To Arthur Sze, dear friend, Keeper of the Acequia, now I remember …
finding your poems in , a small literary magazine published by the remarkable poet and editor Phillip Foss, during a time, the early 1980s, when both of you were teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I wrote to Foss immediately, asking him something like “Who IS this guy?” Those memorable early poems, marked by jumps between strong images, quick-shifting punctuation (question marks, exclamation marks, dashes, ellipses), and your stated intention “to be open to all experience,” reflected your earlier university life in Berkeley where you began translating classical Chinese poetry. Already, your referential field was thrillingly global. The poems were as interested in classical Western subjects (Noah, Maximilian) as in Chinese (“Li Po,” “Wang Wei”) and Native cultures (“Do Not Speak Keresan to a Mescalero Apache”). Still, many of those early poems retained
