Loss and gain appear to be in constant conflict-or, it may be, in constant equilibrium. What is to be concluded? We cannot be sure. Like Whitman, whose spirit hovers behind many of these poems, Sze observes, narrates and describes, but refrains from judgment. The mystery is apparent; the meaning is not, and always the reader is needed to complete the poem.
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