Prompt: Personal Transition and Nature

 

I saw that Arthur Sze has been appointed our newest U.S. Poet Laureate. (See "Arthur Sze at the Library of Congress.") That news sent me looking at some of his poetry. The poem I landed on for this call for submissions is "At the Equinox."

The equinox, a moment of equal light and darkness, symbolizes equilibrium and change. Sze uses this celestial event to explore emotional and spiritual transitions. The poem’s structure mirrors this balance—shifting between vivid natural imagery and introspective reflection.

We have published issues here about the solstice and seasons, but this month we aren't really concerned about spring or autumn,as much as about the balance tipping to a change in a life. The change of seasons might be what tips the equilibrium for us. Certainly, the solstices and equinoxes were important since ancient times, especially in agrarian societies. Autumn coincides with harvests and the start of school. Spring is full of renewal, and summer is often a time of vacations and more time outsdoors.

Sze's poem suggests how the external world can reflect our internal rhythms. The line “looping out into the world, we thread and return” suggests a cyclical journey that internally could be love, memory, or self-discovery. The poem also moves geographically (from Homer to Roanoke), implying that emotional resonance transcends physical space. The speaker admits, “I have no theory of radiance,” because some of what is happening can't be explained and suggests we might be better to experience rather than explain. Turning the gaze upwards to the Moon’s “gleam” and “tides of starlight” evokes a kind of wonder at the vastness and mystery of the universe which might also touch personal experience.

I think that what the poem attempts in using nature as mirror and describing “orange and purple sea stars,” “rain evaporates off pine needles,” and “forsythia buds and blooms” are not just scenic observations, but reflections on inner states of awareness and emotion.

For this submission, can you, in your real or imagined life, think of moments of transition when the balance tipped, and can you connect them to changes in nature? It might not be an equinox or solstice. Perhaps, it is the changing of the tide, the rising or setting of the Sun, the first or last frost, a coming or leaving storm, fog lifting, Moon phases, meteor showers, or the first flower or fruit in your garden. 

 The deadline for submissions for the next issue is October 31, 2025. Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of 26 years of prompts and poems.

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Arthur Sze (b. 1950, New York City) is an American poet, and translator whose work interweaves nature, science, and Eastern-Western traditions. The son of Chinese immigrants, Sze studied briefly at MIT before transferring to UC Berkeley, where he completed a BA in a self-designed poetry major. Over a career spanning five decades, he has published twelve poetry collections and numerous translations, essays, and interviews. His most recent works include the poetry collection Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and the prose-and-verse volume The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025).
Now, as the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress for the 2025-2026 term, he plans to emphasize poetry in translation as a way to deepen public engagement with poetry and enrich the national poetic imagination.

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Arthur Sze Is the New U.S. Poet Laureate

The Library of Congress announced this week that Arthur Sze, 74, will be the next Poet Laureate of the United States.

The NY Times describes Sze as an observational poet, whose work is grounded in nature and imagery. He said he first learned his craft by translating ancient Chinese poems. Over time, his poems grew longer, often made up of numbered sequences that changed perspective and tone from one section to another. His newer poems look simpler, but hopefully, he said, they are deeper.

“When you read a poem, you don’t need to feel like you get it all at once,” Sze said. “The best poems communicate through sound and rhythm and musicality. And as you read and reread, the poem emerges.”

Born in New York City to immigrants from China (his father had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from M.I.T.), he has lived most of his life in New Mexico, where he taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts for more than two decades. As poet laureate, he said he plans to focus on poetry that has been translated into English from other languages.

His latest poetry collection - his 12th -  is Into the Hush.

Poet Laureate | Poetry & Literature | Programs | Library of Congress

View Resource Guide on Arthur Sze

News Release: Library of Congress Names Arthur Sze the Nation's 25th U.S. Poet Laureate

Arthur Sze | The Poetry Foundation

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Prompt: Reverdie

The reverdie is an old French poetic genre. It originated with troubadour ballads of the early Middle Ages and so many of them were song lyrics. They are usually about the arrival of spring. The word "reverdie" translates as "re-greening." There are some traditions in those old poems and lyrics, such as addressing spring as a beautiful woman. Reverdies were often dancing songs and were popular during the time of Chaucer.

The Middle English reverdie that begins "Svmer is icumen in/ Lhude sing cuccu" can be translated as "Summer has arrived / Sing loudly, cuckoo! /The seed is growing / And the meadow is blooming /And the wood is coming into leaf now / Sing, cuckoo!" This "Cuckoo Song" is one I always find odd because it says that summer is coming and yet all the images seem to be of spring.

There are many, perhaps too many, poems about spring. In lists of them, you will find Eliot's "The Waste Land." I like Eliot's poetry, but his images of spring are pretty grim. The poem's first section is subtitled "The Burial of the Dead" and its opening is often quoted:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Spring and All is a volume of poems by William Carlos Williams and the section we consider for this prompt is "By the road to the contagious hospital" - which also sounds pretty grim.

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

The landscape is "Lifeless in appearance" but Williams knows that "sluggish dazed spring approaches" and the poem is more optimistic in this very early spring.

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind- Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf...
Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

E. E. Cummings describes Spring as being "like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully

What we asked poets to do this month was to write a reverdie about the arrival of spring but - is this is not easy - say something that has not been said by poets before.

In "Spring Snow" by Arthur Sze, I see a picture of the spring around me currently - a mix of winter and summer that has not been well blended.

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember

what I like about the poem is the unexpected images that follow in his reverdie. Snow and plum blossoms seem like a wrong coincidence, but it occurs in haiku fairly often, But he follows with several images of that odd mix.

when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection

In "National Poetry Month" the poem speaks by itself, according to Elaine Equi. The poem mentions April, but can you find the spring within it?

Sometimes the poem weaves
like a basket around
two loaves of yellow bread.

“Break off a piece
of this April with its
raisin nipples," it says.

“And chew them slowly
under your pillow.
You belong in bed with me.”