Reading “The Chance” by Arthur Sze

Poetry Lunch S6E3

Reading "The Chance" by Arthur Sze from The Redshifting Web, Copper Canyon Press.

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This poem swept me up quickly from the mountains straight through to the last word, shine. The questions in the first half feel slightly awkward to me in how they're phrased, which only underscores the simple strength of the declarations that follow. There's such clear presence here, and possibility. A sharp kind of seeing that's dedicated to being alive fully. Which is always my striving.

But there’s a shift I notice lately, maybe because l’ve felt chance come more than once — that the striving is less necessary than the being. That the mountains, and the bones, hold light without trying. That occupying the fuzzy spaces between dark and light maybe is the work, all of it. The farther I go the less I feel there's somewhere to get to.

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Link to purchase

Get the book: The Redshifting Web.

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About the Author

Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, which have won the National Book Award for Poetry, been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and selected for an American Book Award, among many other honors. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. You can read more on his Poetry Foundation page here.