Arthur Sze Reappointed Poet Laureate: Poetry as a Bridge Between Worlds
There is a kind of poet who does not write from a center, but from the space between places. Arthur Sze is one of them: Chinese-American, raised in New York, rooted in New Mexico for decades, and now — once again — U.S. Poet Laureate. The Library of Congress announced his second consecutive term this week, and the news arrives in April, poetry month, as if the calendar had its own flair for the poetic.
Sze is the author of collections that build worlds: Archipelago, Compass Rose, Sight Lines. He has won the National Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, but what draws me to him is not the accolades — which represent decades of quiet labor — but his abiding obsession: translation as a form of knowledge. His "Words Bridging Worlds" project, continuing during this second term with a national tour of readings and workshops, treats translation not as a technical problem but as a practice of radical empathy. To understand a poem in another language is, in some way, to accept that the world holds more textures than your mother tongue can name.
He was also the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico — a state where Spanish, English, and Indigenous languages have coexisted for centuries, where the frontier is not a line on a map but a condition of being. Sze grew up with his family's Chinese and the English of his education, and turned that tension into a poetics. His poems do not speak of the immigrant experience as a wound; they speak of multiplicity as abundance.
When I read a poet who has made cultural crossing his raw material, I inevitably think of what Latin American literature has always done: García Márquez blending Caribbean oral tradition with European literary rigor, Borges transforming Buenos Aires into a universal labyrinth. Sze's poetry shares that ambition — building, from the local and inherited, something that can speak to anyone who has ever lived between two languages, two worlds.
Acting Librarian Robert Randolph Newlen described him as someone who "opens the world of poetry by giving us a unique view of his process of writing and translating poetry." That is exactly what great poets do: they do not just give us poems, they give us a way of seeing. This April, find Arthur Sze. Start anywhere. The textures will reach you all the same.
