The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

by Arthur Sze

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Arthur 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.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets. Sze blends both scientific rigor and an Eastern perspective to witnessing and understanding the world, which leads to mesmerizing poetry. For poetry lovers and poets themselves, the book is like taking a seminar with a patient, loquacious teacher who wants you to understand and appreciate how poetry works. One chapter is spent demonstrating the evolution of a prize-winning poem, " The White Orchard," through numerous drafts. It's amazing to see draft one -- 3 couplets--that are completely cut, grow into a 20-line poem that is simply radiant. The poem is a perfect example of the art of revision rather than an otherworldly genius cranking out fully fledged memorable poetry. Maybe all this "work" will intimidate the less committed, but, for those who persist, there might be some art created at the end of the journey. Highly recommended for readers and writers interested in how poems are created.

[Février · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The flow of water is also the flow of language: water and poetry are essential movements that affirm and shape life. Water can be conceived of as beginningless beginning and endless end; if water has no shape of its own, it can take any shape and has infinite possibility. In poetry, I am interested in a finite thing that has a multiple or polysemous range of expression and meaning. Poetry utilizes a finite set of words and yet has the possibility of reaching into the infinite, and it calls our attention to the mystery of existence. "

[Dail Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading about people who care deeply about what they do. The White Orchard felt thoughtful and grounding. Arthur Sze’s interviews linger with me, his reflections on translation, teaching, and the slow, layered work of drafting poems. I loved seeing a poem take shape through handwritten notes in the margins. The small selection of poems at the end feels like an invitation to keep reading, thinking, and noticing. I keep returning to this line:
“…The mind may snag,
still, weigh, sift, incubate, unbalance,
spark, rebalance, mend, release;…”

[sabine · Rating 4 out of 5]

thanks to another chinese american new mexican arthur (我的爸爸) for this book