earticle

영어

Arthur Sze is a prolific, award-winning, but under-studied Asian American poet whose work does not fit comfortably into any of the past or current paradigms of Asian American aesthetics. This essay examines the ways in which Sze translates Asian influences into his own Asian American aesthetic. He performs that translation through actual translation of Tang Dynasty poets, through building into his own poetry connections between the great and the small, the distant and the near that parallel those connections in the Tang poets, and through a blending of his American poetry into a Taoistic poetic. With a focus on the poetic sequence “The Redshifting Web,” this essay illuminates ways to read Sze’s poetry through those influences, the ways his poems create an Asian ancestral container for his American poetic. The essay finishes by offering possibilities for future study of Sze’s ways of gathering his American poetic forbears into his Asian-influenced aesthetic.