The Spellbinding Nature of Language

For poet and translator Arthur Sze, poetry offers a way to ask difficult questions without any expectation of an answer. “It helps us slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” he told Tricycle in a 2020 interview. “When one reads a poem, one has to pay attention to the sounds of words, to the rhythm of language, [and] experience the dance and tension between sound and silence.”

His twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Sze to discuss the generativity of emptiness, how poetry stays present tense, and what it means for art to awaken us to what is.