Into The Hush by Arthur Sze

 

 

 

     Arthur Sze's new book Into The Hush welcomes readers through the immediacy of its poems as the collection gradually coheres into a single calligraphic gesture. This gesture, comprised of the body, the brush, and the character, or kanji, embodies a relationship between all things described in Buddhist terms by the word emptiness, which connotes the way that all phenomena are interdependent and devoid of solitary, stable existence.  In these poems, this interdependent relationship is expressed through radical flux, disjunction, and metaphor.  Woven throughout the collection is a longer poem titled "Zuihitsu" that describes a calligraphy writing session in which the speaker is guided by a teacher.  Reviewing Miles Davis's album In A Silent Way, Lester Bangs notes, "(Davis) turns to a reverent, timeless realm of pure song, the kind of music which . . . stops us momentarily, making us think that this perhaps is the core around which all our wayward musical highways have revolved . . ."  Similarly, Sze's poetics juxtaposes such lyrical moments with leaps in space and time that compel the reader to pause and consider the synchronicity of disparate images and phrases.  

     Much of the pleasure of reading these poems comes from the reader's active engagement in their composition, in the kinds of imaginative associations they are called upon to make.  The second section of "Zuihitsu" illustrates this process, as it begins, "A melody played on the piano with five black keys.  I heard it, walking across / packed snow and ice with microspikes under my shoes."  This melody, arising in the quiet winter landscape, conjures the permeable boundary between mind and world, not simply through how the remembered melody becomes a soundtrack for the mountain hike, but also through how the speaker's body scores the white paper of the packed snow and ice, his boots' microspikes scratching notes across the page.  

     Indeed, this beautiful book is rooted in making poems as a response to an imperiled world whose resonances are continuously mysterious and tender.  This is also a poetry of ideas, and images of being, language, and time are yoked to suggest a simultaneous arising of both form and emptiness in which objects seen and imagined evoke extinct lexicons and seismic shifts.  For example, the first poem "Anvil" reads, 

 

    "When a black butterfly flits past, when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees, . . . 

     when Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages, . . . 

     when the time of your  life is a time of earthquakes . . . 

     when in our bodies we ride the waves of our Earth, 

     here is the anvil on which to hammer your days—"  

 

Correspondences and resonances abound in this field of creative activity that is both time bound and timeless, that acknowledges both presence and absence, echoing the Heart Sutra's phrase "form is emptiness, emptiness is form."  In the poet's language, not only can the names ascribed to things point towards, yet never fully render their dynamic relatedness; the names themselves are things, are bodies of meaning that avail the tools needed for the poet's craft.   

     As the book unfolds, Sze's mastery of poetic forms ranging from sonnets to haibun and pantoum is apparent.  Within the versatility of these forms, the poet reaches toward the radical contingency that emptiness connotes. In the "Papyrus Pantoum", the speaker says, 

 

    "I think, no, I should say 

     I am thought; the yellow sunlight 

     grows hair, the black leopard 

     of night cracks a fibula in its maw; 

     and when the North Pole reaches 

     its farthest point, what if that distance 

     seizes and sizzles into a habit of mind?"  

 

Here, the freshness of our perceptual engagement with the world is conveyed through the strangeness of metaphor, the sunlight that grows hair, the night's black leopard that summon our attentiveness.  In contrast, overfamiliarity or habit leads to blindness, a kind of delusion that robs appearances of their spontaneity and import.  These poems refresh by inviting the reader to see, and more importantly, to feel the ineffable conjunctions between our minds ("I am thought") and what lies beyond awaiting our recognition.   

     The final installment of the poem "Zuihitsu" emphasizes this revelatory moment.  Combining a description of hiking a coastal trail "our bodies, brushes" and the final stroke of the calligraphy session, "we brought it vertically down below the horizontal line, . . . then I gasped, gasped at emptiness—", the poem ends with an explicit gesture, a poetic line that spans both geographical space and the space of the page, both drawn into relation through the poet's observant brushstrokes.  As the character for "heart" is completed, the connection between empathy and wisdom threaded throughout the collection is explicitly drawn.  The speaker discovers and embodies a new language that, like an improvisational jazz performance, is collectively found and composed of the bodies of its participants.  Into The Hush is a book of selfless mastery that engages the reader in its compassionate insights and enlivening music.    

     

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/in-a-silent-way-181826/