The Massachusetts Medievalist gets lost in Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation

In the flood of usually distressing personnel announcements teeming out of Washington D.C. these days, the Massachusetts Medievalist was thrilled to see Arthur Sze named as Poet Laureate of the United States this past September. I knew very little about him or his work and decided to read his monumental The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). I found a poet creating stunning images with intricate, evocative language.

Constellation is not for the faint of heart - it’s more than 500 pages! – but it rewards a long, deep engagement with Sze’s work. Far beyond the title, Sze invokes astronomy and physics, combined with images of the natural world, immersion in Asian and Southwestern US cultures, and global literary traditions. Throughout Constellation, the resonances of these themes enlarge and refract one another, until it seems obvious that descriptions of mushroom foraging, acequia, sleet, cooking, sex, and black holes belong together in the harmonies of Sze’s lyrics.

At its heart, Constellation reinforces appreciation and acknowledgement of the beauty of the English language. The poems almost demand to be read aloud, slowly; I stumbled over many unfamiliar names and terms (selenographer! dehisce!). Early in the collection, a poem consists entirely of the names of widely varied natural items (section 3 of “The String Diamond”):

….
humpback chub,
large-flowered skullcap,
black lace cactus,
tidewater goby…..

While towards the close, another names Native American tribes:

….
Mescalero Apache,
Siberian Yupik,
Jemez Pueblo,
Pawnee,
Chugach/Alutiiq……. (section 5, “Spectral Line”)

He includes Shakespearean echoes (“red numbers on the clock incarnadine the time,” [Section 4, “Quipu”]) and associates seemingly unrelated ideas (“I recognize fractures in turtle plastrons, / glimpse the divinatory nature of language,” [“The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence”]) . Throughout, Sze juxtaposes the micro and the macro to dazzling effect:

Pearls ripen in a lacquer bowl on the butcher-
block table. A red shimmer arcs across
the northwest sky as a galaxy bends the light
of a quasar. (Section 6, “Six Persimmons”)

The collection’s last line provides an enormously satisfying finale: “gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way–” (“Transpirations”).

Even in this fraught political moment, the Library of Congress has stupendously fulfilled its task of recognizing and elevating for us a poet deserving of our deep reading, our extended rumination. Start with the Poetry Foundation’s short selection of Sze’s work, and be prepared to marvel at lines like “The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors / and shimmering” (Section 5, “Streamers”).