Arthur Sze and “Library of Congress”

December is a big month news-wise for our U.S. Poet Laureate! Next Monday, on December 8, 2025, Arthur Sze will begin his laureateship programming with a workshop and a reading at Queens College in Queens, NY—his former hometown—on Monday, October 8. You can watch the 7:00pm EST program via livestream here.

Arthur will then travel down to the capital for his inaugural laureate event at the Library’s historic Thomas Jefferson Building, on Thursday, December 11. You can watch the livestream of this 7:00pm EST program here.

We also have big print news to share: in October, The New Yorker published a poem of Arthur’s—titled “Library of Congress.” Arthur shared with us how this poem came to be:

On July 18, 2025, I met with division heads at the Library of Congress and was so moved by their presentations —that gave me a rare glimpse of books in the vast collection. I was particularly moved by hearing Pablo Neruda read in Spanish the opening to his poem, “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” seeing poems by Tao Qian in woodblock print that I have translated into English, and also viewing Vai script that I had never seen before.  When I returned to Santa Fe, I decided to collage together different moments to see if they might coalesce into a poem, and they did.

And here is the poem:

Library of Congress

You peer down a lit corridor
on the fifth tier of stacks
where a million books breathe
on shelves; here’s a book
on neutrinos captured in Antarctica,
here’s another on solar flares.
A curator displays a book
in Vai script and points to a triangle
with two dots; you wonder
if you are looking at a pregnant
woman, an enslaved man,
or a human ear; you pull a book
off a shelf and, opening it,
hear Del aire al aire, como

then snap it shut: the air hums
with honeybees. A second curator
points at glittering gold script;
though you can’t divine a word,
you guess Farsi and dive
into the marlin-blue depth of the page.
A third curator shows you 心遠
woodblock printed on mulberry paper,
and as you read a distant mind
leaves the earth around it,
you smell daylilies in a courtyard
and know you may caravan
to Timbuktu, but there’s no
pear-blossom end to what’s within reach.