>> Shari Werb: Good evening, poetry lovers. I'm Shari Werb and I'm head of programming here at the library, and also director of the library's center for Learning Literacy and Engagement. I'm very pleased to welcome you this evening for the presentation of the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for poetry in our newly renovated Mumford Room. Before we begin, let me remind you to please turn off your cell phones and any other electronic equipment that may interfere with tonight's program or with the recording of this event for the library's archives. The format of tonight's event is as follows. Our winner will give a short talk on poetry titled Lines of Sight and Beyond. And then he'll be joined by the library's head of poetry, who you met a few minutes ago, poetry and literature Rob Casper for a discussion. We will conclude with an award of the prize, followed by a book signing in the foyer. I would like to thank the Literary Initiatives Office for their work as a recommending committee, as well as to Betty Sue flowers, one of the longtime jurors of the prize, for her input. I would also like to thank Dr. Philip Bobbitt for his generous gift that makes this prize possible. And we will hear from Dr. Bobbitt a little bit later as he talks about the prize. And of course, we want to thank Philip for supporting the Library of Congress and our efforts to promote poetry with this prize in his mother's honor. I'm pleased tonight to introduce our winner for the 2024 Rebecca Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for poetry, Arthur Sze. The Bobbitt Prize recognizes the most distinguished book of poetry by an American, published during the preceding two years, or the lifetime achievement of an American poet. Sze is the fifth poet to win the prize for a lifetime achievement since the biennial prize was first given in 1990. He is also the first Asian-American poet to receive the prize. Sze most recent poetry collection, The Glass Constellation New and Collected Poems received a Science and Literature Award from the National Book Foundation. His other collections include sightlines, which won the National Book Award for poetry, compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and archipelago, selected for an American Book Award. Former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sze is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives. In their citation for the prize, the library's committee wrote in 11 books and over more than 50 years Arthur Sze. Has developed a signature lyricism of seeing. his poems focused on images and declarations, but they also move through breathtaking juxtapositions, create layers of fragments that open up rather than direct to their readers. These imaginative capaciousness pulls in languages, traditions and systems for both East and West, and it can speak to the cosmos, then turn to the smallest natural detail. His latest collection, The Glass Constellation New and Collected Poems, captures the range and the commitment of his life's work to create points of connection, reflection and refraction part of an organic, growing whole. Please join us in welcoming Arthur Sze. [applause] >> Arthur Sze: Thank you. What a pleasure and honor to be here this evening. I want to begin by thanking the Library of Congress Dr. Hayden, Clay Smith, Rob Casper, Anya Creightney, Brett Zunker, and Philip Bobbitt and all of you for coming this evening. The title of my talk is Lines of Sight and Beyond. I believe poetry has a crucial role to play in our lives. It helps us slow down and deepen our attention. It helps us uncover, discover things we didn't know and things we didn't know we already knew. Things that we couldn't articulate until we experienced them in a poem. A poem communicates first through sound and rhythm, and it is understood viscerally in the body before it can be articulated by the intelligence. Poetry speaks to our deepest selves and connects us all, and it also speaks to the exigencies of our time. Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing. As a poet, I want to proceed with care, but I am not bound by reality. I want to use the pressure and urgency of reality to affirm the power of the human imagination and the emotional range and depth of human experience. Although I like facts in my poems, to be accurate, I am willing to change details and invent new ones in pursuit of emotional and imaginative truth. We can have black tangerines in a poem if that's what's needed. And this allegiance to the deeper truth is manifested in the different forms and kinds of poems I've explored and developed over time. Poetry can claim and reimagine the deepest meanings of exploration and freedom as part of the American experience. I'd like to begin with a poem that references Thomas Jefferson. Black Center. Green tips of tulips arising out of the earth. You don't flends a whale or fire at beer cans in an arroyo, but catch the budding tips of pear branches and wonder what it's like to live along a pearling edge of spring. Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon skeleton on the white House floor, but with pieces missing. Fail to sequence the bones. When the last speaker of a language dies, A hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light. Last night, you sped past, revolving and flashing red, blue and white lights along the road. A wild fire in the dark. Though no one you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance, an arrow struck a bull's eye and quivered in its shaft. One minute gratitude rises like water from an underground lake. Another dissolution gnaws from a black center. Black center was created through an associative process, and the generative spark was driving at night and passing an accident on the other side of the highway. I saw red, white and blue lights of police cars as well as an ambulance, and I immediately connected those colors to the American flag. I changed the order of colors to red, blue, and white so that the reference to America would be more indirect. As a poet, I need to explore and play with language. I need to lose my way and disoriented, discover, reorient, and envision new possibilities. As a poet, I need to be able to go into the darkest regions of experience, and write as needed from those places. Black center touches on some dark themes. But instead of unfolding through linear narration, it makes associative leaps. I was born in New York City in 1950 and grew up on Long Island with Chinese immigrant parents who spoke Mandarin as well as English. Exposure to two languages was formative for me. As a child, I remember going to Chinese language school on weekends, where I sat at a desk, and given a sheet of paper with lines that formed a grid of empty square boxes, wrote Chinese characters again and again, trying to get the stroke order and proportion of each character right. Out of 50 attempts, A parent teacher often circled one or two as decent. Maybe that repetitive act of writing, which carried an implicit reverence for language, was a seed that came to later fruition. As an Asian American growing up in Garden City, I felt enormous family pressure to do something safe and professional, scientist, doctor, engineer, investment banker were all possibilities. For high school, I moved to new Jersey and was a boarding student at the Lawrenceville School. I was good at math and science, but I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. My father was a chemical engineer who got his Ph.D. from MIT, so I applied, was accepted, and started college there. In my first semester, I sat in a large lecture hall with over 100 students and stared at whiteboards where the professor wrote out calculus equations. One day I stared at the equations and turned away. I flipped to the back of my notebook and started to write. Phrases came to me. I wasn't sure what was happening, where it was going, but I felt exhilarated. I couldn't have articulated it then, but in that rush, I understood that if I continued down the road set up for me, I would live what Henry David Thoreau called a life of quiet desperation. I could have pursued a career in science, but I would have always had a gnawing hunger inside, and would have yearned to know what would have happened if I had pursued a life of writing. After jotting down a jumble of phrases during class, I remember sitting at a desk in my dorm room that evening and working the phrases into a poem. That was a moment of awakening and it was irreversible. The next day I wrote another poem, and the next day another. Soon I was writing all the time and realized that's what I wanted to do. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I enrolled in a poetry workshop with MIT and Harvard students with visiting poet Denise Levertov. Denise had recently taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and she made the Bay area sound exciting. I had never been west of Pennsylvania, but I decided to apply as a transfer student to UC Berkeley, and at the end of my sophomore year, I hitchhiked from Boston to Berkeley. It took me six days to cross America, and I still remember crossing the Sierra and coming down the highway and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay. As I got situated in Berkeley, I began to understand what an immense gift of freedom we have in our country. On an elemental level, one can think of freedom as not being bound, confined or detained by force. One can think of freedom as self-determination, as personal, civil and political liberty. During my first days in Berkeley, I felt such joy at being able to move without hindrance in any direction I wanted to explore. And I glimmeringly saw this gift of untapped possibilities as an essential part of the American experience. I was able to pursue my dream of becoming a poet. It may seem odd to jump now to a poem written decades later, but I am pursuing a hopscotch path rather than linear chronology. I want to propose that one thing poetry can do by making us slow down, is to help us notice deeply, to even see beneath and behind appearances. I think of how William Carlos Williams can harness minute particulars and make those particulars vehicles for insight and emotional resonance. Here's first snow. A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway, imbibing the silence. You stare at spruce needles. There is no sound of a leaf blower. No sign of a black bear. A few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack against an aspen trunk. A carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall. You only spot the rabbit's ears and tail. When it moves. You locate it against speckled gravel. But when it stops, it blends in again. The world of being is like this gravel. You think you own a car, a house, this blue zigzag shirt. But you just borrow these things. Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams and stood at Gibraltar. But you possess nothing. Snow melts into a pool of clear water. And in this stillness, Starlight behind daylight, wherever you gaze. Poetry is an endless source of wonder and discovery. I wrote this poem in perceptual clusters with dropped lines and indented stanzas, and I wanted to use the form to delineate and even enact through silences the process of exploration and finding unexpected connections and insights. Poetry, to me, is also organic and embodies living at the edge of a new leaf. Each day, I like to write before dawn, into and through sunrise, when I am not fully awake and not fully in control of my language. At this liminal edge, there is inherent freedom and exploration. Here, all things are possible. And in the process of writing toward what might be strange or not understood, but intuited as necessary, the willingness to take risks is crucial. One of the great things about writing is that you can have a disaster, a total disaster, but it is not fatal. You do not slip off a high wire and plummet to death. Instead, you can toss the words aside and start over. Another day, another time. But when the process of writing is going well, I feel like I am working with shards, with snippets, with musical phrases, and that the poem accrues through luminous concretion. One day, I happened to step out of the shower and notice a piece of lichen growing on a wood ceiling beam, I suddenly thought, what would that lichen say to a person? I had never experimented with voice in that way before, and as I wrote, I thought, this lichen will not follow rules of punctuation. It will speak under emotional pressure in one stream, like in song, snow in the air. You've seen a crust on the ceiling wood and never considered how I gather moisture when you step out of the shower. You don't care that I respire as you breathe for years. You've washed your face, gazed in the mirror, shaved, combed your hair, rushed out. While I, who may grow an inch in a thousand years, catch the tingling sunlight. You don't understand how I can dive to a temperature of liquefied gas and warm back up, absorb water, and start growing again without a scar. I can float numb in space, be hit with cosmic rays, then return to Earth and warm out of my sleep to respire again without a hiccup. You come and go while I stay gripped to pine, and the sugar of existence runs through you. Runs through me, you sliver. If you just go, go, go. If you slowed, you could discover that mosquitoes bat their wings 600 times a second. And before they mate, synchronize their wings, you could feel how they flicker with desire. I am flinging your words. And if you absorb, not blot my song, you could learn. You are not alone in pain and grief though you've instilled pain and grief. You can urge the dare and thrill of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post but you cough only look. Yes, look at me now because you are blink about to leave. When I was a student at UC Berkeley, I wanted to explore so many different arenas that I didn't know how I could fulfill the requirements to graduate. I wanted to learn enough Chinese so that I could translate poems by Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei into English. I thought I could learn my craft by apprenticing myself to those poems. I also wanted to study philosophy and English literature. I enrolled in a poetry workshop with Josephine Miles, and she quickly became my mentor when I explained my dilemma. She offered to be my faculty sponsor where I could create my own self-directed major in poetry. Over tea at her house on a Saturday afternoon, after she had gone over my poems, she smiled and said, you can take Swahili if you want. One day you're going to be a poet. Her mentorship and generosity of spirit gave me the courage to continue on my path. Nearing graduation, I told Josephine that I wanted to go somewhere in America. I had never been before. Josephine suggested I try Santa Fe, New Mexico. She gave me the name of a friend, Stanley Noyce, and I set out. When I met Stan, he suggested I apply to the newly formed New Mexico Poetry in the schools program. I applied and was accepted and spent the next ten years working all over the state. I met native students at Jemez Pueblo. Spanish speaking students in Ojo Caliente and Bernalillo, and I worked at every junior high school in Santa Fe. then sponsored by the Santa Fe Council for the Arts, I became a visiting poet at the New Mexico School for the deaf, and worked in classes with the aid of a sign translator. At the end of my residency, the students gave a poetry reading, and I will never forget how, after each student signed their poem in complete silence, there was thunderous applause. And after the worst prison riot in New Mexico history, I taught a poetry workshop with incarcerated women, and a year later with men. I was excited to be living in a part of America that was outside of the America I knew. When Walt Whitman writes, I am large, I contain multitudes. The assertion applies not just to poetry, but to America. For 22 years, from 1984 to 2006, I taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I taught students of all ages from over 200 tribes. It was not an easy situation. The institute seethed with inter-tribal tensions and rivalries. Originally funded through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the funding was precarious from year to year. People came and quickly left. I stayed on, and when the institute was taken out of the BIA and had its own funding from the federal government, I oversaw the transition from a two-year Associate of Arts degree to a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in creative writing. During my time there, I tried not to write about any students, but when I left in 2006, I wanted to write a sequence to remember and honor them. When I start a sequence, I usually write a poem and recognize that it's part of something larger and deeper. That first poem, though, is never the beginning section of the sequence. Instead, it's somewhere inside the field of energy of the larger poem. I have to explore, discover, and work from the inside out. I like how in a sequence one can change place, time, voice, rhythm, emotional pitch from section to section. I believe the poetic sequence is the form of our time, because it enables one to develop a complexity that intensifies as well as enlarges scope and resonance, and it can extend as long as needed. For my sequence inspired by the Institute, I thought about how at graduation, there was a tradition to name each student and then their tribe. So I started by drawing up a list of students I was privileged to teach. Emerson once said, bear. A lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. As I stared at the list, I thought, this is too literal. But suddenly, I saw that if I substituted the name of each tribe for each student, the list would become a roll call. I then played with the sound and rhythm of the tribal names to create an order. I also drew on my science background and thought how each star in the night sky has a unique signature of light. The bands of light are called spectral lines. I decided to treat the Institute as my star, and then I had a viable structure to work with. I say all this because writing poetry is an essential practice of freedom, where the unfettered imagination can use the wretched and the beautiful, the mundane and the astonishing anything and everything I believe no word is inherently more poetic than another that scissors can be used as readily as trash, that phlegm can be used as readily as blood, and that structurally, simultaneity and synchronicity can be as effective as succession. There isn't time to read the manifold sequence of spectral line. It's in nine sections, but I want to share the spine. The central fifth section. Acoma Pueblo, Diné, Crow, Oglala, Lakota. Menominee, Northern Ute, Zuni, Pueblo. Kiowa, Muckleshoot, Standing Rock. Lakota, Muskogee, Ojibwe, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Comanche, Tlingit, Mescalero Apache, Siberian Yupik. Jemez Pueblo, Pawnee, Chugach, Alutiiq. Mohawk. Swampy Cree, Osage, Taos, Pueblo. Arapaho. Jicarilla Apache Paiute Haida. Onondaga Cochiti Pueblo. Sioux Eastern Shawnee, Caddo, Santa Clara Pueblo, Northern Cheyenne and Prairie band. Potawatomi Choctaw Chickasaw. Collage nupiat. This simple list comes out of personal experience, but the literal has been transformed. For me, the path of poetry is the path of liberation. Poetry must resist all forms of coercion. I can try to direct a poem in a certain direction. Other people can promulgate a certain kind of poem. But I know that when I write, I must suspend all that and pay deep attention to where the poem itself wants to take me. I enter a space where I am leading and am also being led. I enter a space where I explore and discover things I don't and can't yet understand. It's scary to not be in control and not know where the writing is going, but this is where the poem is most alive and not knowing too soon what is going to happen and resisting finalizing phrases. I find this place one of intense vulnerability and also at the heart of freedom. Exercising this inner freedom to create a poem requires courage and stamina. When the poem is provisionally completed, I usually experience exhaustion. I have no idea if the writing is any good and don't care about that. Instead, if I know that I've given all I can to the poem, that's what matters. And by extension, I find that this care I have for language leads me to speak and act more thoughtfully, and to care and respect all other people and all living things. I mentioned at the outset that poetry can and must speak to the exigencies of our time. In doing so, it's good to remember Emily Dickinson's advice tell all the truth, but tell it's lent. In the last decade or so of my writing life, I've liked composing poems in one-line stanzas or mono sticks. In this form, each one-line stanza ends in a dash and is independent as the microcosm of each one-line stanza accrues through juxtaposition. A macrocosm is formed and resonates. Here is a very short poem, vector's first extinction in the Galapagos Islands. The least vermilion flycatcher Hopis drill a foot deep and plant blue corn along a wash. Danger! A woman brushed on the side of a napalm bomb. In an oblong box emptied of firewood, a black widow Webb shaving. He nicked himself and stared in the mirror in a moment of blood. Out of a saddlebag, a teen pulls a severed goat's head. Before signing his name, he recalls hotel rooms were once used as torture chambers. In Thessaloniki, the beach attendant made a gun of his hand and fired at him. Prisoners cackled when the inmate on stage said, is it not time for my painkiller? Weighing mushrooms, the defendant cashier grins, you suffer from suspicion. I suffer from kindness. A mercenary turned car mechanic spilled a pile of krugerrands onto the table. Looking up from a tusk under the lamp, the carver smiled. It's butter in my hands. In my journey as a poet, I've tried to keep evolving and not get stuck writing one kind of poem. I like Theodore Roethke's line. I learn by going where I have to go. Yes, I learn by going, by trying and failing, trying and failing again and again. And I want the poem to be sprung from inner necessity. I still have so much to learn, and I can genuinely say that I am as excited about poetry now as I was at the beginning. In this final poem, I employed mono sticks, but added a stricture where each line has to pick up a word or words from the previous line. Within this stricture, there is complete freedom. Any image, place, time, voice, fragment, query, assertion is possible. I developed this form by wanting to deepen musicality. I wanted repetition to move through the poem, but not in any predictable way. I've called this invented form a cascade. My hope is that the stricture gives rigor and intensity to the language, and that the lines enact what Wallace Stevens might have called the poem in the act of finding what will suffice. The poem is set in Jacona, New Mexico. Many people who visit that area are struck by the beauty of the high desert landscape. Yet if you walk in that terrain and look west, you can spot a small water tank on top of a mesa. That water tank marks the site of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb. So suddenly, there's also danger. In this final poem, Jefferson once again makes an appearance. Here's Sight Lines. I'm walking in sight of the Rio Nambi. Salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch. The snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring. At least, no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos. The plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site. A man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now. No one could anticipate this distance from Monticello. Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves. During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad. A woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body. When I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch. I step out of the ditch, but step deeper into myself. I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring. I find ginseng where there is no ginseng. My talisman of desire. Though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips. Though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world's mystery. The ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase. I'm walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field. Fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand. Though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here. Thank you. [applause] >> Robert Casper: Thanks so much, Arthur. That was terrific. So we'll have just a short-moderated discussion before the awarding of the prize, and we'll hear a little bit from Mr. Bobbitt about the history behind the prize. So I really want to frame our conversation around the statement you make earlier in the talk. “Poetry can claim and reimagine the deepest meanings of exploration and freedom as part of the American experience.” And you talked a lot about formal exploration as well as the freedom of writing poems. But I wanted to start with just the story of these four important places that you lived. I was struck by how chance played such a big part in those moves, and they became kind of mythic. So maybe you could talk about them and what that meant for you and your poetry. >> Arthur Sze: Yeah, check where to start with chance. From an Asian perspective, you can think of it as chance, and you can also think of it as fate. It's kind of a wonderful sort of back and forth. And yes, in terms of the places I grew up in New York City and then Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Bay area, Berkeley, and then Santa Fe, New Mexico. Those have been my places. I think you can think of it as chance, but you can also think of it as urgency or necessity. And I guess that's where I would start. Meaning, when I first started writing my first poem, it was in the most unlikeliest of places. But I always think I'm grateful to have started at MIT, because there was so much intensity of math and science that it made me -- it shocked me, and it made me like, think, is this really what I want to do with my life? And sometimes I think if I had gone to a liberal arts college, maybe I wouldn't have discovered that. Maybe I would have slid along and said, oh, I can do this, but I can take literature classes too. But at MIT, there wasn't even an English department. There was a humanities department that combined all foreign languages, English literature everything was piled into one. So that kind of intensity of experience was crucial. And so you could say it was chance. But I also think, in a way, as you go through life, you find yourself in certain situations and it's necessity that springs forward, that helps one determine what happens next. And Denise Levertov made California sound so exciting. It was like, oh this week, so-and-so is reading. And last week, it was just sounded so energetic and vibrant. I just thought, I've got to see what is happening in California. So again, I don't think of these moves as necessarily chance. I feel like it's being open to the possibilities of experience. And I like to think that when you're writing a poem too, one doesn't sit down and say, oh, now I'm going to write a poem about this or that rarely works very well. Instead, if you think, oh, let me see what's going to happen, I like to play with language and hear something that's there I hadn't foreseen. And then if you have, I think it's about courage and stamina. If you have the willingness to pursue and persevere, then these things happen that they might appear like chance, but ultimately they become maybe part of one's character or determination. >> Robert Casper: Yours is also obviously an immigrant story, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit. America is a young country, and you were trained, as you discuss at an early age in creating an ancient language. I wonder what that meant for you. And I'm also curious just about the kind of exactitude of writing those Chinese characters, which seems to me like great training, but also the opposite in a way of play and chance and openness. >> Arthur Sze: Yeah, obviously, I think there's an underlying rigor to language and for Chinese characters. As a kid, you learn to write characters with a particular stroke order and direction, and you get better and better. And I guess some of the things I want to say is you learn rules, and then you get to a stage where you can break them too, and that becomes really important and valuable. I turned to translating classical Chinese poetry because they felt so compressed and so powerful to me. And when I read translations in English, many of the translators, the diction felt forced or dated, or so I wanted to apprentice myself to those poems, and in writing out the characters, stroke by stroke to a poem, I was stepping inside of the poem. So on the one hand, it had a rigor to it. I had to think about how was this poem constructed, but it also had a kind of flow. And it was a great learning process. So I think I sort of balanced the two. >> Robert Casper: And I also just wondered about how your experience as a Chinese American and traveling to China, doing translations of Chinese poets, having your work translated into Chinese affected you in terms especially when we talk about freedom and movement and the sort of idea of a kind of experience that is American. >> Arthur Sze: Yeah. I think for many Chinese poets, one Chinese poet told me it's called a zigzag way. You want to write a particular direction and you hit a wall. You can't really go further. And so then you veer off in another direction, and you hit another wall, and you veer in another direction, and you hit another wall. And it's sort of fascinating to me the huge contrast between China and America. And I've known other Chinese poets who say, well, in China, the sort of areas of boundaries are fairly well determined. And then when they come to America, it's sort of like you can write anything, but the walls are gone, and then it's disorienting. And so the where's the tension? Where's the pressure? So the contrast is enormous. And for me, recently translating contemporary Chinese poets has been really exciting and challenging because it's very different from classical Chinese. And instead of writing out character by character, I'm writing out phrases and I'm thinking more about how-- I'm still writing the poems now, but I'm thinking in a different way, in sort of larger and almost like a kind of musical phrase by musical phrase and that's giving me inspiration for my own work and thinking about that. >> Robert Casper: Your story of traveling and sort of absorbing the places you arrived at is also a story of absorbing different kinds of languages, too, not just Chinese, but I mean, obviously moving to Santa Fe and then working at the IAEA, you had that experience as well, and I know that you brought scientific language into the classroom with your students. So I wonder if you think that for you, that kind of openness to other languages is a kind of American experience, or it reflects a kind of Americanness in your poems? >> Arthur Sze: Yeah. I think the openness to language and to languages definitely is part of the sort of lineage of American poetry. I'm thinking just off the top of my head that if you think of Whitman and Dickinson, it's sort of like the North and South Pole. I mean, every American poet is going to quote Whitman and Dickinson as important influences that sense of innovation in their language and their imagination. I mean, they're so different, but they are foundational to American poetry. And it seems to me Whitman absorbs sometimes East Indian words or phrases, and it's like, wait a minute, where did that come in? And this. So I think there's a long precedent for that. When I taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I taught a class using classical Chinese poetry with native students, and they would take a Wang Wei poem, and they would, instead of translating it into English or in addition to translating into English, they would translate it into Chalugee or Navajo and when I showed them that Mandarin traditionally has like four tones, they would get up and write phrases in the Diné language and show me, well, we have four tones, but the third tone is a glottal stop. It's a pause. It's a silence inside of the word. And then I would think, oh, they should be using that in their poetry. They don't necessarily have to use it in a word. They could take an English word and create tension with the silences and the pauses. And so I think for native students and for American poets, it's ongoing, this sense of absorbing and drawing from other languages. >> Robert Casper: You said the poetic experience is a the form of our time, and you talked about it being able to extend as long as needed. And of course you've written so many sequences. It made me think about, especially with your compositional approach, how you determine a beginning and an end to a poem, how you feel it. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Arthur Sze: It's really difficult. I think the very first sequence I wrote is a poem called The Leaves of a dream, or The Leaves of an onion, and I remember writing the three, the first three poems as three separate poems. And one of my things that I like to do, my quirks is to lay out poems on the floor and then put blank pages between the poems I've written and think, am I missing something? Should there be something going there? Or what if the one, two, three is? What if the third poem is first, and what? And so I looked at those three poems and I thought, wait a minute, this is really part of something larger. And that was really exciting for me to write. And that was again, my first sequence. And when I wrote, I think I wrote past the sixth poem and I realized that the energy just was dissipating. Then I started to sort of try and coalesce. In my experience now, I can if I write a poem, I can feel like I'm just getting started, that it's like the tip of an iceberg and that 20 lines, 30 lines isn't enough. But I can't quite and I don't know why. Am glad not to be able to foresee what's going to happen. So like the Spectral Line poem, where I read the fifth section with a roll call of native tribes. Those nine sections took me 11 months to write. So these sections come very slowly to me when I'm working on a sequence. It's not like I sit down and say, oh, I can see it, and here it is. And it's more like, I know this is part of something much larger, and I need to give myself time and not be in a hurry and sort of pull things up that I don't even know are there. >> Robert Casper: Well, I thought I would end our conversation just with a walk through the last poem that Arthur read, Sight Lines. You all have a copy? because I thought it would give us the opportunity to talk through the sort of signature movement in your poems and capaciousness. This is an interesting poem. It begins really by situating us in the first three lines, but it both describes a place and we are moving within this place and much is already happening, even though on the surface it just seems like it's description. I imagine you didn't write this to begin with in the poem. What part did you start with in the poem originally? >> Arthur Sze: Well, let me first say that there were, what, two, four, six or there was 18 or 20 lines? I think 20 lines. I probably had 60- or 71-line stanzas that I played around with, and I juxtaposed in the earliest part. The genesis of this poem is actually a fun story to share. Lisa Rossbacher contacted me out of the blue and said, I'm putting together an anthology of poems about Thomas Jefferson. Do you have a poem you can send me, or can you write something for me? And I thought at first, I can't write anything on demand like that about Thomas Jefferson. And then I thought I've written a lot about Chinese history, a lot of the traumas and painful episodes are part of my family history from the Cultural Revolution. And I thought, why not write about America? And I thought about living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in Jacona, New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, thinking, oh, in Jefferson's time, this was not part of America, but he was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. And so the actual beginnings of this poem are the Jefferson despised the newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves and the image of Monticello, because Lisa Rossbacher told me, I think she said, I think I'm going to call it -- I'm going to use that as the sort of image for the anthology. So I thought about the architecture of Monticello. There are probably like 15 or 20 lines about Jefferson that are in this poem that disappear. So basically I made a mess. And sometimes, I'll actually, if it's too difficult to focus, I'll actually cut them out when I'm working with the one line stanzas, and I'll move them around on a table and I'll come back and I'll say, what if this is the opening? What if that's the opening? I hope that at the end, like you say, sort of the beginning came to me very late. I felt like I wanted to place a speaker in a landscape. and the end came to me very late. But of course, like all poems, one hopes there's a kind of rigor and necessity so that you feel like, oh, it had to be this way and this motion. But again, it probably took me maybe two months of writing every day to work through this. So the Jefferson came quickly, and then walking in this landscape came next. And thinking about and seeing Los Alamos up on the mesa, and then thinking about plutonium and then thinking about the idea that each line is like a rock where only part is above surface. So there's the idea of you have the text of the poem that's visible, but what's more potent or what is really critical is the subtext, the sort of sense of power and depth of what's behind the language or what isn't stated. So the sense of a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now. I was thinking of someone who lives in the valley, whom I had met a couple of times, who retired from working in Los Alamos and weapons, and then was breeding horses. And that seemed like such a striking, literal thing that happened. I that ended up in the poem. So it sort of grew by accretion. >> Robert Casper: Well, and I was struck by how the poem ends, in part by returning to glimpsing horses in the field. And there is a way in which your poems both enact a kind of simultaneity of experience. All these things are happening all at once, and they're all kind of equalized in this radical way, but then still return to subjects, return to images, return to scenes in very powerful ways. >> Arthur Sze: Thank you. I think I would sort of invoked the image of metaphor of music, the way musical phrases come back. So I again, don't I can't intentionally think, oh, now I've got horses and that's going to come back, but I can, if I'm writing from my deepest self, sort of not know what I'm doing, and phrases will happen that have the kind of heat and light, and then I can recognize that, oh well, this line needs to be in the poem and work in this lead. And so there's a kind of near and far, there's a kind of inner and outer world happening. But I can only say that in hindsight. >> Robert Casper: Yeah, yeah. But you were aware, obviously, because of the prompt for this, about how you were moving historically, you were going to move historically to Jefferson and then out of that in some direction. And that's of course, what poems can do so magically is move effortlessly in time and space. But these Hemistichs really --monastics really do that. Amazingly, I was surprised that you had such a space between the two because, I mean, I know they're double spaced, as you can see, but those dashes make me want to move forward so quickly. And I felt like they were much more. They're both pulling you forward and stopping you. >> Arthur Sze: Yeah, it was exciting for me to use the dashes because I feel like there's a sense how you use it, and it's like it's an interruption. You're going to make a leap. But here in this form, it's sort of a leap into what, and everything is open ended. >> Robert Casper: Well, before we conclude and give you the prize I would like to welcome up Philip Bobbitt, the son of Rebecca Johnson Bobbitt, to tell us a little bit about the prize's history. >> Philip Bobbitt: Thank you, Rob. I'm sorry we were late. It reminded me of a phrase I always applied to Dallas, Texas. Dallas is a very successful city in a very unpropitious setting. Terrible weather, terrible soil. My family and I left New York this morning. We got up just before 6 a.m to come down here. And we were late for a 6:30 reception. Just the phrase is man's yes to God's no. Well, we're happy we're here now. We apologize for being late. My mother, Becky Johnson from Johnson City, Texas, came to Washington in the 30s during the depression. She had taken a degree, has had each of her five siblings in Texas. She came here to study graduate school in what was called library science. She was working in the cataloging department, where she met a young man, also from Texas, from East Texas, not from the Hill Country, who had won a scholarship from his school. Allegedly, a cow was sold to pay his train ticket to come east. He also was assigned to work in cataloging. I don't think that either of these young people wanted to come to Washington to meet someone from Texas, and I'm quite sure my mother did not want to marry a person and be carried back to Texas. One of her suitors had bribed the bandleader at the Shoreham Hotel to strike up the yellow Rose of Texas every time she came in, and she wasn't going to get that back in Texas. But these things happen. And but for this wonderful institution and their meeting, we perhaps might not be here tonight. My mother died in 1978, relatively young. And after her death, I was going through some of her papers. Like many people of her generation, she wrote copiously letters and notes in a green wooden desk that my daughter Rebecca, who's here tonight, has now. And I found all these index cards with a hole punched in the center of the top, on which were written sometimes lofty phrases and quotations, but mainly bits and fragments of poetry. There were hundreds of them. And so I took them to my father, who was quite shattered by her death. And I said, what? What are all these? And he said, well your mother and I met at the Library of Congress. I said, yes, I know that. He said, and we worked in cataloging. I said, yes. Well, he said, your mother was engaged when I first met her. And I had to somehow dislodge this man. But we worked under the eyes of a very strict supervisor who didn't allow in this sort of fraternization. So we would exchange notes, pretending that we were handling things in the Dewey Decimal System that explain the dots that the holes are actually reversed. The hole was at the bottom of the card. I heard this story, and I knew about the prize of the Library of Congress, given in 1948 for the most distinguished work in American poetry that was given for the Pisan Cantos to Ezra Pound. This was just after the war. It caused a tremendous furor, and Congress passed a resolution forbidding the library from giving further artistic prizes. And when I heard this story about the cards and their meeting here, I thought, this is what we should work on. We should get this rule overturned. That was in 1978. The first prize wasn't given until 1990. This is the 34th year since then. It was much more difficult than I anticipated. We could get the chairman of the House committee on board. The guy in the Senate would fall off. We'd get the Congress on board, and the cultural people in the white House would fall off. Finally, we had everyone on board, and the librarian himself refused to go with it because he feared that it would insert the library into political controversy if the award were given to someone who was unpopular. So I really had abandoned the project. When we get a new director here, Jim Billington. Jim was going through the correspondence, found the letters I had written about the project, and to call me and ask if we were still interested in pursuing it. I said you bet. And that was how the prize eventually came to be. I know this is partly a story about the past, about my parents meeting, about my father's debate with me, about Ezra Pound and the prison camp he was in, about Jim Billington, who we lost in much lament. But all those incidents are also about the future. And when we have a prize given for such distinction as this one, it always points forward. It points forward to people who will be reading these poems and all of us are gone. People who will be in these chambers celebrating some successor. And I want you to be happy that we're here, looking forward as well as back. Thank you. [applause] >> Robert Casper: All right. To conclude this evening, we would like to actually award the prize to Arthur, Phillip and Sheri. May you come up on stage, please. The Library of Congress is pleased to award the 2024 Rebecca Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for poetry For lifetime achievement in poetry to Arthur Sze. Congratulations. [applause]