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Quipu
“Sze brings together disparate realms of experience—-astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.”— The New Yorker “Sze’s poems seem dazzled and haunted by patterns.”— The Washington Post Quipu was a tactile recording device for the pre-literate Inca, an assemblage of colored knots on cords. In his eighth collection of poetry, Arthur Sze utilizes quipu as a unifying metaphor, knotting and stringing luminous poems that move across cultures and time, from elegy to ode, to create a precarious splendor. Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling
a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root,
slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop
when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into
a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground. Long admired for his poetic fusions of science, history, and anthropology, in Quipu , Sze’s lines and language are taut and mesmerizing, nouns can become verbs—“where is passion that orchids the body?”—and what appears solid and -stable may actually be fluid and volatile. A point of exhaustion can become a point of
it might happen as you observe a magpie on a branch,
or when you tug at a knot and discover that a grief
disentangles, dissolves into air. Renewal is not
possible to a calligrapher who simultaneously
draws characters with a brush in each hand;
it occurs when the tip of a brush slips yet swerves
into flame . . . Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry and a volume of translations. He is the recipient of an Asian American Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in New Mexico.
a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root,
slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop
when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into
a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground. Long admired for his poetic fusions of science, history, and anthropology, in Quipu , Sze’s lines and language are taut and mesmerizing, nouns can become verbs—“where is passion that orchids the body?”—and what appears solid and -stable may actually be fluid and volatile. A point of exhaustion can become a point of
it might happen as you observe a magpie on a branch,
or when you tug at a knot and discover that a grief
disentangles, dissolves into air. Renewal is not
possible to a calligrapher who simultaneously
draws characters with a brush in each hand;
it occurs when the tip of a brush slips yet swerves
into flame . . . Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry and a volume of translations. He is the recipient of an Asian American Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in New Mexico.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2005
4 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Sze
36 books70 followersArthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 29, 2009
Such a beautiful and complex poet. Sze incorporates everything of the universe and finds a way to not only parallel them, but do it in such a way that forces the reader to rethink their own ideas of the aesthetic and the world. I would recommend this collection for anyone, even if you're not interested in poetry.
February 20, 2021
Challenging, deeply scientific, yet mythological poetry. Rewards careful reading & savoring each poem before moving to the next.
April 15, 2022
Sze's poetics to me feels as ancient as it does postmodern. What can at first strike the reader as perplexing complexity, and even randomness, reliably spools out into a spirit of deeply meditative attention, and the links become felt, intuited -- even if at a level below articulation. This collection is a broadly successful one -- a quipu being a perfectly-selected unifying image -- and "The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence" contains the *most apt* description of what Sze's poems insist upon, gently but persistently: "these have no through-line except that all // things becoming and unbecoming become part / of the floe." So, so good. The closing lines of the same poem double down, gorgeously: "And as a lantern undulating on the surface // of a black pool is not the lantern itself, / so these synapsed words are not the things // themselves, but, sizzling, point the way."
November 22, 2024
mystic; i think my favourite poem is "spring smoke."
a bit hard to decipher at times but that is probably a skill issue on my part. sometimes i felt the colour phrases were repetitive
i loved the unconventional uses of nouns as verbs !
a bit hard to decipher at times but that is probably a skill issue on my part. sometimes i felt the colour phrases were repetitive
i loved the unconventional uses of nouns as verbs !
unfinished
May 19, 2012You know what, I give up on this. I've been reading it on and off for like a year and a half, and while it has some nice moments, it has never really caught me. I've admired Sze's work in some anthologies - I don't know if it's a whole book of him that's problematic for me, or whether it's this book. Either way, I think this going in the donate/sell bin. Despite it having a completely awesome cover.
February 16, 2015
fantastic
May 25, 2015
exactly the sort of book i might revise my opinion on after a few reads. i'm interested but not catching something. highly associative for all its narrative appearances.
July 16, 2011
The poems I could understand I enjoyed.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews