Thursday, September 18, 2025
The current President of the United States, Mr. Donald J. Trump, has decried all the initiatives of social agency that have promoted diversity as an essential ingredient to a functioning democracy. In at least one current area of cultural embellishment, the position of U.S. poet laureate continues to promote its recent emphasis on ethnic identity in choosing a writer for this position. Arthur Sze, the son of Chinese immigrants, has accepted his appointment to be the next nation’s poet laureate. According to the New York Times article that covered this announcement, “Sze’s work does not focus on identity,” which makes his choice stand apart from other recent poet laureates as Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera and Ada Limón.
I myself would have asked Garrett Hongo to be the next U.S. poet laureate, but in the interests of full disclosure, I have to point out that I was the first editor anywhere to publish Mr. Hongo’s poems. Four of his poems appeared in the second issue of MOMENTUM magazine, issue number two, which came out in 1974. I have admired his work for a half-century. Although he was born, in 1951, in Volcano, Hawai’i, he spent many of his youthful growing years in Los Angeles County; he was educated at Pomona College (B.A.) and the University of California, Irvine (MFA, 1980). He would have been the first poet laureate of the United States to be so closely associated with Los Angeles, had he been selected. For examples of his L.A.-based work, see Laurence Goldstein’s POETRY LOS ANGELES and Suzanne Lummis’s POETRY GOES TO THE MOVIES.
In any case, congratulations are to be offered to Arthur Sze, who certainly has received as many awards as Garrett Hongo and has had his poems translated into 15 languages. This last fact is perhaps the most important factor in saluting his appointment. I gather that Sze wants to emphasize poems that have been translated into English as a way of expanding the discourse around poetry while he is poet laureate. I have no objection to that as long as he equally reminds his audience what all too many American poets would prefer to forget. Too little poetry written in English in the United States deserves to be translated into another language. American poets all too often like to sit back and celebrate their appropriation of poems in other languages as a form of cultural condescension. Their assumption is that their poems are every bit the equal of what has been translated into English.
Guess again.
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“(Arthur Sze’s) poetry is distinctly American in its focus on the landscapes of the Southwest, where he has lived for many years, as well as in its great formal innovation. Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sze forges something new from a range of traditions and influences — and the result is a poetry that moves freely throughout time and space.”
—Acting Librarian of Congress, Robert Randolph Newlen
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Post-script: It has been a bit of a puzzle to me the past several days. On a daily basis, I almost never get more than one visit to my blog from China, but for some inexplicable reason I have been getting a couple dozen a day recently. Maybe one of my readers in China would be kind enough to write and explain the sudden interest. I have never had more visitors from a country other than the United States before this most recent report. This has all happened before I wrote today’s post.
TOTAL NUMBER OF VISITS FROM INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES IN THE PAST SEVEN DAYS:
China — 123
United States — 80
France — 4
Canada — 3
Mexico — 2
United Kingdom — 2
Spain — 2
Germany — 2
Belgium — 2
Russia. — 1
About Bill Mohr