“If I control everything, the poem is dead. The poem should shape me as I shape it.” UC Berkeley alum Arthur Sze (BA ’72, Individualized Major in Poetry) is the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate — and the first Asian American to hold this position. He began writing seriously on campus, drafting poems on a typewriter in a small building near a eucalyptus-lined creek. At Berkeley, he learned to trust attention, sound, and the natural world in his work. It was also where Sze found life-changing mentors like English professor Josephine Miles. After an overcrowded workshop left him needing more, Miles simply said, “Come to my house for tea, and I’ll go over your poems.” Those collaborative sessions later led her to sponsor his individualized major in poetry. A translation apprenticeship is how he learned his craft as a poet. Studying classical Chinese poems helped him understand how silence, structure, and implication carry meaning that exposition cannot. The practice shaped his cross-disciplinar...