1.

Academy of Achievement Interview

2. An Interview with W.S. Merwin by David Elliott
3. “Fact Has Two Faces”: An Interview with W.S. Merwin by
Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson
4. The New York Times Article: “W.S. Merwin to be Named
Poet Laureate” by Patricia Cohen
5. Finding Home and Inspiration in the World of Nature
(W.S. Merwin’s poetry book) by Dwight Garner
6. Pure Poetry (Critical Essay on W.S. Merwin) by James
Torrens
7. Writing outside the Self: The Disembodied Narrators of
W.S. Merwin by Jane Frazier
8. W.S. Merwin and Postmodern American Poetry by Neal
Bowers
Interview: W.S. Merwin
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry

July 3, 2008
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

Back to W.S. Merwin Interview

You have lived in two exceptionally beautiful places, Hawaii and the South of France. As a
poet, do you find it necessary to surround yourself with nature, or is it the other way
around, that the nature inspires the poetry?

W.S. Merwin: I never thought of it as a program. I used to live in New York and I wrote. I think
if you're a poet, or whatever kind of artist you are, you want to be able to write or compose or
paint anywhere. But...

I remember one day talking to a bunch of friends crossing the campus in college, and listening to
what they were thinking of doing with their lives, and I thought, "They don't care about where
they're going to be living." And to me, it's terribly important where I am. The place is
enormously important. I want to live in places. I don't want to live in situations all of the time,
and they're talking about situations. I mean, I know how to make a living somehow, but that's not
really what I care about. I wouldn't have known how to say it, but I knew that one thing that was
terribly important was a place. So I don't know, I had a retired maiden aunt who left me $800,
which was all she had when she died, and my mother put it in bonds and I had $1200 when I was
in my early 20s, and I had it when I found that ruined farmhouse that had been not lived in for
almost 50 years. And the lady who owned it sold it to me for $1200. I said, "How much would
you sell it for?" after a long conversation when she wouldn't sell it, and her husband said, "You
better sell it, because it's going to fall down." So after tears, she said she'd sell it, and then the
price she named was $1200 and was translated into francs. I put out my hand just like that and
I'm very glad I did. It looked straight down 400 feet to the Dordogne and it's the whole valley of
the Dordogne.

What town is that in?

W.S. Merwin: There isn't any town. It's a little tiny hamlet. It had about nine houses in it, they
were all peasants at the time. Now they don't farm anymore. Do you know where Toulouse is?
It's halfway between Toulouse and Limoges in the Southwest.

Later you chose to move to Hawaii. When did that happen?

W.S. Merwin: I came out here in the '60s to do a reading over at the university and I fell in love
with it. But it was kind of unreal to me, and then I came back again a few years later and I spent
longer and I got to meet people and a teacher in particular that I really wanted to see more of.
My marriage had broken up in France years before and my former wife wanted to live in my
house over there, so I let her stay there, and I didn't have anywhere to live except a little tiny
apartment in New York. I decided that I just wanted to spend more time out here, and little by
little I got hooked. Quite fast, in fact.

That's understandable.

W.S. Merwin: I'm still hooked. I love it more all of the time.

We'd like to hear about your childhood too. You grew up in urban surroundings, didn't
you?
W.S. Merwin: Across the river from New York, in a place called Union City, which is right up --
it used to be, before that, West Hoboken -- it is just up the hill from the Palisades, from Hoboken,
and from my father's church I could look down on the harbor. I was fascinated as a small child
to kneel up at a window there and just spend hours watching the traffic on the river, the river
traffic, which was quite different then, there was a lot more of it. Very beautiful, I thought, and I
still have wonderfully clear images of it still there. I mean I can still see the ferry barges taking -
- I mean, not just the ferries, the passenger ferries, but these things that would take a whole train
on a series of barges across the river, and ships going up and down in the afternoon light. It was
very, very beautiful. Everything is gone. I mean the traffic is gone. The Hoboken harbor has
changed completely. My father's church has long since, many years ago -- gone. And the house
is still there, but unrecognizable. I've been back and seen it.

We've read that you started writing hymns for your father's church as a young boy. When
did you start doing that?

W.S. Merwin: When I could make letters with a pencil. I was fascinated by hymns. It was one of
the things that most fascinated me about having to go to church every Sunday, which I took for
granted, like putting on clean clothes on Sunday and all that. You had to do that.

So I had to listen to all of these morning services, and I was allowed to do drawings and things,
and then do what I wanted with a little pad and pencil. And I was fascinated by two things. One
of them was the language of the King James version of the Bible -- which was different from the
language that we spoke -- the language of the psalms. There was a whole lot of the Bible that I
got to know by heart without even thinking about it, and the language of the hymns: "the
spacious firmament on high" and "the blue ethereal sky." I didn't know what half of the words
meant, thought it was wonderful, you know. It's funny, the way it rhymed, and so I wanted to
write that. And my mother read to us, which is very important. She read Stevenson's Child's
Garden of Verses and she read Tennyson, "The Brook," and a lot of poems like that. And that's
wonderful when parents read -- not just stories -- but poems to their children, because the
language of poetry is different from the language of prose, and children pick up that language.
And if they can pick it up very early, it's really very, very important. They are likely to always
love it if they do. I suspect that they really naturally do.

We've got an educational system that doesn't encourage it at all, any more than they encourage
listening to Mozart. And you know, one of the strange things is that I don't think that's natural. I
have a friend, the guy who wrote Equus and Amadeus, Peter Schaffer. Peter is a friend, and I
heard Peter give a brilliant lecture on Shakespeare a few years ago and we had a long, wonderful
conversation afterwards. Peter's gay and he had a boyfriend who was a young officer and who
never read anything. He wasn't interested in reading.

Peter one evening said, "I'm going out and I'll be back quite late because I'm going to the
theater." And his friend said, "Well, what are you going to go and see?" He said, "Well, it's
nothing that would interest you at all. I'd take you, but I don't think you would be interested." He
said, "What is it?" He said, "Well, it's a play by Shakespeare." He'd never heard of Shakespeare.
He said, "It's a new production of Hamlet and I want to see it." "Well," he said, "I'd like to go
and see it if it interests you that much." So he got him a ticket and he went along. And this guy
who had never been to a play, never read anything like it, gets through the first scene of Hamlet
on the battlements with the ghost, and the ghost gets into the banquet scene afterwards, and he
turns and grabs Peter by the shoulders and says, "Does anyone know about this play?" he said.
He thought it was the most exciting thing he had ever seen, that first scene, the battle scene. I've
seen kids sit up in that Shakespeare in Love movie, which I didn't like very much, but Gwyneth
Paltrow doing Juliet, and these kids put down their popcorn and sit up on the edge of their seats.
They never heard anything like this. It's not so strange. They hear it. It's too bad that it's
neglected, because it's a whole dimension to their life that they are not getting.

The arts are neglected in the school system these days, as if they're some kind of luxury.

W.S. Merwin: Yes. I think they've always been essential to us.

When we talk about the extinction of species, I think the endangered species of the arts and of
language and all these things are related. I don't think there is any doubt about that. I think
poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between
poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it's got a subject and the subject comes first
and it's dealing with the subject. But poetry is something else, and we don't know what it is (that)
comes first. Prose is about something, but poetry is about what can't be said. Why do people turn
to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or
when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can't
say it. They can't say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can't be said. I think
that's the big difference between poetry and prose. All the arts, in a way, are doing that, they are
talking about, "Dove sono? (Where are they?)" What's that? She can't say it, can she? Where are
they? Where are they? What has happened to those days?

What books did you like to read growing up?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, some of them were pretty obvious.

I must have read Robinson Crusoe four or five times and Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure
Island, all of Stevenson. A book called Ship's Monkey about a ship off to Borneo, and books
about American Indians. I really taught myself to read because there was a book about Indians
with pictures, a lot of pictures of Indians, and it was a children's book, but it had a text at the
bottom of each page and I couldn't read the text. So I asked word by word what the words were
until I could read the book about the Indians because I wanted to live in a place like the place
they lived in, in the woods. So that taught -- it was two things, I mean learning to read, because
of a fascination with people who didn't read and write, that's sort of interesting. And realizing
that early that I really wanted to live not in a city, but in the forest.

What was your father's reaction to your original hymns?

W.S. Merwin: Sort of a little pat on the head. He wasn't opposed to them, but he wasn't very
interested. "Isn't that nice." I did illustrations for them, too.

When did you start thinking about writing professionally?

W.S. Merwin: Seriously? By the time I was in

college I knew that's what I wanted to do. I
thought that I had to do something else to make
a living, and I don't know what that will be, but
I didn't give it a thought. And I'm very glad I
didn't, because I don't know if this was true for
the people who were going to be corporate
executives and hedge fund operators and things
like that. I think it's true for them, too, to some
degree. The longer you can keep the options
open, the longer you can keep the choices open,
the better. And all of a sudden when I was in
graduate school, this guy needed a tutor for his nephew, and the nephew was Peter Stuyvesant
and this was the Stuyvesant family. So I had one year up in this extraordinary place one summer,
which was an old deer park surrounded by 17 farms which were all part of the original estate,
and that went back to the 17th century and earlier, late 16th century when the Dutch were there,
before the English came.

Outside New York?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah, in New Jersey, way over on the Delaware River, and then over to France.
That's what took me to Europe. And then from there, I had two other tutoring jobs. I couldn't
have done that if I had been following a career and got locked into it, wanting to do the academic
track and everything. Nothing against teachers or teaching, it just wasn't what I wanted to do at
that point in my life. I think some of these smart kids make crucial decisions too early and get
locked into something that will be apparently very successful, but may not be what they really
want to be doing. And that is dangerous, because that's where a lot of breakdowns and mid-life
crisis and things like that come from. I have psychiatrist friends who have told me that this is the
main body of their clientele, the people that come in. They have done all of the right things and
why is their life so screwed up?

You decided to study romance languages at Princeton. What led you to that?

W.S. Merwin: Well, I went to a very strict and severe Methodist prep school where I got a
scholarship to wait on tables and so forth to pay my way through. And I really hated the place
because it was so kind of puritanical and severe.

All boys?

W.S. Merwin: No, but it was worse than that. It was boys and girls, but they were kept separate
and they weren't allowed to speak to each other. So there they were getting nubile and very pretty
and all of that and you got ten demerits for ever speaking to one and 20 demerits for doing it
again and you got 30 and you were out for good. I had to be a good boy at home and now I'm
supposed to be a good boy here and I really don't like being a good boy. But there was one
professor there whom I really loved and he wasn't like that at all. He was the language professor,
and he taught Spanish and French and German and he was a funny, funny, sweet, humane, highly
cultivated man.

What was his name?

W.S. Merwin: His name was Lawrence Sampson. He died soon afterwards of heart failure, but
he started me paying a lot of attention to languages, in particular Spanish, and then I went on to
do the same thing when I got to college. Had a very interesting Spanish teacher in college who
was so homesick for Spain and he was Spanish himself. I mean, not Mexican, but Spanish. He
wanted some help translating Lorca -- so the first modern poet I read was a Spanish poet, it was
Lorca. Romancero gitano was the first book, and we translated that together. It was my first
attempt at translation, too. And then I went on and met Ezra Pound in the crazy ward at St.
Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.

You met him in the crazy ward?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah, he was in the crazy ward. He was legally insane. I didn't know anything
about his politics, fortunately. I had to learn about it later.

He made broadcasts for the Axis during the war.

W.S. Merwin: Yes, for the Fascists in Italy, and his anti-Semitism, dreadful things. It would have
been very troubling. It's always been very troubling once I did find out about it. But I loved some
of his poems that I'd read, and his ear.

Every poet who has come after owes him something, that is part of the enigma about Pound,
whatever they think about his character. We owe him something from the way he heard English.
And so I went to see him, and he said that I had to go on translating. He took me seriously as a
poet and he said, "You should write every day..." should do all these things, and gave me a lot of
advice. He loved giving advice.
Did you see signs of madness?

W.S. Merwin: No, he wasn't mad. He was no more mad than he had ever been. He was nuts, but
not mad. He had gone on the air for Mussolini and he had said really quite stupid, but very, very
ill-judged things, bad things, pro-Mussolini, in the middle of the war. And the prosecution
wanted to shoot him for a traitor right there in Italy. And there was a movement to prevent that.
His defense lawyer was a Quaker and the safest thing to do was to say that he was insane. He
was eccentric enough.

Somebody asked T.S. Eliot -- he and Ezra, they had known each other forever. I don't know,
Pound was so opinionated that you wondered how anybody could stand being around him very
much, but he was brilliant, he was absolutely brilliant. Somebody asked Eliot -- he had a lot to
do with the final text of The Waste Land, you know, Pound did. He was very, very, very skillful
and smart. And asked Eliot if Ezra was really crazy and he said, "Well, you know Ezra."

What was the impact of working with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur at Princeton?
They were both poets too.

W.S. Merwin: Oh, they were very important to me, both of them were.

Berryman (was) hands-on about poetry and he was ruthless and merciless and he would destroy
everything I wrote week by week. And you know, I learned a lot from him. Blackmur was one of
the most brilliant literary intelligences I've ever been close to, and hearing him doing what he
did, twice a week he had a sort of volunteer seminar, certain invited people could come and he
would just sit at a table and talk about one chapter of Ulysses, for example, for three hours. No
notes or anything. He was marvelous as a teacher. I mean, he seemed really not to be paying
attention and then you realized he got everything about you. He was thinking about the right
thing for you, too. I mean, he saved me from getting thrown out of college a number of times.
I never did all of the right things. I never read the things I was supposed to. I always read lots of
other things and some of the teachers got very impatient, especially in graduate school.

There was a party -- I heard about this afterwards -- when Blackmur was there, and the dean of
the graduate school was there, and he was one of the people who wanted to kick me out. And
Blackmur said to him in the course of the evening, he said, "Did you ever hear about -- in your
knowledge of the English academic system did you ever hear about don..." whatever his name
was, don Seymour Smith, or something like that. And the dean said, "No, I never did." Blackmur
said, "Well, you might not have because his only claim to historic recognition is that he's the guy
that got Shelley thrown out of Oxford." The dean got the point. And they sort of put up with
things that I'm sort of amazed by, that I got away with. Nowadays I don't think it would matter so
much, but I would read, something would send me off on a tangent, and I would read a whole lot
of stuff, but it wasn't what the assignment was about. It was related to the assignment, but it was
on a whole different thing. And I did it over and over again. But I was reading endlessly, I
couldn't stop reading. But very often I would not bother with the assignment and go on to
something else.

It sounds like poets in particular need to find their own voices and their own paths. It
seems almost contradictory for a poet to be a conformist who follows all of the rules.

W.S. Merwin: I think that's true. I don't think there is any doubt about that. If they lose that, then
they lose the whole thing. But you know, I think that's true of everybody and I think that
everybody has their own path. But if they don't pay attention to it, or if they don't look for it, if
they don't respect it, if they are not aware of it, they run into trouble. Their life becomes thinner
and less satisfactory. Even distractions may be the thing that is helping you, if they are your
distractions, if they are what you are really interested in.

Could you tell us about tutoring the son of Robert Graves?

W.S. Merwin: That was the third tutoring job.

Why couldn't Robert Graves tutor his own son?

W.S. Merwin: He was doing a lot of writing. Robert wrote an enormous -- I mean, Robert was a
great model of working. People handle interruptions and distractions differently I've noticed,
and Robert was very good at it. He wrote every day, alone for hours and hours in his study. If he
had to come out and deal with a meal or with a crying baby or with somebody coming to the
door, he would come and do it and then he would go right back into where he was working and
keep it going. James Merrill, who is a dear friend of mine, a wonderful poet of the same
generation, Jimmy used to say, "Oh yes, the interruptions are all part of the whole process." It's
all right, he didn't mind interruptions. I don't like interruptions. Very often, if I get interrupted,
very often I'm not even paying any attention to them, because I won't leave what I'm doing. I
think the people who deal with them better are wiser than I am, but I can't change that, or if I
can, I'm scared of losing something, I guess.

Did you develop a relationship with Robert Graves?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, yeah, sure. It began with a honeymoon and a wonderful friendship across the
generations. He was 30-some years older than I was, and he had had that whole life in World
War I, and written Good-Bye to All That, and he was quite well known by then. And his poetry,
of which there is still some of it that I like very much, and I learned a lot from it and from him. A
brilliant, brilliant man.

What did you learn from him?

W.S. Merwin: I think the most valuable book is The White Goddess. It's very controversial, and
Robert cooked the books sometimes. He made up the mythology rather than being absolutely
accurate, which is why it's not altogether trustworthy, but it's a very daring book. It's called,
"The Grammar of Poetic Myth," The White Goddess is. And he saw the whole world -- the whole
value system -- on the basis of a goddess, a goddess figure, not a male god figure, but a female
figure, and she's the goddess of lust and fear. I mean she's not altogether gentle and easygoing. I
thought when I read the book, before I went to Europe that this was a great metaphor, like
something in Joseph Campbell or something like that. But I realized to my amazement and some
consternation, after a while with Robert that Robert took it all quite literally, you know. He was
turning into kind of a fundamentalist of his own kind, and he eventually got jealous and fought
with every younger poet. I mean, this thing would happen, and he would have a sort of
honeymoon with another and a great enthusiasm, they would be great buddies, and then
something would go wrong and Robert said they are not true sons of the goddess and all of this
other stuff and drum them out. It was kind of difficult because when we had our falling out, there
I was with the job there. But I spent that year with him and I loved the place on the north shore
of Majorca. And I went back on my own for another winter there and wrote the translation of the
poem of The Cid for the BBC, to earn some money.

One of the marvelous things that I think I feel so lucky about was that I went to see (T.S.) Eliot
occasionally in London when I was there because of my relationship with Pound's son, Omar.

Omar introduced me to Eliot so then Eliot was very kind. He was very kind to Omar, he was very
kind to me, and I smoked then, and he used to save me French cigarettes which people gave him
and he didn't smoke. And he was homesick and we would talk about the Ohio River and the
steamboats.
Were you aware at the time how lucky you were, having these experiences?

W.S. Merwin: I feel lucky about all of it, but that something I didn't realize was happening at the
time. Everything from that deer park and the farms of the Stuyvesants through really the whole
thing with that farmhouse on the Dordogne and the year in Portugal and all of that, I was
stumbling on places and ways of life and assumptions, a permanence of something that was very
ancient, that had been there for a very long time and was just on the verge of disappearing. And
if you went back even five years later, it was gone, it would have been gone and it was gone.

I had a letter from Graves's son William, who

was the boy I tutored. He hated being tutored.
We didn't get along very well at all. The other
kids I tutored, I got along fine with. William
didn't want to be tutored. He hated me and he
had terrible fantasies about what a dreadful
person I was. I couldn't understand why it wasn't
working with William and finally threw up my
hands and let him do what he wanted to do. But
we're in correspondence now, and he said, "In
spite of all of the problems with Robert, you
saw him probably at his best." Ava Gardner
came and called on Robert the following year and they started putting him on British television
and he started earning a lot more money. He became a celebrity, and he just loved being a
celebrity and it became more important than anything else.

You were in your 20s when W.H. Auden singled you out for the Yale Younger Poets series
that he was editing. How did that come about?
W.S. Merwin: They would choose, out of a small number of manuscripts, the winner of that
year's Yale Younger Poets series. That was a very big deal for a while. Now there are many
other setups like that around the country, and it's a good thing, because they are publishing more
books of poems. I don't know the reason, but Auden did and I was very happy. I was then living
in Portugal and it was wonderful news. It got good reviews and that was very nice.

Was that an important vote of confidence? Did it make

you take yourself more seriously?

W.S. Merwin: I was sort of pigheaded. I was going to do it

anyway, but it was very encouraging, sure it was.

Did you have any contact with Auden after that?

W.S. Merwin: Very slight. A couple things. Quite happy,

very slight things. Auden was gay, a lot of Auden's friends
were. Auden had a sort of fixation on being gay, what he
called "the Homintern." He didn't like his gay friends or
himself associating too much with straight people. I thought
it was kind of silly. But also, I had an awe of him, of Auden.
He was a different generation, seemed much wider a gap then
than it does now, but it was a considerable gap, that
generation. We had mutual friends, and I called him up a few
times in New York to ask him questions about things and he was always very friendly. But then
we had an unhappy exchange not long before he died.

I was supposed to go and read at the University of Buffalo, and I didn't know until fairly close to
the time of the reading that I was supposed to -- this was at the time of the Vietnam War -- I was
supposed to sign a loyalty oath, not only to the Constitution of the United States, but if you
please, to the Constitution of the State of New York, and I refused to sign the loyalty. We went
around and around and around about all of the different ways around it, but they involved
putting down my name and then putting riders under it that made it empty and I said that I don't
see why I should do that. I mean, I don't believe in doing this, I don't think this has anything to
do with loyalty, I think it has to do with entrapment. And I won't play the game and I just won't
do it. And at that time, it was $1,000 for the reading, and they said, "We won't pay you," and I
said, "Well, we'll see about that." And finally I agreed to go because a friend -- it was Robert
Haas who invited me, and he was very embarrassed by the situation. He hadn't known about it to
begin with.

I went and gave this talk about being loyal, what loyalty really meant and why I wouldn't sign a
loyalty oath and about the Vietnam War. And then I said -- and I published the talk afterwards in
The New York Review of Books -- and passed the hat at the reading. I said, "This is a free
reading," and passed the hat, not for me, I said, for the war resisters who have gone to Canada.
When war resisters leave, this money will go to them. So, I raised several thousand dollars for
the war resisters and the University of Buffalo was angry as could be. And Auden wrote and said
that if he didn't know me -- he didn't know me very well -- he would have thought the whole thing
was a publicity stunt. And I wrote -- I spent two days over the letter -- answering Auden with
deep respect saying, you know, we completely disagree. This was a public situation which I
didn't ask for, and I had a right to make a public statement at that time and to use it because I
think we're involved in something that is so wrong and so really shameful and we've told so
many lies about it that if one has a strong position, one should speak out about it.

I saw him once afterwards and we just -- it was at a public thing, and we just shook hands and
there was nothing to say. He wouldn't back off anything, and I had apologized in print for
offending him, but what could be said? And I was very sorry about that, because I really did
admire him and had this dream about Auden, the day after he died. I arrived in Athens, and I
went to see James Merrill and James knew Auden quite well. I mean they saw each other, saw a
lot of each other. And I said, "I had this strange dream about Auden last night on the way here
on the train. Fell asleep and I had this dream that Auden was lying in a cot, in a kind of place
like a barracks and that he sat up in bed suddenly and he said something very important and I
didn't hear what he said and then I woke up." And Jimmy said that he died last night.

Where do the subjects of your poems come from?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, I'm sure I don't know. Sometimes I know, but very seldom.

Do you have a ritual of writing every day or do you wait until you feel a poem coming on?

W.S. Merwin: No, I do think it's important to have a ritual. I try to be very bearish about the
mornings and do nothing, not get involved in the telephone or mail, unless there is something
that really is incredibly urgent. I won't deal with it until after lunch. I do all of that stuff later, so I
have the morning to stare at paper and think about poems and things like that.

If you stare at the paper and nothing comes, do you force yourself to keep staring?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah.

I don't know how it works, I really don't. It comes from hearing things rather than from having
ideas. I've got notes that I have made over the years, and they are very precious to me, and I
sometimes ponder over the notes and see what I thought I was doing writing that down, where it
was going. The notes are usually things that I seem to have overheard rather than -- they are not
ideas. There is a wonderful conversation that Zola -- no, it wasn't Zola, it was Degas. Degas and
Mallarmé, the French poet Mallarmé, were good friends for a long time. And Degas had always
wanted to be a poet and he said to Mallarmé, "I don't understand it, year after year I've written
poems and they are terrible, I know they are terrible, I know they aren't any good at all." And he
said, "I don't understand it, because I have such good ideas." And Mallarmé said, "Oh, but
poetry is not made with ideas; it's made with words, you have to hear the words."
We were interested in what you were saying earlier today about the interconnectedness of
the arts.

W.S. Merwin: Well, I don't think any of these things are separate. I've spoken to some incredibly
smart kids and they're at a point where they're beginning to think that smart is the whole thing,
and smart isn't the whole thing. One of the troubles with smart is that it makes divisions, it chops
things up: "Mozart doesn't have anything to do with business." It depends on you. You are what
Mozart and business have to do with each other. Look at where the connection is. It's not just a
relief from stress or anything like that, it's something feeding some other part of yourselves that
you need.

When we spoke to the late Carol Shields, the novelist, she suggested that fiction can explore
a deeper reality than non-fiction can because it can get into the mind of a character.
Perhaps poetry goes even farther than fiction in distilling what we are, how our minds
work.

W.S. Merwin: Yeah. There was a great essay

years ago by Francis Fergusson on Hamlet. He
starts by saying it is now 300 years that Hamlet
is making fools of his critics. Because Hamlet is
one of the supreme things in Shakespeare, in a
forum that is both more primitive and more
profound than philosophy, which is what's
happening all through that play. Shakespeare
keeps changing the way it happens. It's looking
at the planet Earth, the whole thing is changing
all of the time. Shakespeare is changing it all of
the time, that's the great genius. There is no
point that you can grab it, that you can grab hold of that thing and say, "Yeah, that's the whole
thing." Polonius's boring speech to Laertes with all of the good advice? It's very good advice, and
Laertes is bored to death. It's very hard to pick up that one. You can see the boredom and you
can see also the wisdom.

Only this morning on public radio there was a discussion of who really wrote
Shakespeare's plays. Someone made the point that there are no extant letters from him and
that if he was such an incredibly prolific writer he would have written notes to friends or
something.

W.S. Merwin: I don't know why. None of the other playwrights did. We don't have anything
from Dekker or Marlowe or Ben Johnson. You know, Ben Johnson was far better educated than
Shakespeare and there must have been a correspondence, but nothing was saved. Of course, his
house burned down and a lot of stuff was lost.

You have no doubt that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.

W.S. Merwin: Oh no, I have no doubt about that at all. Furthermore, I think there are a whole
bunch of things that Shakespeare wrote that we don't even ascribe to Shakespeare. I think that the
"Mad Tom" poem, that great long poem, wonderful poem, probably was Shakespeare. A lot of
other people think so too.

Even in the prose passages in his plays, Shakespeare is always a poet.

W.S. Merwin: Oh yes, there is no question. All the way from the beginning until the end. And he
was also a great actor. I think he played Prospero in The Tempest. This is one of the great
geniuses that has ever been. By the way, I love that quote from Michaelangelo someone
mentioned this morning. Someone asked how he had done what he had done, and he said, "I just
kept getting rid of all of the things that weren't me." But he also said that it's an easy thing to be
universal. Everybody is universal, and he recognized it. The great, great spirits like that do
recognize that they are universal, but that everybody is universal. Everybody is complete, you
are complete. Pay attention to it.

You said earlier that poets don't want to write what anyone else has written. Could you tell
us more about that?

W.S. Merwin: I think that it's something that you're born knowing. If you're interested in writing
something, then you want to write something that is really yours, that you're saying something
that you are saying. And obviously, not just want to do something that is an imitation, although
you are learning all of the time. Everything that you know is of value to you. I didn't mean to
dismiss that. But if you rely on it and think that it's all about knowing, it's going to be very dull
and boring and it's not going to speak for anybody or to anybody. When you listen to Mozart or
when you listen to Shakespeare, you don't know what part of yourself is responding to it, and
you don't know what part of them it's coming from. Somewhere in between is this poetry, this
music. It's that girl pouring milk from the pitcher.

Like in the Vermeer painting?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah. That's the mystery, where

does it exist? It's not in us and it's not there and
it's not in the experience of the other, but it's all
about experience, it's all about attention. And
yet I can't touch the milk in the pitcher, I can't
hold onto those notes of Mozart. I don't know
the mystery of any single one line of
Shakespeare, what makes it unforgettable. The
more you hear it, the more you think it goes
deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I
think that one thing is getting lost, like
endangered species. I really think it's all an
extension of the same thing. It used to be that there were two things that I could always count on.
Kids liked the arts to start with, and I don't mean they liked Mozart. They liked to sing and dance
and they liked to make up little plays on words and do all of those things. It was quite natural.
And they always liked animals. Now I think that if you hand them a computer, they would much
rather pay attention to that than either of those things, and I think that's disturbing. However
miraculous it is, it's sort of terribly ingrown. It's virtual reality instead of reality. I use a computer
like everybody else, but I'm not in love with it and I'm happy when I don't use it. To be hooked
on it to that degree -- I watch people, they get up in the morning and they go to the computer,
and whatever else they've been doing, they go right back to the computer. I think that's a fixation.

Like an addiction?

W.S. Merwin: It's an addiction. People very close to me have got it and I'm just troubled to see it.
I see kids being brought up that way, no contact with animals, no contact with growing and
living things, very little social life and this thing substituting for all of them, and I find that very
troubling. I expect that sounds limited and old-fashioned or something of the kind. I'm not saying
that we shouldn't have computers, but I think that that fixation is a little troubling.

It's sometimes said of your work that you have a preoccupation with the subject of time.

W.S. Merwin: Doesn't everybody? I was talking to the physicist Lisa Randall last night, we were
sitting next to each other at dinner -- what a wonderful woman -- and we were talking about
these dimensions, this dimension of gravity, which I'm fascinated by, everything that she has to
say about it. She was talking about space and time, just in passing, and I wanted to continue the
conversation because I want to hear what she has to say about time.

I think time is a fiction. It's a human fiction. There's a reality, and we don't know what the reality
is. I mean, the watch and the time that we're going by is a fiction that we've agreed to, but we
don't know that it's true, and what its relation is to time in the universe. And of course time to us
-- throw away the watches and throw away the chronology of all kinds -- but time is really
experience. I mean, when we're in love and wanting to see the person we're in love with, time
goes very, very slowly, and the moment we're with them, it goes like lightning. The trouble about
being happy is that everything goes so fast. Being in jail, it must creep along incredibly slowly. I
don't know that this is true to the same degree for animals that it is for us. A great deal of that
fiction must be a human fiction, I think. I don't know why I think that, but I don't think my dog
feels time the same way that we do. I don't know.

She can't tell me.

She doesn't look at her watch?

W.S. Merwin: No, she doesn't do that. She probably would if I gave her a watch.

In thumbing through anthologies, it's undeniable that death has always been a popular
topic for poets, from John Donne to Emily Dickinson. I guess it's the final mystery. One of
your own best-known poems is "For the Anniversary of My Death."

W.S. Merwin: Sometimes when people write about it, they say, "Oh, that's terribly morose," or
very dark and all of that. I think they're kidding themselves.
Death is part of every moment of our lives. It's always there with us. It doesn't mean that we have
to be gloomy about it, but it's always there. I mean, yesterday is gone, isn't it? What we have and
what we're blessed with is this very moment, with the whole of our past in it and the whole of the
unknown future in it, but it's all here. And it's going as fast, faster than we can talk about it,
although both of those are true at the same time. Are you going to sit and be gloomy about it?
Some people are terrified of dying. I'm very lucky. My mother was never in the least frightened
by the thought of death. It was there in front of her all of the time because she was an orphan.
She lost both parents by the time she was six. Her grandmother took care of her until her
grandmother died when she was 12. Then her brother quit his education to take a job so that he
could support both of them and he died before he was 30. And when she married, she lost her
first child 15 minutes after it was born and nobody knows why. I think the hospital made some
mistake. So, her whole youth was one death after another. It's as though she had always known
about it. It was always right there, and she wasn't afraid of it at all. I worried about my father on
that subject, but his last words were, "I'm not afraid." He died. I think that's a great gift from
parents. I don't know. It would be very rash to say how one feels about it. I certainly don't think
of it with constant seizures of panic or anything of the kind. It seems to me the bus comes along
and you get on, you know.

Would you be kind enough to read some of those poems for us?

W.S. Merwin: Sure. What would you like to hear?

We have "For the Anniversary of My Death."

W.S. Merwin: "For the Anniversary of My Death" was written almost 40 years ago, I think.

"For the Anniversary of My Death"

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what.
Perhaps you would you read this one: "Just Now."

"Just Now"

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath that remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

In one of your poems, you begin, "From the kindness of my parents, I suppose it was, that I
held that belief about suffering, good people." It sounds like you had kind parents.

W.S. Merwin: Yes, yes. That wasn't all they were, but they certainly were kind. Yes. My mother
more so than my father. My father was frightened, and less kind than my mother. But yes, it's
perfectly true and they both had a sense of decency about how you behave towards people. You
didn't do nasty and cruel things. You just didn't do that.

Would you read that poem for us?

"Good People"
From the kindness of my parents
I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only

it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend

pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their own hands

but it escapes their attention

or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

Perhaps you'd be kind enough to read another for us, "Yesterday."

"Yesterday"

My friend says I was not a good son

you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go

to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says

maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father

I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says that my father turned

in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said

I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work that you were doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window

my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go

and nothing I had to do

Thank you so much. What does writing poetry do for you?

W.S. Merwin: I have to do it. It's central to my life. García Lorca said to a young poet that if you
can live without writing poetry, don't do it, nobody needs it. But I can't live without it, I've
always wanted to do it. It makes sense of things.

What advice would you give to a young person wanting to write poetry?

W.S. Merwin: It's all about attention and listening. Pay attention and listen. Listen to everything,
listen to absolutely everything. Listen to the sounds you don't want to hear, listen to the ones you
do want to hear, listen to the people talking around you. I heard this wonderful thing this
morning about taking the bus. Every so often, I was saying to Paula, the last time as we went
through New York, I used to love riding on the subway, because I don't have to have something
to read, I just am sort of fascinated by everybody around me, what they're saying and what
they're doing. It's paying attention, but it's listening, listening. And all of a sudden you hear
something, and it may be a phrase that you've heard over and over again, but suddenly it's got
electricity in it, you know. And those are the notes you take out. What is that little charge in there
and where does it want to go? You may not even know what it's about, but it's all about, if you
tried to write something new all of the time -- as I have -- all your life, it seems to change. If
you're telling the truth in the essential place where you don't know, it really is all you that is
coming out and nobody else could write it, and that's what you want. That's what you want to
make students see, listen. Chuang Tzu -- who was a great Taoist, as much as almost 3,000 years
ago -- said, "When I say that someone is good at hearing, I do not mean that they are good at
hearing anything else. I mean that they are good at hearing themselves." That's what the
attention is about. And however smart you are, if you get distracted from that you're going to end
up in an unhappy place, I think.

You've spoken to students about embracing their ignorance.

W.S. Merwin: Ignorance is going to be with them, however smart they get and however much
they know.

Our knowledge, the whole of human knowledge -- look at the night sky -- how big is our
knowledge? We're tiny, you know. It's dust. It's tiny. The unknown that surrounds it, where it all
came from, it's the great mystery, we don't know where it came from. How come we're here? It's
every bit as interesting as where we're going. How come we're here at all? Isn't that amazing,
really? Out of the whole of the universe, out of the whole of what we think of as time, here we
are.

What did it mean to you to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders?

W.S. Merwin: It's very nice to win prizes. I don't think you should spend your life hungering and
thirsting for them, but if they come your way, that's fine. I remember John Berryman, somebody
said -- there was some question of him winning some big prize -- and there was a journalist
interviewing him and he said, "Well, if you win that prize, it will be wonderful, won't it?" And
John said, "Yeah, it will be wonderful. It won't be very wonderful, but it will be wonderful." I
thought that's pretty good. There's a line of the Psalms that says, "If riches come, set not your
heart upon them." You accept them and you say thank you, whatever it is, and it's very nice, but
don't pin your life on these expectations. I've always felt that. If it comes by, that's nice.

Thank you so much. It was a great experience talking to you.

W.S. Merwin: Thank you.

This page last revised on Sep 15, 2008 15:31 PDT

An Interview with W. S. Merwin
Author(s): David L. Elliott and W. S. Merwin
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1-25
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208522
Accessed: 20/09/2010 11:40

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you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
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Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
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"Fact Has Two Faces": An Interview with W.S. Merwin
Author(s): W. S. Merwin, Ed Folsom, Cary Nelson
Source: The Iowa Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 30-66
Published by: University of Iowa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20155820
Accessed: 20/09/2010 11:38

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http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
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Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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http://www.jstor.org
 "Fact Has Two Faces": An Interview with W.S.
Merwin Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson1

EF: You have rarely done interviews. Why?

WSM: I gave one in Los Angeles about six years ago, with a
couple of
students who wanted to do one, but hadn't I
they prepared anything.
think that's one of the reasons for distrusting it. If the interviewers are
or the are remote, you have to a
unprepared questions give monologue
to save the occasion. Then the risk is self-indulgence. The interviews
we know well, I suppose, started with those in Paris Review, about

years ago. Then it became a very

twenty-five popular form, and I think
it's been a happy hunting ground for all sorts of
self-indulgence, both
in the making and in the reading. It's often a substitute for really
about a and to say coherent. It can
thinking problem trying something
be spontaneous, but sometimes it's just louder, given more seriousness
and attention than it probably deserves.
CN: I think the last detailed interviews I've seen with you are the 1961
interview published in The Sullen Art and the interview with Frank
MacShane in Shenandoah in 1970.
published
WSM: Both were a long time ago?ten and twenty years, but I assume
we're doing something different.
EF: You were us that you have been reading Leaves
telling recently of
Grass again. I'm curious about what you find there now.
WSM: I've always had mixed feelings about Whitman. They go back
to in my him thrust at me as the Great
reading him teens, having
American Poet. At the time, from my own and
coming provincial
utterly unliterary background, I wasoverly with Culture
impressed
a so the barbaric yawp didn't to me
(with capital C) particularly appeal
when I was eighteen, which is an age when it is to, nor did
supposed
I feel that this was the great book written by
an American. I've tried over
the years to come to terms with Whitman, but I don't think I've ever

really succeeded. I've had again and again the experience of starting to
read him, for a page or two, then the book. I find
reading shutting
and . . .
Yet the
passages of incredible power beauty. positivism and the
American disturb me. I can to the romantic side of
optimism respond
Whitman, when he presents himself as the voice of but even
feeling,
then it's not a that in a musical or intellectual sense.
poetry develops
It doesn't move on and take a form?it repeats and finds more
growing

30
 and more detail. That bothers me,
particular but in
it's his rhetorical
insistence on an stance, which can be quite wonderful as a
optimistic
statement of momentary emotion, but as a world view and as a program
for confronting existence it bothered me when I was and
eighteen
bothers me now. Itmakes me uneasy when he talks about the
extremely
American expansion and
the feeling of manifest destiny in a voice of
wonder. I the about
buffalo, about the Indians, and about
keep thinking
the species that are rendered extinct. Whitman's
being momentary,
rather sentimental view just wipes these things out as were
though they
of no importance. There's a cultural and what you call a
might specietal
chauvinism involved. The Whitmanite enthusiasm troubles me for the
same it seems to me in
reasons; partake of the very things that bother
Whitman. I don't know how to say it better than this, which is one
reason I didn't write to you about it. I'm not sure I'm very clear about
it.

EF: I think very clear about it.We were

you're talking this morning
about the problems inherent in putting a Collected Poems,
together espe
cially for you, since you have developed individual books so clearly and
with such integrity. People who follow your writing I think,
closely,
conceive of your career in terms of the various books, moreso
perhaps
than in terms of individual poems. The books are each organic wholes,
and each is a separate and clear step in your with growth
development,
and change in evidence. Each marks an shift.
important evolutionary
Whitman, on the other hand, is a poet who insisted on one book
writing
over a lifetime, and that's part of the reason for the uncomfortable
positivism that pervades his work, isn't it? He starts out with this
incredible positivism which is rampant in the mid-century, in the 1850s,
which grows out of his sense of exhilaration about manifest destiny,
about America as a field of unified contrarieties. As
ceaselessly growing
his career developed, though, the two major historical events of his adult
life?the Civil War and the closing of the frontier?destroyed the
persona that he had taken on with such burgeoning enthusiasm. Conse
the book?his one book?became a burden to him in
quently growing
away. He could not contradict the book because he was not new
writing
ones; he was adding on to and readjusting the old one. I'm wondering
if some of that positivism inWhitman is there because he refused ever
to set his
past aside and begin again?
WSM: Several times Whitman sees essential about the Amer
something
ican situation. F.O. Matthiessen describes it too: in a democracy one of

31
 the danger points is rhetoric, public rhetoric. I think now,
looking back,
that he is also describing his own weakness. Both Whitman's
strength
and his weakness is that he is a rhetorical
basically poet. And he's
not sense that all
rhetorical only in the obvious poetry is rhetorical, but
in the sense of rhetoric as on a stance and then
public speech: you decide
you bring in material to flesh out that stance, to details to your
give
This is one of the that makes me uneasy about Whit
position. things
man. The stance is there; and much of the poetry
basically simply adds
detail to it. So many of the moments inWhitman that I really love are
to this. Yet to my mind, these exceptions occur far too
exceptions
Most of the time he's a The whole Leaves
infrequently. making speech.
Grass in a sense is a It's a of emotional about
of speech. piece propaganda
an emotional to a historical moment. It's almost set up in a
approach
way which makes it
impossible for it to to or to reflect
develop, deepen,
on itself and come out with sudden new perspectives.
EF: What about some of the poems of the "Drum Taps"
period like the
"Wound Dresser"?
WSM: some o? my favorite because his
They're passages, you know,
theory won't support him there. He's attention to what
simply paying
he sees in front of him. I find those poems both sharper and more

moving than many other things inWhitman.

EF: But they tend to get lost in that vast programmed structure o? Leaves
Grass . . .
of
WSM: He allows himself to get lost in it, insisting on the bird
inciting
of freedom to soar . . .

CN: Even in those poems in which he is depressed by what he sees and

admits his difficulty in dealing with it?rather than announcing it yet
as an occasion for his enthusiasm?some of the same
again appropriate
role as the representative speaker for the country, the role of the speaker
voicing the collective condition of America, continues to be fore
with less mere rhetoric, less oracular thea
grounded, though perhaps
tricality.
WSM: I'm very anxious not to be unfair to him. I'm not altogether
convinced, as you must guess, by the deliberate stance, but there's
a wonderful and generous human behind it, and a quite
obviously being
incredible and original gift, incredible power. But those misgiv
equally
now for all these years, so I guess I'm
ings have been quite consistent
to have to live with them.
going
EF: Do you conceive of your own writing, your own career, as the
creation of one large book?

32
WSM: Well, your whole work is one large book, because there is amore
or less audible voice At least Iwould like
running through everything.
to think that one's work becomes a coherent that
project eventually,
are not with no in the whole. But
poems merely disparate pieces place
I don't conceive of deliberately to construct a
trying single book the way
Whitman was to do with Leaves Grass. I don't think of that
trying of
even in terms of the separate books. I never set out to write The Lice,
or to write The Carrier wrote until at a particular
of Ladders, but point
something
to be
seemed complete.
On what terms, or on the basis of
what assumptions, Iwouldn't be able to say, any more than Iwould with
a be able to say "Ah, that is finished."
single poem poem
EF: You have said that when you go back to nineteenth-century Ameri
can writers for a sustaining influence, it's not Whitman you turn to, but
Thoreau. I think a lot of throw Whitman and Thoreau
people together
as part of the American Transcendental and Romantic tradition. What
draws you to Thoreau that doesn't draw you toWhitman?
WSM: I suppose the way in which he meant "In wildness is the
one
preservation of the world" for thing. Or the recognition that the
human can not exist in a natural void; whatever the
independently
alienation is that wefeel from the natural world, we are not in fact
alienated, so we cannot base our on that difference.
self-righteousness
We're part ofthat whole thing. And the way Thoreau, very differently
from Whitman, even in a takes his own and
paragraph perception
it into a deeper and deeper way of seeing actual
develops something?the
is one of the things that draws me to him. I think
seeing in Thoreau
that Thoreau saw in a way that nobody had quite seen before; it was
American in that sense. I don't know ifWilliams talks about Thoreau,
but I would liked to hear what Williams
have had to say about Tho
reau's to see, even Williams' great sympathy is more
capacity though
toward Whitman. Indeed I've suspected for a long time that an Ameri
can tend to go either toward Whitman or toward
poet's sympathy would
Thoreau, not both. Gary Snyder at this point
toward is rather snippy
about Thoreau, says he's very uptight, WASP, and so forth. That's a way
of describing Thoreau's weaknesses all right?such as his lack of any
automatic for his fellow human
spontaneous sympathy beings. Thoreau
is not The kind of hawky in Thoreau puts off the
all-embracing. thing
enthusiasts of enthusiasm itself, the great Whitmanite hugs of feeling,
the lovers, "I love my fellow man." Perhaps if you really are there you
don't have to say it so often and so
loudly. Dana recently has been

33
 reading Henry James and Thoreau and getting very impatient with
James and reading a passage of Thoreau and saying, "You know, for
the natural world is scenery outside the window." There's never
James
alive out there. And for Thoreau, when he sees it, it's alive,
anything
completely alive, not a detail in a piece of rhetoric. And he leaves open
what its is. He realizes that the intensity with which he's
significance
able to see it is its significance. This is an immense gesture of wisdom
in Thoreau that I miss inWhitman. Whitman's wonderful expansive
enthusiasm isn't there in Thoreau, though he has things of equal beauty
and power. The last page o? Waiden is certainly one of the most beautiful
ever written, and of a kind of elevation that Whitman himself
things
was to reach all the time.
trying
EF: Yes, Whitman does tend to dwell a bit too long on "cameraderie,"
as if it's
something he's trying to invoke rather than to describe. I think
in that sense there's a real loneliness at the heart of Whitman.
WSM: There is at the heart of both of those writers, but it's quite
obvious in Thoreau, he makes no bones about it. There's that wonderful
he says, I don't pay enough attention to my fellow human
passage where
I don't feel strongly enough about them, I don't take enough
beings,
interest in them, and I'm going to do something about that: these people
on the to walk closer to them and
down here working bridge, I'm going
see if I can't think of them as they
were
though groundhogs.
EF: Do you read Thoreau often?
WSM: Well, I keep him in the John. He's been there for years. So I go
back and read things over again. I think Waiden is an incredible book.
I feel grateful to Thoreau in a way. He's been a companion. Yet I see
Thoreau's limitations, too, including whatever it is that makes him
write one sentence onto another sentence out of notebooks,
by tacking
and putting them together. It's a strange way of writing, though he's
not the first person in history to write that way, after all.
EF: Your myriad translations suggest all kinds of affinities for you from
outside America, but are there other American writers besides Thoreau
that you find yourself returning to, that you would call sustaining
influences?
WSM: Thoreau is really the main one that I go back to. There's nobody
before Thoreau. There was a time when I used to read Mark
really
Twain for fun, but apart from Huckleberry Finn, which I love, I find that
he doesn't last very well. I don't even find him very funny anymore.
an It's amazing how
And then I read early book, his book about Hawaii.
much racism and John Wayne-ism there was in that generation.

34
 CN: Has Thoreau been behind some of
the prose that you've written
You're about
your family and your past, which are
recently? writing
very different from his, but there's a certain about
topics humility
existence that I see both in Thoreau and in these pieces
phenomenal
from your new prose book, Unframed Originals.
WSM: I hadn't thought ofthat, Cary; that's interesting. Maybe so, who
knows?
EF: Certainly that position you put yourself in when you buy the old
abandoned house in France at the end ofthat one essay,
autobiographical
called "Hotel"?the of into that house so far, not
position moving only
to clear the floor and put panes in the windows and paint the
wanting
walls, but rather only lie there on a cot?is a very Thoreau-like
simple
position. It's like his bean-field: half-cultivated and half-wild.
WSM: Yes. I guess that's part of what Iwas talking about a minute ago.
That's a wonderful way of putting it, too?his before the
humility
phenomenal world. If you don't accept the genuine chairness of the
chair, if it's all as it is for a in the
just background, great many people
contemporary world?first the separation from the natural world, then
from the phenomenal tend to be seen in terms of
world?things only
their uses, or in terms of what abstraction they
can serve. If the
reality
of the unreal objects cannot be accepted as an infinite thing in them, you
can't see anything. You only see counters in a game that is of very
doubtful value.
CN: I feel in your recent a real wariness about rhetorical over
pieces
statement, a wish to write in a very delicate and lucid way and not to
fall into what might be aWhitmanesque mode of thinking about your
own to terms about it if
past, but speak in simple and direct possible.
WSM: Well, of course I don't have to tell you that you're always
writing in a rhetoric of one kind or another, but I am working to avoid
as much as a kind of rhetoric which is an emotional screen that
possible
to look at. That's
keeps you from seeing what you're trying something
I did want to do. And I also realized, part way
through, since one of the
the main themes of the book is what I was not able to know, what I
couldn't ever find out, the I couldn't meet, that reticence was one
people
of the main I was about. Indeed it was a very reticent
things writing
I
family. But I felt if I could take any detail, any moment, anything
could clearly see, and pay enough attention to it, itwould act like a kind
of hologram. I'd be able to see the whole story in that single detail?just
the way, if you could pay attention to a dream, the dream would
really

35
 tell you everything you needed to know for that time and
probably
But any exaggerated rhetoric you were at that
place. obviously using
in the sense of an emotional in front of the
point, waving flag thing
itself, would prevent that from happening.
CN: I have been trying to L tween the way your poetry of
distinguish
the last twenty years makes me think about and the rather
language
different view of that I detect in
language Unframed Originals. At least
from The Moving Target on, it seems you felt it
necessary?if you were
to write as the present conditions of the world to write?to
required you
let language do to you what it would, to let in effect have its
language
way with you. In these recent prose pieces I sense a new wariness about
that, a desire not to let language have its way. I'm wondering whether
that rings true at all, or even whether you have some sense that the
recent prose pieces are written in a different mode, that
significantly
a real in your to words?
they show7 change relationship
WSM: Itmust be, but Iwasn't aware of it when it was And
happening.
to connect that with what we were just saying, when to
you're trying
avoid that one kind of rhetoric, of course you're a different
developing
kind of rhetoric. I had a of to write in what years ago
feeling trying
I suppose I would have described as a kind of classical way, in which
the form of the prose, the form of the writing, was in the service of but
not swallowed up by the subject, so you were really deliberately formed
the The ordered what you were
through language. language seeing,
unlike, to choose a very different alternative, a stream of consciousness

style. Yet I'm unaware of some of the other differences. I

certainly don't
want to what I've done before, and if it feels as I'm
keep doing though
just doing something I've done before then obviously I don't want to
be doing it. But I don't very often have some deliberate, conscious notion
of what direction I want to move
in; when I started off to write those
I knew to handle
that Iwanted that material, to it down, to
pieces put
give itwhat would be the clearest and sharpest possible form, but I didn't
know how to go about it, and finished the book, I would still
having
feel I didn't know how to go about it, and don't know now. I don't think
I know how to write but particularly I don't know how to
anything,
write
prose.
EF: Certainly there is a dramatic shift in the way your prose feels from
The Miner's Pale Children to
Unframed Originals.
WSM: How do you see the difference?
EF: I see the difference corresponding
to the difference between the

36
 most recent poems. The
poems from that period and your change of
voice in your most recent poems is surprising, and moves further in the
direction of the more of The Compass Flower. Your
colloquial language
recent poems are a much more into them
allowing colloquial language
selves than I've heard before. They're a kind of clear narrative
allowing
that they have not had before?one of the ones you read
development
the other night, as I told you, reminded me of Williams' "Plot of
Ground." It seems to me a movement that is first evident in many of
the poems o? Compass Flower. The language seemed to grow less gnomic
in tone, much more more relaxed, and I
inviting. The voice became
sense the same in the recent prose. As I'm describing this, I realize
thing
I'm not saying the same senses almost
thing Cary is?Cary something
to this in the recent prose, a reticence and a . . .But
opposite tightening.
we would both agree that The Miner s Pale Children is a book which goes
much more the period of The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders than
with
recent
these pieces. Do you feel that?
WSM: But I don't think there's a contradiction. You're saying different
I think it's possible for both of these things to be happening
things, but
at the same time. I
certainly wanted the prose to handle material that
it never had
before, and to do it as plainly and directly as
possible.
Plainness is the thing you are both saying is involved here.
CN: It seems that it would have been immensely dissatisfying for you
to write about this matter in the style of The Miner s Pale Children
subject
or Houses and Travellers.
WSM: But I also think there's been an impulse in the direction of
for a time. It's been and it goes back far.
plainness long growing, quite
I've seen some critical commentary confusing plainness and what's been
called the quietness o? the poems. I don't know if they really are quiet
or not. don't seem to me But there are not so many
They quiet obviously.
as there are in has moments
decibels Whitman, though Whitman of
another kind of power. A line like "A woman waits for me" seems to
me to have at least as much emotional
power as "I hear America
know, I don't care if he hears America singing; I do care
singing"?you
when he says "A woman waits for me."
CN: But there are moments, at least in The Lice and The Carrier
of
when one say you hear America is some
Ladders, might dying. There
in a
thing of that role of speaking representative way for the culture,
not with Whitman's enthusiasm, but with the same
obviously virtually
energy in reverse. Were there times in say, on the American
working,

37
 in The Carrier on some
sequence of Ladders and of the poems of real
horror in The Lice, when you felt inWhitman's but
yourself position
with a very different message, with a very different tone?
WSM: Very much, yes. One of the things that I found happening, not
as I tried to write those American at different times,
deliberately, poems
again and again?I don't think it's possible for me to see or to
approach
that subject?it never has been?without the feeling that Ed was describ
as we drove across the country this feeling of
ing yesterday, inhabiting
a However the culture have left, we are not
palimpsest. long may just
on a Insofar as there is any historical or
sitting here Sunday afternoon.
at all, that involves these many
temporal continuity continuity layers,
many of them invisible, and they are not different at all from the
and of our own And if
repressed, pressed, forgotten layers experience.
we are so dishonest and so mutilated that we can't make any sense
really
of the world, or come to any terms with them, then our lives are maimed
and truncated lives and our
accordingly?our imaginative probably
lives too. You know I've felt various about that over
the
physical things
years and very often
the rage that you, Ed, said that your father felt
when he saw what was to the soil of this
country?I
can
happening
imagine it about the soil, too. For awhile I used to think of it
feeling
in terms of two two Western one of them the of
myths, myths, myth
Orpheus obviously?the important thing there is that Orpheus is sing
ing with the animals all around him listening?and one can take that
as a of arrogation or as a of harmony. It's both, you know,
myth myth
it is homocentric but it's also inclusive, and everything is there in the
act of And the other is the myth of Phaethon, who says "Daddy,
singing.
Iwant to drive those horses," and ends up with a holocaust . . . and the

beginning of racism. It's probably not as as that, but at one

point
simple
I it in terms of those two But the American
kept seeing myths. poems.
Let me them in another way.
approach
F.O. Matthiessen, as I remember, years ago was about the
talking
of a number of American writers to find an American of
attempt myth
at
history; Richard Howard quotes that wonderful passsage the begin

ning of his book, from which his title comes, Alone with America. You
know, one can to see the great phoney myth of the
begin differently
of theWest"?it was the destruction of theWest. It was heroic,
"winning
but it was heroic in an incredibly cramped and vicious way. People did
suffer and were but they
were also broken and cruel, and
magnificent,
in the long run incredibly destructive, irreversibly destructive. What

38
we've done to this continent is unbelievable?to think that one
something
species could have done this in a hundred years. Right where we're

sitting. And this is our lives. This is not

something
to have
opinion
an
about, this is what we live with, this is our bodies and our minds, this
is what our words come out of, and we should know.
EF: Cary was suggesting that in The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders you
sometimes take on the voice of the culture in a kind of negative way.
I'm wondering if sometimes too the voice in those books is not that of
the other animals, if your desire throughout your work is not in part
to what is both and absolutely necessary, that is,
accomplish impossible
to voice to the voiceless to those creatures that cannot
give beings, speak
their rage. Do you at times feel your voice coming not from the human
culture but instead from the silent herds being destroyed by that human
culture?
WSM: It would be very presumptuous to agree to that, but insofar as
I dare to suggest a formula for myself or anyone else, I think it's very
to remain open to that to welcome it, and to evoke
important possibility,
it if Otherwise, what else is there? Otherwise, one is there in
possible.
an historical, brainwashed, limited mo
ego-bound, culturally incredibly
ment. One can't
perceive anything because one has no perspective at all.
The nearest I can imagine to what I would think
opposite?the thing
of as a sound or even healthy approach and attitude toward existence
as a whole distinct from the endless separation of the human
(as species
from the rest of existence that leads to evaluating the one at the expense
of the be Blake's "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that
other)?would
cuts the an immense world of clos'd to your senses
airy way,/Is delight,
five?" It works both ways, one both can be and can never be the bird.
EF: I think of "For a Coming Extinction," where the voice shifts a great
deal, trying to to the gray whale while aware of the fiction
speak being
that the gray whale can hear us anyway, and then at the end of the poem
the voice o? the culture: "Tell him/that it is we who are
becoming "
The most ironic lines in your poems occur when your voice
important.
shifts into that mode of
speaking
for the culture.
WSM: I hadn't
thought of that.
EF: And when the voice seems least ironic and the most enraged, it seems
to be
speaking from somewhere that one cannot name, that is not within
our culture. It is not a voice speaking from within, but a voice that has
to dismiss itself from the culture for a time in order to speak the rage.
WSM: Like "Avoiding News by the River."

39
EF: Yes.
CN: It's more difficult, it seems to me, to decide what voice is speaking
in the passage right before that in "For a Coming Extinction": "Consid
er what you will find in the black its court/The sea cows
garden/And
the Great Auks the gorillas/The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless/
And as stars/Our sacrifices." At first in that passage
fore-ordaining
there's an extraordinary and, I think,
powerfully unresolvable sense of
. . .
anger
WSM: Iwas to say, even when you read it, that all I hear is the
going
anger with which it was written. It overrides these other distinctions.
EF: But there's a clear double-voice there: "Our sacrifices" carries all
of the pride o? the destructive culture.
WSM: Yes.
EF: And yet it comes out sounding incredibly angry because we know
that the voice that is really speaking this poem and mouthing those
words is not emerging from the source that would speak those words
with pride.
CN: One also hears a certain even, earned.
contempt
WSM: Yes, and youknow, driving in the West, I've thought and
remembered afterwards, and see it in Hawaii these things: you
watching
drive along and you see some pile of ditched cars, or a little place where

they
serve
trash?deep fried food, or something like that, and you think,
in order to bring this about dozens of young men were sent off to die
of leprosy in the leper colonies, or hundreds of Indians and thousands
of buffalo were the whole
killed and place has been poisoned for years
in order to about
this little of shit. And it's described in terms
bring pile
of the triumph of civilization. What kind of impossible lie is this that
we're all subscribing to?
CN: I have a poster version of "For a Coming Extinction" upstairs that
I see each time Iwalk in that room. It's a more immediate and continu
than one can easily have with a poem in a book.
ing relationship Every
time I read the poem I enter into a cluster of remarkably divided
emotions. Each stanza seems simultaneously fractured and sustained by
contradiction. "The End/That great god" suggests at first our lust for
extinction, for a kind of demonically hieratic narrative conclusion. Yet
a sense of transcendence also enters into the reference to "The End" as
a To the extent that the poem confers a static
"great god." immortality
on the gray whale, it too participates in that act of "sending." There
is a certain beauty in these animal "hosts ranged countless," a
beauty

40
 not cancelled a sense of loss or status as a collective
either
by by their
indictment of human history. If we are
appalled
at the numerical
accumulation of slaughtered animals, we are also in awe of the "irre
hosts" now ranged before us. These two
impulses
are inex
placeable
tricably linked by the poem; it becomes fascinated with that miraculously
awful achievement and thus puts forward a far more radically compro
mised voice than anger alone would permit.
WSM: It would be very difficult and very rare to make a poem out of
or out of pure anything. Even love are seldom made
pure anger, poems
out of pure love. made out of words, so all of the
Actually, they're
that are built into any phrase come into it. Pure anger would
paradoxes
be a scream.
just
EF: And there can't help but be a fascination with those people who at
the end of the poem say "It is we who are important." You can despise
those people, but there's a fascination with them, and you have to come
to terms with the layer of the world
them because they've constructed
we're on and on now.
living dying right
WSM: Yes, you have to come to terms with them; that doesn't mean that
you have to say it's okay.
CN: No, but there are texts of more unqualified anger about this kind
of subject matter, not in your work but elsewhere in contem
necessarily
I think yours is a poem that forces you, if you want to
porary poetry.
read the poem carefully, to think own motivations. It
through your
doesn't let you away easily. It doesn't let you off being convinced that

you won't continue in this pattern. You may already be part of it.
even more
WSM: Thataspect of it is apparent probably?from what
told
have me, whether to it with or
people they've responded pleasure
with that poem that was last year.
annoyance?in pineapple published
People obviously find that they're being got at in different points in the
poem, and don't like the attack.
EF: That reminds me of another poem from The Lice, "A Scale inMay,"
where this issue of a double-voice is central. The "I" in this poem seems
to be able to identify the problem of human arrogance while simulta
his own in that arrogance.
neously recognizing participation

A Scale in May2

Now all my teachers are dead silence

except
I am trying
to read what the five poplars are writing
On the void

41
 Of all the beasts to man alone death brings justice
But I desire
To kneel in a doorway empty except for the song

Who made time also its fools

provided
in watches and with ballots for their choices
Strapped
Crossing the frontiers of invisible kingdoms

To succeed consider what is as it were past

though
Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it
If you find you no believe the temple
longer enlarge

the day the nameless stars the door

Through keep passing
That have come all that way out of death
Without questions

The walls of light shudder and an owl wakes in the heart

I cannot call upon words
The sun goes away to set elsewhere

Before nightfall colorless petals blow under the door

And the shadows
Recall their ancestors in the house death
beyond

At the end of its procession

through the stone

Falling
The water remembers to
laugh

back on it now, what can you tell us about the voice in this
Looking
poem?
WSM: I'm trying to remember the poem was written,
exactly when and
I can't. Obviously it was written
sometime in the 60s, in the
spring. I'm
not a theorist and in any case I don't want to embed it in a
theory that
it was written with the whole out
implies thing worked intellectually

42
 in advance. But in hindsight I think I see that certain things I've been
to say for years seem to have been converging all the way along.
trying
I see quite a number of them in that poem. But I'd better say something
first about the progression; the middle part?the second, third, and
fourth sections?are set up in ways which can be taken either
straight
or and Iwould like them to be taken both ways. been
ironically, They've
about, in criticism, as
written from both points of view, though each
excluded the other, and that wasn't the intention. And, as Ed has pointed
out, the use of language in a to possess the world is part
particular way
of what Ifelt, much of my life, to a
be very dangerous human arrogance,
one which no one is exempt as
from?we're sitting here part of that
We to ourselves that do not to us, that
arrogance. arrogate things belong
don't belong to I don't want to that as a kind of ethical
anybody. develop
matter and say how I think we should solve the ecological problems,
and so on. As I suggested the other night, I think that the first
pollution,
in
hope of mankind begins simply caring about those things.
The thing that I do want to try to say
something about, as a basis for
the poems of that time, and probably all of the poems IVe
talking about
written since, is that?to put it personally first?I used to feel that it was
a terrible fault of character not to be able to come to clear resolutions
about things, that I would two sides of
and decisions always be seeing
and "Yes, but." Of course that is a fault of character,
something, saying
but at the same time the character does use a left and right hand, the heart
does beat both ways. And I've come to believe that existence?and by
that I don't mean just human existence, Imean existence as a whole?
has always got, basically, these two aspects to it, one which is relative,
and the other which is not relative at all. The second, of course, is the
teacher who is not dead, the world of silence. But that's also the world
in which you can't call upon words. The arrogance comes from
saying
that that world doesn't exist or is of no importance, when of course in
my view it's that world that gives words their real life. It also allows
them to be luminous, transparent, and to illuminate the world, which
in itself is transparent and luminous. Arrogance and an attempt to possess
that world as
something which is absolutely solid and can belong to

somebody, completely nullifies that whole dimension of existence, and

existence of any kind of sense, and it it of its senses.
deprives deprives
It us of our own senses. The sense of smell is the first, most
deprives
obvious one; we've almost lost it; it's going away from us. If you take
that as a basic note to the poem, I think itwill help make the poem ring

43
 clear. And I don't think that idea is a very difficult one, though it's
a difficult to come to terms with. And very little of our
probably feeling
social, and historical our in the time that
public, experience, experience
we live in, fits us for to terms with we're
coming it; being shunted away
from it all the time, and it is very uncomfortable, until we accept it.
Then I think it is the
only comforting thing there is. That's why the
water remembers to
laugh.
EF: I'm curious about what you might have to say about the form that

you used in this particular poem?a three-line stanza which becomes a

form you return to quite often: in Asian Figures, in Feathers from the Hill.
In this poem these varying are all in those three
perceptions captured
line moments. What attracts you to that form?
WSM: Well, it goes farther back than that. There are poems in The
are in wrote a
Moving Target which that form, and I number of poems
in the form at that time, but I didn't most of them. A little later
publish
I tried to and figure out what I was
develop doing. One of the things
I wanted to find . . .
you know, when people say "I don't understand
modern or "I don't understand any poet," sometimes mean
poetry" they
they have difficulty in
apprehending intention and subject and so on, but
I think that sometimes it's a to grasp an unfamiliar
temporary inability
sense of a new of how can be
completeness, recognition things complete.
And at one point Iwanted to see what it was that made a poem
complete
as a small, if not the smallest, unit; it was a way of what
discovering
was the that would stand itself. I to a
single thing by Why gravitated
three-line form I don't know, but that seemed to me the ideal small
form. And in Asian Figures I really was trying to see just what was the
smallest form, not that I wanted to stay there, but I wanted to
explore
this idea of completeness. And then when you start these com
putting
do you see them as separate or in relation to each
plete things together,
other? It's a I think, that art is always this is
question, suggesting:
yet at the same time, what is its relation to
complete, everything?
EF: Returning for a moment to the
irony, the double-voice, in this

poem?to what extent does the "I" separate itself from the world of
fools?
WSM: Well, a that has a double answer: how
you're asking question
much do I remember about my intention of the poem, and what do I
feel now, which is the only I can answer it from. I think that was
place
deliberately left up in the air because the "I" is not separate from the
fools; on the other hand, the "I" is judging a kind of human action, a

44
 human gesture, to be separate from. Of course we're
it wants all fools;
I have a watch in my don't have it The foolish
pocket (I strapped on).
is to take that world which we have made as the real, total,
thing
absolute final world, and say we have it?it's ours. You know, I doubt
whether one can come to that resembles a moral
anything judgment
without to be outside it. On the other hand, you can't altogeth
seeming
er make one without
identifying yourself with the person you're judg
whether you know it or not. You don't see it if
ing, you're totally
separate from it. But an action doesn't necessarily mean that
deploring
one is "It's them"?it's us. If you see someone a
saying beating dog, and
there's nothing can do about feel
you stopping it, you angry, but part
of your anger probably is bound up with the fact that somewhere inside
a not to
you, you're capable of beating dog. But you may stop think,
"Is it me? Am I being You want to stop the
self-righteous?" beating of
the dog. I want "them" to stop
destroying the Northwest, the
killing
salmon, killing them both in the sense of that unim
thinking they're
portant, and in the physical sense of the rivers; both of them
polluting
are the same
really thing.
But I can't any close or absolute accuracy what
really remember with
I was trying
to do in this poem. And, you know, it would not be an
authentic poem if the intellectual intention were the real, final
guiding
force inthe poem. This is another way of recognizing that other
dimension; I think a real poem comes out of what you don't know. You
write it with what you know, but its source is what you don't
finally
know. There's a passage where Thoreau says, "How can someone find
his ignorance if he has to use his knowledge all the time?" The arro
gance would be the assumption that what you know has some kind of
final value and you can depend upon it, and it will get rid of a whole
world which you will never know, which really informs it. . . . Both
of these worlds, in my view, are without there is absolutely
meaning;
no in either, but the sense of the world of relation comes from
meaning
them nonetheless.
we
EF: When get to The Compass Flower, the ecological rage and ironies
and devastations that I feel everywhere in The Lice seem to have
changed
The ecological poems in The Compass Flower tend to have
dramatically.
a tone like that of "The Trees"?a sadness at what's about to be gone
and a recollection of what it is that the trees have offered. It's a very
different tone from
that in The Lice. you could not remain
Obviously
at the had arrived at in The Lice, where it seems to me that
point you
were on the of not at all . . .
you verge writing poems

45
 most of the time that Iwas
WSM: Absolutely right. In fact writing The
Lice I I had pretty well because there was
thought given up writing,
no in it. For different reasons?much the same way that I
really point
some writers
think of continental Europe felt late in the Second World
War and after, that there was really no point in going on writing; what
was
they had experienced just terrible beyond anything that
language
could deal with, and there was no point in even trying, and there was
no one to write
it for either, for very can
probably long. That easily be
as I think it may not be just despair?it
described despair, but may be
a kind of vision: a dumb vision, and I don't think you can
searing stay
there if you're going to go on
living.
EF: Your books since The Lice form a clear and record of how
eloquent
you have come to
grips with that despair, and moved beyond it. But I'm
interested in your own version of how you came to terms with
personal
on to write after The Lice. What to the rage and the
going happened
anger and
the despair?
WSM: Oh, I think they're all still there, but I suppose some
lucky
that the anger itself could destroy the one was
recognition thing that
angry in defense of, and that the important was to try to
thing keep what
as before phenomenal
Cary described humility things: the fact that that
chair may be destroyed tomorrow is no reason not
to pay attention to
it this afternoon, you know. The world is still around us, and there is
that aspect of other human beings which has not been solely destructive,
and to which one is in debt, and which involves the
constantly simply
of existing able to look and see the trees, the
pleasure together, being
cat in and out of the room. The answer to even one's anger is
walking
in the way one can see those things, the way that one can live with them.
Not very often, perhaps for no more than a few seconds at a time. Even
so, one lives second by second.
CN: I have been the past few days and
reading The Compass Flower
its
about to the four books it. From The
thinking relationship preceding
to an your
Moving Target through Writings Unfinished Accompaniment,
special vocabulary?including words like silence, darkness, emptiness?
is taken up by historical circumstances, a feel
permeated by particular
about our culture's that time it seemed to many of
ing destiny. During
us that our culture's destiny
was
being played
out in very visible and

unarguable ways. In The Compass Flower you are often trying to write
very different poetry, including love poetry, yet this vocabulary in away
returns to haunt you. In writing the poetry of The Compass Flower was

46
 it a to deal that were colored by a different
struggle again with words
sense of or at least words that seemed decisively to to the
history, belong
world and its power to enter into and transform our private lives?
public
WSM: I think so. They are words that I used with increasing caution,
because they can become habitual, can become counters. can
they They
have an emptiness which obscures their real emptiness; they
can become
sentimental indeed in that way. They can become one's own
simply
that are habitual. That's
signatures really self-defeating.
CN: I would say that some of those same words become habitual in
Kinnell. Indeed it's a risk for many like that
poets?a vocabulary
becomes so much a of the way write that it's instinc
part they merely
tive.

WSM: Yes. Well, I'm not going to try to never, never use
obviously
those words, but I use them with increasing, deliberate self-conscious
ness. If I use them now it's with a kind of self-consciousness Iwouldn't
have had using them fifteen or twenty years ago.
CN: In the period of The Lice the self-consciousness would have gotten
in the way.
WSM: That's is now, when
right. The funny thing you're both talking
about that, I realize that there is a small group of from the
poems
of this year?new ones?in which the kind of magma that
beginning
Lice suddenly insisted on writing, out the same
produced The bringing
vein again, just before the inauguration of Reagan.
CN: Well, we're to have more occasions like that. The history
going
that wrote The Lice or that's there in The Lice has hardly left us.
WSM: I think so. I didn't set out to write those poems. Several poems
came out with more of that than I knew was going
suddenly quality
to be there.
Just the beginning of this year particularly, I felt a great deal
of that: the British presence in Ireland, what was up to, and
Reagan
Watt, my return to
Pennsylvania and seeing what the result of the new
was there?total devastation.
policies
EF: Those most recent poems surprise me somewhat. I feel in them the
same anger that was in The Lice, the same rage, but what is different is
that the historical allusions are direct and clear. The allusions are not
defamiliarized for the reader, as often happens in The Lice. In The Lice,

you may be about an assassination, but the name of who was

talking
assassinated does not appear, and in fact there would not be a direct or
clear allusion to any of the actual events of the assassination.
WSM: Actually both of the assassination poems in The Lice were written
before the assassinations.

47
 EF: So they really were not historical . . .
poems
WSM: The one was written very shortly before the Kennedy assassina
tion; the other one very shortly?about three days?before Martin Lu
ther King was killed. I better not write any more of them.
CN: I think it's difficult to say the poems in The Lice are not historical

poems. The process at work for a reader is one in which a core of

precise
historical referentiality becomes uncertain and unstable, even blurred,
in the poem. Yet in a way the poem's historicity becomes more repre
sentative as a result. The poem presents a more
history potentially
possessive of us and where we are in time. The to erode
specificity begins
as the poem
proceeds.
WSM: I have a recent poem with a reference to the IRA strike,
hunger
but I'm uncertain about that passage, and I'm of
taking the
thinking
reference out of the poem. I very much
extremely specific Although
wanted it to be in there when Iwrote the poem, I'm not sure it
belongs
there. I don't think it strengthens the poem, or even serves the reasons
for having that specific passage there in the first
place.
EF: This talk of referentiality ties in with your of how you
description
came to deal with after at the wordless
writing poetry arriving position
you were in upon
completing The Lice. There seems to be a
gradual
realization that the world is still here, that you could still be attentive
to the that were around the feeling that I
things you?that's certainly
sense book by book after The Lice. A striking example of this
growing
new is "St. Vincent's" in The Flower. This is a
feeling Compass poem that
to me marks a new kind of attentiveness, a new kind of use of
language,
that I find more and more, as I've said, in your
prose
autobiographical
pieces. We have that same concern with wanting to the senses
keep
seems to be a in this poem that there's been a
open?there feeling place
there for a long time that has been part of your common experience;
you see it every day, and yet you've never seen it. You've never
paid
attention to it, never at it. "I consider that I have lived
really looked
and open and ears to hear/these years across from St.
daily with/eyes
Vincent's Hospital." And what happens in the poem, then, is a kind of
opening of the eyes and ears to the sights and sounds one has learned
to dull one's senses to, so that "long/ago I learned not to hear them/even
when the sirens turn to back in/few stay to look/
stop/they passers-by
and neither do I." So there's a sense now o? staying to look, staying to
record, staying to what be on the
imagine might going beyond things
that one can see and hear if one is attentive enough. And then the poem

48
 ends with a
question, "who was St. Vincent": the name given
to the

thing that one has lived across from all the time?I take it that the

question does ask for an answer, who was St. Vincent, and I think of St.
Vincent who defined his life by paying attention to those elements in

society that no one else attention to. So, too, this is a poem about
paid
to pay attention, it seems to me, to things that one has learned
learning
not to pay attention to
to, by custom, by habit, and then learning
overcome that.

CN: Before you read "The Last One" the other night, you said that you
wished that the poem would become so that no one would
untopical
know what itwas about, a comment that I found appealingly subversive.
"St. Vincent's" a
is poem whose is more or less inescapa
referentiality
ble: Iwonder if you are comfortable with that, or do you sometimes wish
that it, too, had a quality of undecidableplurality, making
it
impossible
merely
to link it with that building and that structure.
WSM: No, I don't feel that; I'm very fond of that building. The poem
was written in January, I think it was 1975. I've had an apartment for

many years across the street from St. Vincent's so that's the
Hospital,
time and place of it. And it was, I suppose, a attempt to do
particular
that thing we were to honor the very specific historic
talking about,
immediate circumstance, to make the poem directly out of that. The

poem was a deliberate attempt to closer to the

practice something
tradition ofWilliams andWhitman. One I
of the things that envy about
that tradition sometimes is the ease of address, the immediacy of the use
of historical circumstance, which sometimes I would very much like
to have been able to use more But I can't
familiarly myself. obviously
believe that I'm ever going to be in the center ofthat tradition; I don't
share any of the original It has seemed to me that
assumptions. fact has
two faces, too. Fact is in the world of relation?one is always
looking
at the outside of facts. One sees all the facts from the outside. One is
never to be on the inside until one is up in the relation, then
going caught
of course you don't see the inside; there is no separation between the
inside of you and the inside of what you're at. the same
looking They're
was St. Vincent" remains a and it's a question
thing. "Who question,
that one goes on asking; it's the question that asks what the relation is
between the world of history and the world that's shared. And between
them and oneself.
There's a moment in St. Vincent's when he gave up the
biography
life that he'd been living and went to live with the poor whom he'd

49
 been serving, because he felt that what he'd been doing was
inadequate
. . . and afterthe first night of introduction to this terrible
squalor, with
and misery
people beating each other and
hunger and the lives falling

apart, he woke up in the middle of the in tears,

night saying, "Forgive
me, God, I did not know that this was on. I didn't know that
going
went this far. I didn't realize that this was in the world."
suffering
EF: In "St. Vincent's" the referentiality is very clear; it's all there?
we're given the name of the hospital, we're given the context in the
book of poems to let us know we 're in New York, we know
exactly
what the building looks like. Is the original St. Vincent's still extant,

by the way?
WSM: It's still there, but, you know, like everything else, it's changing.
the inside out of part of it now, and the facade,
They're tearing keeping
which is the old part of it. But they're I had
quite beautiful, expanding.
a when the poem was Imet who said that
surprise published. somebody
been over there to St. Vincent's for medical reasons, and they'd
they'd
found the poem pasted on the walls of the elevators. I got a letter from
the nun in
charge of public relations who said, "There are a lot of
in that poem, and if you'd really like them answered,
questions please
come and I did, and had a
by and I'll take you through the hospital,"
whole . . .The are still
afternoon going around St. Vincent's. questions
unanswered.

EF: But the unanswered are very different from those in your
questions
earlier New York
poems. I think, for example, of "Before That" from
The Moving where you have an of "Cemeteries
Target, image sifting
on/the city's windows." Do you anticipate that your reader will see the
that you described at your reading the other about
referentiality night,
the crosses being the white X's on the windows of condemned buildings,
or is that that you remove from the realm of in
something referentiality
the poem, and only restore at the reading?
WSM: Well, there is going to be a historic future, which is
assuming
an that we make but we have no real reason to, one can't
assumption
doubleguess which of our historic circumstances are
going
to be known
or matter to a hundred, two hundred years, hence. I'm unsettled
people
to realize that as the natural world recedes, and as of students
generations
grow up without having had any
contact with it, an enormous number
of really very basically are remote,
simple images becoming increasingly
inaccessible, in traditional poetry and in our own. There's an
image in
a poem of mine about flies in the middle of the room going around a

50
 statue of
nothing, and a poet came to visit me one day and was talking
about my poetry being surrealist and used this image as an example; I
said, "Come on," and I took him to a room and the door and
opened
said, "Look." There's a whole lot of simple sensual experience related
to the natural world which is a of the past; I don't think
becoming thing
this can continue I don't see how we can exist in such an
indefinitely.
attenuated and deprived context.
CN: When you introduce a poem like "Before That," a poem that seems

very open and in some ways gnomic and unstably suggestive, and you
certain lines their or their occasion,
gloss by identifying object seeming
to a source and the
thereby grant the poem writing process a moment
of origin, what do you feel you've done to the text?
WSM: I feel that I've obscured it. Because I think that I probably

you and anyone who reads the poem with a distraction. The
provided
to at not
important thing is arrive that insight through referentiality but
Now of course there would be no without
through response. response
some kind of reference. But I didn't feel that the poem should
obviously
have more reference than it had when Iwrote it. And in a sense
putting
more "chat" around it than it had then betrays it. Not that Iwant for
it to be a kind of mystification, or
anything like that. Iwant it to present
a kind of in terms which are not those of the habitual and
experience
customary referentiality which is dulled and blunted and exterior. It is
a cemetery, you know; it's not like a cemetery, it's not a lot of white
on a window. And its sense is the sense of cemeteries on
things painted
windows. Just that.
CN: Is it just the pressure of a reading, then, wanting to break the
and make at least for a moment, accessible?
rhythm things,
WSM: It's a moment of weakness and friendliness.
EF: This whole matter of historical allusion, is tricky
referentiality,
business. references in your poetry can be quite explicit when
Specific
are or derive from a References like
they personal personal experience.
that never become "topical"
in the way that references to current events
do. Topical in a that
things fade way personal references don't.
WSM: It has to do with a consistent about and
feeling poetry, probably
about all of the arts, but certainly about my own poetry, which is that
no deliberate for writing a poem works. A poem to be
program begins
a poem when a of words starts off what you might
sequence giving
describe as a kind of electric charge, when it
begins
to have a life of its
own that I sense the way I would if I suddenly a shorted
picked up

51
 electricwire. If it doesn't have that, even if it's got what Iwould very
much like it to have, then it's not working as a poem. I suppose all poets
work that way in one way or another, but I notice in many of my
a more deliberate to what want to put in
contemporaries approach they
their poems, though they do
it different, / and in ways that I have never
been able to do it. There are many I would like to write about
things
or to include in poems, but I've never been able to work that way. The
life of the language doesn't when it's done that way, so I have
happen
to wait. . . .

I had a conversation with AllenGinsberg eleven years ago, in New

Orleans, when Allen said, "Okay, how would you write a poem about
this room?" And I said, "Well, Allen, the difference is that you assume,
I guess, that you could write a poem about this room
just because you
chose to, and I can't make any such assumption. I'm not sure I could
write about this room. Perhaps at some point Imight be able to, though
Iwouldn't start down details." It would start
necessarily by just jotting
with the room, obviously, but we not agree about what "the
might
room" was. It's a differentway of approaching the whole idea of how

you write a I 'm not sure that I can write a poem

poem. just by deliberate
ly setting
out to write a poem about, you know, the sofa, or ... It's a
nice idea, but basically there's a part of me that would think, well, you
could always do it as an exercise, but if a certain extra dimension isn't
there, the brilliance of the exercise won't disguise the fact for very long.
This seems to me so obvious that I almost take it for a doctrine, but I
that there are many see it that way at all. I feel
realize poets who don't
that way when I'm reading poems, too. If I can't eventually find that
there, the poetry bores me.
quality
I think I 'm probably often deluded about what I 'm doing in my own
because I that I'm nearer and nearer to
writing keep thinking getting
an of historical detail, and yet when talk about the
immediacy people
poems I realize that may not be their But then for years I
impression.
that I was more and more and directly, and
thought writing simply
the poems were more and more difficult,
people kept saying getting
opaque, harder to read.
EF: We've discussed your relationship with Whitman and other Ameri
can writers, but what poets do you feel the most natural affinity with?
as talismans, are very
WSM: My favorite poets, the two that I live with
remote in time and didn't write in I would feel even rather
English.
diffident about them, both out of and awe:
naming superstition

52
 Fran?ois Villon and Dante?not very far apart from each other in time,
both medieval poets. And when I began Iwas fascinated with medieval
I think some ofthat was due to Pound's I had great
influence;
poetry.
admiration for Pound when I was incollege. That was
it; a
partly
rebellious stage, because almost no one else admired Pound, and I used
to walk around with a beard which I grew just like Pound's. There's
one
thing that we all owe
him, the debt to his way of hearing. That
ear runs of the Cantos. I find them hard to read,
incredible through much
not because of intellectual references, which are reason but I
enough,
irritated with what the man is saying, the stance, and that
keep getting
cornball American that he into. But my debt to him
lingo keeps lapsing
began very early.
Whether the affinity with the medieval poets is as close as it was I
don't know. I have a debt, as I think everyone does whether they know
it or not, to Anonymous; to oral literature as the best one can work
toward it. That's the real matrix of possibilities that's always there. I
I'm to stop and then I find someone else
keep saying going translating,
I want to translate. There's still so much possibility that one hasn't
touched, found, heard.
EF: I'm curious about how
your translation work teaches and forms
voices for your own or how much your own poetic voice
poetry,
the voice of your translations. When you read "The Last
predetermines
One" the other night, you mentioned that you had in mind a creation

myth?is that the "Creation of the Moon," which you translated from
the Amazon native A part of that translation reads, "So the
original?
head started to think what it would turn into/If it turned into water

they would drink it . . ." and so on. Itmoves on with that repetitive line
structure, and the feel of the poem is very much like "The Last One."
Do your translations modify your own voice, or vice-versa? I guess it
can't help but work both ways . . .
WSM: Yes, I think it works both ways. I'm very anxious not ever to
do that?and I don't mean this as a pejorative comment on Cal Lowell's
work at all?but I never wanted to do what he did; I never wanted to
take the work of someone else and use it as a for
simply springboard
providing poems of my own. And I
persuaded myself, for the sake of

practice, until the late Sixties, and that first book of selected translations,
that I did keep them separate. There were various ways of them
keeping
separate. On the other hand, something that you become involved with
as as translation, if you're working at it over a
intimately period of time,

53
and something in which you use words as
deliberately
as you do in
translation, is bound to affect your own And besides, what you
writing.
want to translate is already an indication of an affinity that you had
before you found that poem to translate. So Iwas not ever deliberately

looking around in translation something that I could use as the

for

starting point for poems of mine. Yet that particular kind of move
ment?the repetitive line structure?that you're describing is an exam
a Iwanted to echo,
ple of something that provided suggestion, something
a deliberate allusion.
A deal of anonymous oral to me
literature seems
great endlessly
not as imitated, to be and but
suggestive, something crudely directly,
as a reminder that the possibilities open to us at any moment are not
as limited as we The is not as as
might suppose. world simple and
codified and conventional as you thought it was. There is even a conven
tion that recurs in oral literature in which the consideration of possibili
ties becomes itself a kind of form. In one
Spanish ballad
a
girl has had
her dead lover for seven years in the room, and she says, "If I tell my
father, this will happen; if I tell my mother, this will happen; if I tell
my brother, this will happen," and so on. And you can think of many

fairy tales in which that happens. I think

that's something that you find
much less often in written than you do in oral literature. Eliot
literature
talked about tradition in that way, at least once as I remember it, in a
lecture on Dr. Johnson. He was Marlowe and Tennyson,
comparing
as the verse form and as literature in a way
saying developed, developed,
it refined itself at the expense of possibility. In the earlier, apparently
cruder way of doing it, you have not only a different kind of energy,
but you have a different sense of
possibility.
I think this is one of the
that in metrical verse form that was most
things happens English?the
traditional in at the time of Chaucer with an
English begins importation
of the romance form of iambic pentameter into a is
language which
amixture. And of course the new meter a basic
already replaced parallel
ism in Middle English, which Middle English shared with Hebrew
and with a a great deal of the
poetry great deal of oral poetry, with
poetry of the Americas. I think that is one of the
parallelism probably
basic forms of poetry, perhaps the basic structure of verse, and is
deep
never lost. . . .
really
CN: "The Last One" is a poem that's always troubled me a bit, because
I've heard you it
read before and, with its energy and and
parallelism
it's a poem that often generates a murmur of approval and
repetition,

54
 satisfaction from an audience. to suspect that
I tend reaction,
positive
though, because my guess is that people feel the poem gives them a
secure moral or ethical vantage It's a poem that may seem to be
point.
science fiction "revenge of the
simply in the mode of the conventional
despoiled earth on those who despoiled it." Yet I don't think that's what
the poem does. The poem begins "Well to
they made up their minds
be everywhere because why not," and in a sense the poem in the end
makes up its mind to be
everywhere because why not; or at least the
poem, in the voice and manner of the shadow, proceeds to carry out a
rhetorical of the same
appropriation totalizing, universalizing, covering
motion as the poem opens. And
that the possessors begin with in that
I think the sense of pain and at the kind of
sense?although despair
tragedy that the poem communicates is not undercut?what
ecological
is undercut, it seems to me, is any secure moral that we feel we
position
can take in the midst ofthat Somewhat the same exaltation
catastrophe.
in power occurs again in "Now It Is Clear" from The Carrier of Ladders,
which includes the lines "As though Iwere a great wind/which iswhat
I pray for." The in the poem, and the poem itself in a way,
speaker
becomes the great wind, as the second half of the poem moves forward.
These formal and rhetorical co-optations should force people to call their
own moral into at the same time the poems
certainty question, though
leave that moral as that is immensely desirable to
certainty something
us.

WSM: I'm so glad you said that, because my chief doubt about the poem
is precisely what you have suggested, that it might be understood as
from a secure moral vantage point, that those are
simply saying, people
not the poem, as I see it, and I think
doing such dreadful things. That's
the index of what I mean is in the last line?with its suggestion that
the relation with what the shadow is in the poem has been ignored,

despised, thrown away; that's quite as important to me as the science

fiction aspect of the narrative. I'm reminded of the line in the psalm,
"Yea they despised the pleasant land." The pleasant land was themselves.
CN: There are a number of irreducible ironies in that last line, "The
ones with their shadows." Are their personal shadows uniquely
lucky
their own, as they (or we) might like to believe; i.e., are their shadows
unlike the consuming, generalizing shadow of the rest of the poem? Or
do they each already carry within themselves the semblance, the vestige,
of that covering shadow they hope they have escaped?
WSM: Both. When two stand together and their shadows run
people
whose shadow is whose? Who owns the shadow?
together,

55
 CN: We've talked about how translations can initiate your own
help
poems, but more generally how do your poems start?What are the first
that as you to write? Is it that sense of a certain
things happen begin
of words alive? Does a line or two come to mind as
sequence coming
a first
step?
WSM: There's that sort of excitement
coming from somewhere. Some
times it's not even in words
yet; it's just somewhere around. But I never
far from that more or less about
got very away spooky feeling poetry,
you know, that it does have something to do with the muse's presence,
as used to describe it?some
Berryman really very ancient presence that
to and alluded to and invoked
is referred again and again in all talk about
poetry up until very recently. It's talked about very foolishly very often,
and very embarrassingly, but without that presence what the hell are
we attention to.Without it we're an intellectual game
paying playing
and there are some very brilliant intellectual games going on in the
world at the moment, but among games it's a matter of taste, not a
matter of importance.
EF: You mentioned the other day Berryman said to you
something
when were nineteen . . .
you
WSM: said, "At this point I think you should get down
He in a corner
on your knees and pray to the muse, and I mean it
literally."
CN: Once the muse has departed, do you revise a lot?
WSM: Well, I don't know quite how to answer that, Cary; in a sense,
a lot?if I look over a draft of a poem, I see that things have been
scratched out and scratched out scratched out, but actually what
and I
do is write very slowly, and it a lot as I'm on.
really change going
very often getting close to the final at the
Although quite thing right
then making minute verbal adjustments until it seems to
beginning,
come out But once it reaches a certain I very seldom go back
right. point
to it, except either to throw it out or cut hunks out of it, see if
maybe
I can do with less, see if I've overwritten it.
CN: Do you save chunks that didn't fit in and use them other
places?
WSM: I
keep thinking I'm going to, but as amatter of fact I very seldom
look at them
again.
EF: Do you have this same "spooky" feeling when you're about to write
a a very different of act for you
piece of prose? Or iswriting prose kind
than writing poetry?
WSM: It's not a very different kind of act. There's something of the same
there. I can't write anything without that, because I don't know
thing

56
what else holds imaginative language together. And writing anything
else, I findit rather boring, wearisome, and a rather depressing process.
That doesn't mean that there's not a great deal of labor involved in

writing. I find writing very hard, and I find writing prose in particular
very hard. It takes a long time before this mass of writing
begins
to
an energy of its own that sustains it, it But I don't
generate keeps going.
mean a kind of either?sometimes the plainer it can be
baroque energy
the stronger it is.
EF: At what sense when an or a
point do you experience feeling will
become a poem instead of a piece of prose? I'm curious about what draws
certain experiences into prose for you and others into poetry.
WSM: I'm not sure about that at all. Eleven or twelve years ago when
Iwas starting to write The Miner's Pale Children I wondered about that
a lot, and sometimes Iwould start to write as the one
quite something
and I'd realize it was the other. The differences I still don't know, yet
I've come to the conclusion, thinking about this, that the more passion
or
intensity there is in a piece of writing, whether it is prose or poetry,
the more it calls into question the writing's generic allegiance. In other
the more a more it tends toward
words, charged piece of prose is, the
the condition of poetry. Then you begin to describe it as or you
poetic,
to ask what itwas that it from poetry. And oddly, I think
begin separated
that this happens with poetry too. The more charged poetry is, then the
more it's driven to the point where it does some of the
things that prose
does. I suppose I believe that because to me the ideal poet is Dante, and
some of the most passages in Dante are, as Eliot said, rather
powerful
flat. At least they look rather flat, though you realize they are anything
but flat, but the plainness of Dante leads you to think it's just like prose,
except it's utterly unlike prose.
CN: Earlier in your career you were writing poems about your family
and about your past, some of them never collected in books. Now you're

prose pieces about the same

writing things.
WSM: New poems about them, too.
EF: That's what led me to think about that corresponding nature of the
some new as
prose and poetry, because of the poems sound very much
if they are the corollary in poetry of these new prose pieces.
WSM: Those connections I don't know, of course, because not
they're
deliberate. As you notice them, or I notice them, then I can guess at what
the connections are, but I don't really know. One doesn't really know
what the connections are between so related but dis
closely obviously
tinct You don't in your own or in your own life.
things. writing

57
 CN: Is there a sense of return, circularity, completion, in coming back
to those after so many years?
topics
WSM: There's a sense of it but it's not utterly deliberate,
happening,
except it was deliberate in I
that wanted to deal with that family material
in that book of prose, Unframed Originals. IVe been waiting for two or
three years to get circumstances together where I could do it. My notes
were in a warehouse and I had no desk to work on, and so forth. A lot
of it was done in the house that we were to build, before the
trying
carpenters would show up in the I'd go down when it got light
morning.
until ten o'clock, then stop and start
and work they arrived about

hammering pieces of wood the rest of the day. I never know how to
answer those about the connections of different writings of the
questions
because so few of the connections are beforehand. It's like
past, plotted
what's the connection in your mind between different parts of
saying,
a you can describe them in terms of the poem, and
poem?well, maybe
you set it out beforehand, but maybe it as you went
developed along and
then you saw what the connection was both as you wrote it and as you
look back on it. But a great deal of it is bound to be very subjective, and
it's not you can articulate or describe yourself.
finally something
EF: You've mentioned your fondness for Williams. As you talk about
the differences between prose and poetry, Williams is certainly one

figure in American literature who has worked with that distinction?or

lack of it?quite a bit.
WSM: Who calls it constantly into question. I think that's a measure
of imaginative richness, calling it into You don't wonder about
question.
it when you're reading Sidney Lanier, but you wonder about it when
You wonder it when
you're reading Melville. about you're reading
Thoreau, whose verse isn't very interesting, but the power of the won
derful passages in Waiden is the power of poetry. The energy of the
is as intense as anything in nineteenth-century poetry. You
language
have to think of Keats or Hopkins for something comparable.
EF: Do you go back toWilliams?
WSM: Yes. But not as a cult figure, as some
people do.
I go back to him
with great affection and reverence. I really do love Williams, and I read
him over and over when Iwas about twenty; I still read him. I go back
to him, how shall I say it, as an engraver. It's the visual
quality of
individual moments inWilliams: not the of the long poem
magnificence
in Paterson, but passages in Paterson which I see as separate poems, or the

early collected poems, Spring and All and that period. Or some of the very
late poems.

58
 EF: Pictures from Brueghel?
WSM: Yes. He's come back to that vein with a wonderful
serenity by
that point. And such purity of language. The element of Williams
which some of his admirers like so much, the "experimental" element,
sometimes seems to be around. the matter with
just fooling Nothing
around, but I don't find myself to it But
fooling returning irresistibly.
I imagine Iwill continue to reread parts of Williams with fondness and

gratitude.
EF: Do you go back to the prose of Spring and All, or only the poems?
WSM: Less to the prose. I don't like his prose so much as the poems
that I'm fondest of. And I read the autobiography, but the prose there
is often
limp.
EF: In the American Grain?
WSM: In the American Grain is a wonder?I love that.
CN: Much ofthat is beautifully composed prose?sentence by sentence,
phrase by phrase.
WSM: Yes. Many of the Williamsites seem to
ignore the element of
in that great book, the most and
composition probably impressive impos
wrote.
ing single book that he
CN: I reread parts of it every year.
WSM: There's in it like the lyrics, but it's there
nothing really exquisite
on the shelf with the great American single volumes. It's on my shelf.
EF: When I think of Williams and his experimentation, I think of
course of the poetic line. Whitman and Williams and Olson and Gins
have written so much about the poetic line, and all have
berg?all
theories about its origins, which they all associate with breath. The
theories probably culminate in Olson's
"Projective Verse." Williams
talked of dividing the Whitman line into three parts, coming up with
the triadic line composed of three variable feet, and so on. What are your

thoughts about the origin of the line in your own work? Where does
your line emerge from?
WSM: I think the line is a matter of absolutely essential importance.
If the line is not that important, why is one verse in the first
writing
One of the meanings of verse after all is "a line." Yet one of the
place?
ironies of what
you just said about Whitman-Williams-Ginsberg is that,
a lot about the line, their tradition has been involved
though they talked
in the demise of the clarity of the line in a great deal of modern and
American verse. It's one of the danger in recent
contemporary signs
verse. There's a amount of talent around now, some
huge including

59
 really gifted young people coming
out of
colleges, but some of them
have a very shaky sense of what a line is. This is obviously bad for
individual poems, but it's also very bad for the possibility of their
as or for the of a
development poets development anything resembling
tradition?even for the continuation of an Olson or aWilliams tradi
tion. You can't go anywhere if you're not fairly clear about what a line
is. Yet I'm not even sure that Iwant to say what I think a line is,
though
I've thought about it. I'll describe how I've taught the topic, though that

may prevent me from it again.

doing
students in certain it was valuable to try to
With places I've thought
force them to figure out what a line wTas. A year and a half
they thought
I was at Oberlin, where the students were very gifted. I read a lot
ago
of manuscripts and said, "I'm not going to do the
workshop thing of
over your papers and little I don't think that's
going making suggestions.
really the
most
appropriate thing. What I'd like to do is go around the
room and make who wants to be involved in this try to
everybody figure
out what a line of verse is." After two hours, we hadn't got very far.

They realized that they'd never really thought about

it.We left it with

my saying, "I think this is what

you have to think about the next time

you a line somewhere. At the risk of losing a great deal of spontanei

stop
ty for awhile, you need to look to out what in hell you
closely, figure
think you're doing: why you stop it after three syllables, why you stop
it after two beats, or why you stop itwhere you do?what are you
doing?
Are you just writing prose and 'I like it better this or is
saying, way,'
there some reason for doing it?"
really
As far as
they could
get spontaneously in two hours, these young
a in their own contemporaries,
people who'd read lot?mostly but they
were themselves to poetry with some seriousness?was to
addressing
realize that a line was a unit of something. What it was a unit
of
was

something they couldn't agree on.

CN: Do line breaks seem to come to you
naturally
as you write, or is
that one of the things you have to work with to
change?
WSM: Both. And of course there are two things that a line is doing?it's
a of its own by means of stopping where it does; and
making rhythm
unless you're doing it wrong, unless it's working against you and you've
lost it, lost this line, it's making a of movement and making
continuity
a within a It's those two at the same
rhythm continuity. doing things
time. And this is something that you don't see happening very often in
these limp, unheard little bits of prose?lines one after the
just tacked

60
 other. Andtheir continuity is the continuity of prose. There's no real
reason it should stop at any particular
why place.
EF: Over the years you've used many different lines. Certainly your
lines derive in part from your study of various traditions?I suppose this
is one thing that takes you back
to Pound, his experimentation with
different lines. But does line have any association with breath for you?
WSM: No, think so. It can, but I don't
I don't think there's any necessary
connection. I think of stopping at a given point as a
rhythmical gesture,
and also as a gesture of meaning?because where you stop, if the rhythm
is is going to have an effecton the if
working, meaning, particularly
not But it's important to stop in such a way that
you're punctuating.
to do with It
the stop itself has something impetus. keeps the motion
of the poem going, both in terms of rhythm, sound, and in terms o?
meaning, denotative meaning.
CN: Your control of line breaks is clearly one of the real
strengths of
your work over a of time. It always seems minutely
long period perfect,
yet I have the uncanny that it simply comes to you
feeling instinctively.
WSM: I pay a lot of attention to it.
CN: You mentioned punctuation. I don't think you've ever talked about

your decision to use

not
punctuation for such a long period of time. It
has always seemed absolutely I can't imagine the poetry with
right.
but have you worked out the and the poetics of
punctuation, appeal
abandoning punctuation?
I don't know about its are various
WSM: appeal, but there things that
led to that decision. I had virtually at the end
stopped writing poetry
of the Fifties, because I felt that I had come to the end of something and
that if I wrote again I'd
want to do it
quite differently. James Wright
went much the same process, although we never conferred
through very
with each other to know that we had both reached that point at the same
time. Of course during the time when Iwasn't writing, Iwas
thinking
about it. There's a passage from Milosz's The Captive Mind about the
suddenness with which he had this moment of crisis whenhe was lying
on his face on the cobbles with machine bullets
gun going around him
and friends into trucks, and thinking, what do I want to
being herded
remember, what poetry has been most important
to me, what poetry do
I want now, I don't ever want
right now, this minute? And I thought,
to Iwant to write to take with
forget this about poetry again: something
me at a bad time. Because we're to have a bad time from now on.
going
One of the corollaries ofthat is that there's a lot you
really don't need

61
 in poetry. You have to pay attention to see what their
things and
function is. If there's really no function, what are
they doing there?
are you that includes
Why writing poetry things you really don't need
there? This process of trying to see what was unnecessary, of strengthen
and intensifying, of getting down to what was really
ing by compressing
essential, led me to write poetry that was farther and farther away from
conventional stanzaic and metrical structure.
Of course none of this was so deliberate. It was part of practice
quite
more than and discontent with what I was
theory, doing and wanting
to articulate the direction in which I was going. I recognized I was
away from stanzaic verse, but I also saw farther
moving myself moving
from prose. So I asked myself what the point was of staying with prose
Punctuation is there as a kind of manners in prose, ar
punctuation.
ticulating prose meaning, but it doesn't necessarily articulate the mean
of this kind of verse. I saw that if I could use the movement of the
ing
verse itself and the movement of the line?the actual weight of the
as it moved?to do the punctuation, Iwould both strengthen
language
the texture of the experience of the poem and also make clear its
distinction from other kinds of writing. One would be paying attention
to it in those terms. I also noticed else
something right away. Punctua
tion as I looked at it after that seemed to the poem to the page,
staple
but if I took those out the poem lifted itself right up off the page.
staples
A poem then had a sense of integrity and liberation that it did not have
before. In a sense that made it a late echo of an oral tradition. All this
gave the poetry new rules, a new way o? being, and I haven't really
to want to
changed enough give that up.
Someone was asking me the other day about what they called my
"broken back" line, the two-part line. I was it for a couple of
writing
years, and I would still like to feel it is available. Indeed I would like
to have it available in English. You know, meter is never
generally
something permanently absent. I think that line is related to the Middle
line o? Piers Plowman, which to me is the basic line of
English English,
overlaid?we talked about palimpsests?overlaid, as I said earlier,
by the
Italianate iambic pentameter. But the caesura in the iambic pentameter
is like a
ghost of the old Middle English line asserting itself all the time,
we hear in
saying I'm here all the time. I think it's there under what
iambic pentameter. And as the iambic pentameter becomes harder and
harder to hear or to stay awake through in contemporary poetry, I think
the other, the deeper, older line is something one, with the slightest
effort, might be able to hear again.

62
 The difference between that line and iambic pentameter, I think, is
a traditional one. Iambic pentameter, because of the long tradition,

developed a flexibility which theMiddle English line never did. The

flow-on of enjambment in iambic pentameter became incredi
qualities
themselves so
bly varied, but eventually they played out, that there's
a meter there at all. By the time you get to someone like Conrad
hardly
Aiken a kind of vers libre. But the
you're writing essentially enjamb
ment of the Middle English line never developed that way, didn't last
If you take up something that is like a continua
long enough probably.
tion of it, it seems a little stiff, but it can do things that iambic pentame
ter
probably can't. And I don't even think ofthat line with the heavy
caesura as a strict meter
in the way Pope would have thought of iambic

pentameter, but as a different

kind of pattern or
paradigm.
EF: The caesura obviously controls breath?when you read a line, the
line controls your breathing. Maybe this has to do with what you were
one as a
saying the other day?that problem with "projective verse"
is not that it assigns too much to breath, but not
theory importance
enough.
WSM: But the pauses in verse are not necessarily the pauses of breath,

breathing. If the pauses of verse are exactly the pauses of

anything else,
it becomes It has to have its own pauses.
boring.
I like some of Olson's poems very much, but I never cottoned onto
that "projective I remember
verse." As it, he talks about verse
projective
and its relation to breath, but it seems to me truistic: the relation of
to breath is absolute. And you can come at it from any angle you
poetry
want to. He talks about it in a rather limited way?that
outbreathing
and inbreathing in themselves are a kind of metric. I think it's far more
so I doubt that there's much to be in pursuing that
complicated, gained
particular argument.
CN: Different poetry teaches you to breath in different ways. As you
read a
it there's to it. But I've never seen
learning process; you adjust
any way of treating Olson's line as the equivalent of a single breath.
EF: Ginsberg is the one who has come closest to to
probably trying
that that's true, that he breathes a line and when his
suggest absolutely
breath is out he moves to the next line.
CN: But it takes a tremendous effort to
pull that off, and when he reads
in public it's by no means easy to establish that relationship in any literal

way.
WSM: Yes, and that also rules out something which is
inseparable from

63
 it and in a sense more interior or
inward?the whole role of hearing,

listening, both in writing and in reading or listening. The Ear?the fact

that the body is the ear. Breathing also is a way of hearing; they're
not

separate. But if it's just physical breathing, what role do the ear and

listening play?
EF: What's Olson's
physiological formula?the Head, by way of the
Ear, to the Syllable; the Heart, to the Line. Part
by way of the Breath,
of his idea, at any rate, is that the syllable is what the ear has to do with,
not the line. The line has to do with the breathing.
WSM: see that at all, because
I don't I think one of the
things that
with in verse, in poetry,
all units is tension. There's one
happens always
or not In
element playing against another one, whether it's metrical.
conventional verse the line ismade of variations on the iambic pentame
ter pattern, so you have the pattern and the variation playing against
each other, and the tension resulting?and that's one way of seeing the
in the line. And I think this is true in every kind
vigor and the energy
of metric, whether it's conventional and regular or whether it's what

you could call organic. There are to be two sorts of forces

always going
each other: an and either an answering, a
playing against expectation
or a variant on the The expectation sets up a sense
refusing, expectation.
of repetition. You either fulfill the repetition or you don't. That tension
runs
through the making of lines or the making of stanzaic paragraphs,
for the whole poem.
EF: That same pattern of and variation is also apparent in
expectation
as well. Has there been any
the overall rhythm of each of your books
one of your books that has affirmed itself to you as a book, as a
single
more than the others, or do they all have a similar sense
complete thing,
of completion?
WSM: all do, particularly since The Drunk in the Furnace.
They
EF: Including The Drunk in the Furnace?
WSM: The Drunk in the Furnace. The first three seem to be
Including
much more but they too each finish with the end of a phase.
gatherings,
Of course I don't feel that close to them now.
CN: Still, idea of putting
the them all together in a collected volume
seems I like them as separate objects, even the first four
inappropriate.
books. But I certainly don't want The Lice in the same volume as The

Compass Flower. They're separate books to me.

WSM: I don't either. What do you think about a Selected
really
Poems?

64
 CN: I can't think of any reason to do it.
WSM: Well, I've resisted it, because I would not like to undercut the

separate books.
CN: It may be that if you grow with the poetry and live through the
of time when the poet is actually writing you have a strong
period
of loyalty toward the individual books. Fifty years from now
feeling
most readers would as well have a Collected Merwin. With
probably just
Yeats, although I am conscious of the huge differences among the books,
to have the Poems.
I'm perfectly happy Collected People who collected
the separate volumes, however, often prefer to read them in that form.
WSM: Yes, but Yeats has been collected in the only way that it would
make any sense to me. If Iwere ever collected Iwould want it done that

way, where very much aware of the books as divisions. And

you're
have to do that with Lowell too, you know, although all of Cal's
you'd
fooling around with History and Notebooks presents problems. Nonethe
less, you'd want his books very distinct?you wouldn't want Lord Wea
ry s Castle and Life Studies combined into like a Collected
something
Browning.
a very separate are
EF: One thing that gives your books each identity
the titles. You tend not to title your books after the name of a poem that
is in the book, although you did with The Drunk in the Furnace.
WSM: "The Drunk in the Furnace" is really the kind of poem that is
about everything the book is about. Generally, though,
I don't do that.
I guess I made up my mind about it in a conversation with Bill
Arrowsmith a time ago. I'm not this for but
long proposing everybody,
for me a title should contribute something important. So that if you took
a title away, it would be missing The title should
poem's something.
not be a redundancy. Of course the relation between a poem and
just
its title is far more specific and intimate than the relation between a book
and its title, but the title of a book should still make a
significant
contribution.
EF: Because of the nature of your book titles, the reader is forced to carry
the title through each poem, and to allow the juxtaposition of the title
of the book and any particular poem to play itself out. The titles of your
books force the reader to come to grips with the book as an interrelated
whole. At what point do titles for your books come to you?
WSM: I think it's been different. Sometimes I've hung around for
awhile, listening for one to come,
waiting for it. I had a superstition,
in the days when I was writing that if I got my title too soon,
plays,

65
 if I got the title before I started to write, that I'd never get
especially
the play finished. In any case, there's no point in rushing it. I suppose
one reason I know the new collection isn't finished is that I don't have
a title for it yet.
The title for The Lice came early. It jumped
fairly
out ofthat passage
in Heraclitus while Iwas on the poems. The
Moving Target,
on
working
the other hand, came late. I know that I 've got several pages of false

attempts at that title. Iwas

also a time waiting for the title to Writings
to an to out what on earth is the
Unfinished Accompaniment, trying figure
title of this collection. With The Compass Flower, however, I had the title
before the book was finished.
CN: Do you save notes for titles and drafts of poems?
WSM: I keep all the drafts now. I still have some of the old I
things
wrote in but for awhile after that I
college, destroyed things. Then
Graves told me to save and since then I have.
everything
EF: Can you reconstruct the process you go through to come up with
a title like Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment? Do you
retrospective
think through the poems in some way?
I wasn't at all; I was
WSM: thinking sitting and waiting for the title.
I can remember the chair and the room inMexico. Of course Iwas doing
other things as well, but ten days went by before the title came. When
I got back to New York, Adrienne Rich said, "What are you to
going
call the new book," and I told her, and she said, "That's it, that's what
we all want to write'.'Those were
happier days.

NOTES

1This interview took place on October 11, 1981, at Cary Nelson's home in Champaign, Illinois.
Some of the discussions of individual poems build upon a symposium on Merwin's poetry
Slowik and held at Beloit on
arranged by Mary College April 3-4, 1981. Slowik, Folsom, Nelson,
and Merwin formed a panel to discuss Merwin's poetry
as part of Beloit's Festival of the Lively
Arts. Merwin gave a poetry reading at Beloit in
April, and readings at the University of Iowa
and the University of Illinois in October, 1981.

2 From The Lice. Copyright 1967 by W.S. Merwin and reprinted with the permission of
Atheneum Publishers

66
June 30, 2010

W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

By PATRICIA COHEN

W. S. Merwin acknowledges that his relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation
built atop a dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii, will be disturbed by the Library of Congress’s
announcement on Thursday naming him the country’s poet laureate.

“I do like a very quiet life,” Mr. Merwin said by telephone after learning of his appointment. “I
can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.” He said he does relish “being
part of something much more public and talking too much,” however, and the job of the nation’s
premier poet will enable him to do both.

Of course, no matter how many public appearances Mr. Merwin may ultimately make, for most
people he speaks most eloquently through his verse.

At 82, Mr. Merwin is an undisputed master, having written more than 30 books of poetry,
translation and prose over the course of six decades.

“W. S. Merwin is an inevitable choice for poet laureate,” said Dana Gioia, a poet and a former
chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “He has created a distinctive style. His poetry
is lyrical, elliptical and often slightly mysterious.”

Mr. Merwin, who retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth, has won just
about every major award an American poet can, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, for “The
Shadow of Sirius” in 2009 and for “The Carrier of Ladders” in 1971; and the National Book
Award in 2005 for “Migration: New and Selected Poems.”

William Stanley Merwin is one of a bumper crop of poets born in 1926 or 1927 that included A.
R. Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, James Wright and
John Ashbery. What distinguishes his work from the other poets of his generation who were
forging a new style in the wake of modernism, Mr. Gioia said, is how he “combined the intensity
of English-language modernism with the expansive lyricism of Spanish-language modernism.”

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Merwin grew up in Scranton, Pa., and Union City, N.J.
At the age of 5 he started writing out hymns for his father, who ran a tense, strict and sometimes
violent household.
Fathers figure in his 1983 poem “Yesterday” :

My friend says I was not a good son

you understand

I say yes I understand

he says I did not go

to see my parents very often you know

and I say yes I know

At 18 he sought out the advice of Ezra Pound, who told him to write 75 lines every day. Pound
also suggested taking up poetry translation to learn what could be done with language — advice
that Mr. Merwin followed.

He attended Princeton University on scholarship, studying with the critic R. P. Blackmur, who he
has called “a kind of mentor and parent,” and John Berryman, who he said was one of the
brightest people he ever met. He has said that he used his initials because doing so seemed
serious and adult, in the manner of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.

From his earliest scribblings, Mr. Merwin has had a conception of poetry that is strongly tied to
music. “It’s close to the oral tradition,” he said. “It’s close to song. You have to hear it before
you can understand it.” His first collection, “A Mask for Janus,” was selected for the Yale
Younger Poets Prize by Auden, whose style of long unspooling sentences had influenced the
novice’s own verse.

In the 1960s he began writing poems without any punctuation, and later, without capital letters,
except for the beginning. “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the
page,” he once explained. “I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”

Mr. Merwin came to wider attention for his hard-edged political allegories that condemned the
Vietnam War and environmental destruction, starting with his 1967 collection, “The Lice.”

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, heard advice from several writers and scholars
before choosing Mr. Merwin to succeed Kay Ryan as the nation’s poet laureate, its 17th. Mr.
Merwin plans to be in Washington on Oct. 25 to open the library’s annual literary series with a
reading. The position does not carry many formal duties, though laureates have traditionally
undertaken projects that reach out to potential audiences. The one-year term carries a $35,000
annual stipend.

Mr. Billington said he is confident that Mr. Merwin can broaden the audience for poetry through
technology, if not in person: “We even discussed the possibility of doing something using remote
technology from Hawaii.”
Mr. Merwin moved there in the mid-1970s to study Zen Buddhism, and now lives with his wife,
Paula. He said he has cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants on the
formerly denuded plantation, including the hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from
extinction.

Using his home as a backdrop would illustrate the connection between Mr. Merwin’s work and
“his extraordinary interest and devotion to the natural world,” Mr. Billington said, adding that no
definite plans have yet been made.

A high-tech solution to the geographical problem is somewhat unexpected for Mr. Merwin, who
said he has never composed a poem on any sort of mechanical or electronic device, preferring a
small spiral notebook or even a paper napkin. “It’s the nearest thing to not writing,” Mr. Merwin
said. “The more self-conscious it gets, the stiffer it gets.”

During his tenure, Mr. Merwin said, he wants to emphasize his “great sympathy with native
people and the languages and literature of native peoples,” and his “lifelong concern with the
environment.”

Although raised in the Western tradition, he said he feels more affinity with an Eastern one,
“being part of the universe and everything living.” With that exhilarating connection comes
responsibility, however. “You don’t just exploit it and use it and throw it away any more than
you would a member of your family,” he said. “You’re not separate from the frog in the pond or
the cockroach in the kitchen.”

That sentiment can be heard in his poem “For a Coming Extinction,” from “The Lice”:

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

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Finding home and inspiration in the world of nature.(W. S. Merwin's poetry book)
(The Arts/Cultural Desk)(BOOKS)

Garner, Dwight. "Finding home and inspiration in the world of nature." New
York Times 1 July 2010: C7(L).
Academic OneFile . Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

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Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2010 The New York Times Company

The rap against W. S. Merwin's poetry has been that it is obscure and abstract, as aloof as a balloon on the end
of a string. It's true that he's an elegant poet, easy to admire but hard to care deeply about.

After a string of masterly books in the late 1960s and early 70s -- books like ''The Lice'' (1967) and ''The Carrier
of Ladders'' (1970), filled with caustic antiwar poems and visions of the despoiled planet, and adroitly flecked
with classical allusion -- he took a step back from the modern world. His remote house in Hawaii -- he moved
to Maui in the mid-70s -- and his interest in Zen Buddhism have sometimes made him seem like a man apart
from society, a soul too pure too mix with the frantic heave of life as we know it. During the second half of his
long career he's been a ghost outside the machine.

Critics, it seems, wrote him off too early. Mr. Merwin, now 82, has been on a late-career sprint, not dissimilar
to the one Philip Roth has been running for the past decade and a half. In 2005 Mr. Merwin won a National
Book Award for his career-spanning collection ''Migration: New and Selected Poems.'' In 2009 he won a
Pulitzer Prize, his second, for ''The Shadow of Sirius,'' a pared-down volume filled with simmering, death-
haunted cognition. His poetic nostrils seem to be open and flared wide, in a way they haven't been for
decades. Mr. Merwin is back, and he is having a moment.

The most surprising thing about Mr. Merwin's selection as poet laureate of the United States is that he hasn't
held the position before. (In 1999-2000 he was a special consultant in poetry for the Library of
Congress's Bicentennial, along with Rita Dove and Louise Gluck, but that wasn't quite the same thing.) He is
an establishment poet who has collected most of the establishment's prizes. Some will call his selection now
safe, dull, uncontroversial, blah. And they'll have a point. It is not the kind of choice that makes one leap up
and blow hard into a vuvuzela.
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But Mr. Merwin's appointment is potentially inspired. He is an exacting nature poet, a fierce critic of the
ecological damage humans have wrought. Helen Vendler, writing last year in The New York Review of Books,
called him ''the prophet of a denuded planet.'' With the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becoming more dread
and apocalyptic by the hour, Mr. Merwin may be a poet we'll need. The pacifist in him may brood over the long
war in Afghanistan.

On the page Mr. Merwin's poems are as instantly recognizable as those of any poet alive. Shorn of
punctuation, they are usually short, and in recent years free of capital letters except at the start. In
his reverberating brand of free verse, lines hover in the air like pulses of distant starlight, or humming throws
from deep right field to home plate.

Here is ''For the Anniversary of My Death,'' from 1967. It's a poem that, like much of his best work, smuggles
in overlapping layers of grave meaning:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveller

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Mr. Merwin's career can be broken down, roughly but not unfairly, into three phases. His earliest poems
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were difficult and ornate; reading them required technical climbing skills, crampons and an ice axe. He was
''mad about writing the hard way,'' Louise Bogan wrote in The New Yorker, reviewing his first book, ''A Mask
for Janus'' (1952). That book was selected by W. H. Auden for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award.

The second phase began in the early 1960s when, under the influence of Robert Lowell, his diction and
syntax loosened and his poems became more political and personal, albeit threaded with classical history
and legend. He won his first Pulitzer Prize for ''The Carrier of Ladders'' (1970). He earned a rebuke from
Auden after asking that his prize money be given to antiwar causes. Auden accused him of grandstanding.

Mr. Merwin's third phase began when he moved to Hawaii and began studying Zen Buddhism. Tropical
foliage started to bloom in his poems, and punctuation began to vanish from them. Throughout his career
Mr. Merwin has also been a respected translator of writers like Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, and
of works like ''El Cid'' and the ''Chanson de Roland.''

Like his friend Ted Hughes, Mr. Merwin was any young woman's dream of what a poet should look like. In
the 1960s and 70s he resembled a young Albert Finney. He ''flutters female hearts,'' Time magazine observed
of him. ''Nobody has a right to be that good looking,'' Howard Moss, the longtime poetry editor of The New
Yorker, once said. Sylvia Plath was said to have been infatuated with him.

Mr. Merwin, quite late in life, brought it all home in ''The Shadow of Sirius,'' his most recent book. In one of
its poems, ''Worn Words,'' he seems aware of his own achievement:

The late poems are the ones

I turn to first now

following a hope that keeps

beckoning me

waiting somewhere in the lines

almost in plain sight

it is the late poems

that are made of words

that have come the whole way

they have been there

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Mr. Merwin has come the whole way, too, and now to Washington in spirit if not in actuality. The poet
laureate's job has mostly been ceremonial, benign, boring. But here's to the hope, anyway, that there's a bit
of strange fire left in this august poet's belly.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: W. S. Merwin in Hawaii, at his home on a former pineapple plantation on the northeast coast of
Maui. Zen Buddhism and the lushness of the islands have informed his later work. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM
SEWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); The famously handsome Mr. Merwin in his younger years.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY DIDO MERWIN)

Gale Document Number:A230221657

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Pure Poetry.(W. S. Merwin )(Critical essay)

Torrens, James S. "Pure Poetry." America 14 Dec. 2009: 24+.

Academic OneFile . Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

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Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2009 All rights reserved. americamagazine.org

W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, is one of the most lasting and continually productive of American poets. In addition
to his own multiple volumes, beginning in 1952 with A Mask for Janus, he has been a distinguished translator
of poetry in French, Spanish, Latin and Portuguese. Obviously he appreciates quality when he finds it. His
long elegiac poem, "Lament for the Makers," guides us through those he has admired and held as friends for half
a century. It is a roll call of the greats, from Dylan Thomas to James Merrill, even as it is also a sequence of
losses. He has found in these past masters "the true sound of brevity/that will go on after me." Reading
them convinced him that the "presence I had known/sometimes in words would not be gone." The voice of
good poetry is enduring.

In 2005, when Merwin issued his New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), not surprisingly he gave it
the title Migration. The cover art is a beautiful aerial photograph of Lowell, Ga., called "Snow Geese in
Migration." This sense of being in movement, and part of a directed passage through the world, this attention
to "the high wavering trails of migrant birds" ("Another River"), enters his poetry at many places. In a poem
called "Teachers," he admits that "I dream of the first words/of books of voyages/sure tellings." These have
been his real teachers.

In Merwin's poetry there is an even more persistent theme, not unrelated to the migration of the living. He
is preoccupied with the darkness that surrounds and engulfs us in the universe, and also with our fugitive
but astonishing experiences of light--"the blaze in widened eyes," he calls it in "The Chinese Mountain Fox."
You cannot compel the light, he believes. This is what interests him in what are known as "the Marfa
Lights," elusive flashes often reported in the Glass Mountains of West Texas. All sorts of people claim to see
them, but you can never be sure.

In "The Hours of Darkness," a blind old man says to the poet: "How often you return/to the subject of not
seeing/ to the state of blindness." Yet the poem ends declaring "we see the youth of the light/in all its ages/we
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see it as bright/points of animals/made long ago out of night." Stars, that take so long to reach us with
their radiance, are for Merwin "the youth of heaven the ages of light" ("At Night before Spring"). Yet he named
his latest collection (2009) The Shadow of Sirius, suggesting that the Dog Star, brightest in the sky, does not
truly dispel night.

W. S. Merwin was brought up in an aura of belief; his father "was a country preacher/in a one-
store town" ("Inheritance"). But he has also been affected by the skepticism of the modern mind. These
two powers contend in his poems. We see this vacillation at work in a poem entitled "To Purity," from
Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

Merwin begins "To Purity" with the line "I have heard so much about you." What can he mean? In recent
decades pure food and drugs, that is to say, pure products undiluted and undoctored, have become a big
public concern, as has purity of water. We want what we ingest to be free of impurities. But also, anyone with
a sense of ritual and religion has learned much about lustrations and ceremonies of purification. Under the
term katharos in Kittel's New Testament Dictionary, we read this: "By associating what is holy and what is
clean religion fashions a starting-point for the ultimate moral spiritualizing of the concept of purity." Merwin,
writing in his 70s, also would remember an era when chaperones and courtship were in order, and modesty
and purity were ideals for the relation between the sexes. So, however taken, we need to let this term
"purity" connote a strong longing for an ideal, reachable or not.

Next comes a baffling statement: "if you claim to be you/I will know it is not true." Isn't this self-contradictory?
No, it is not in the character of purity to advertise or tout itself, to trumpet its own identity. Ego is not
consonant with purity.

The poet, incidentally, is addressing purity as a "you." Is this merely as expected in a personification, a
literary license in other words, or does it imply something more personal? English literature, we know, has a
string of wonderful "To" poems, as in "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns. This approach enlivens an ordinary
musing and surely attracted Merwin, for the title of every poem in Present Company begins with
"to"--"To Impatience," "To Smoke," "To the Dog Stars." But does not the "to" in "To Purity" also express a
genuine tribute?

The speaker says that if, by contrast with any self-announcing, purity keeps quiet, he will listen. He will have
his antennae out, with the "old mixed feelings." This avatar of purity could be the real thing, although
appearance once more could be deceiving. Doubt is at work in his mind along with persistent belief and yearning.

Merwin, who has always been entranced by light, especially "the white light from/ the beginning"--from the
Big Bang or the pronouncement "Let there be light"--sees it reverberate in the bright spectrum of garden
colors. But "garden colors" can also suggest the original garden, Eden, the earthly paradise, where we first
watch the spectrum of emotions and passions complicating the white ideal. As to "a face, an eye," lighting up,
they certainly suggest and make us hope for an interior pure source.

Reading "To Purity," we notice its seamlessness, the omission of capital letters and of all punctuation marks.

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The syntax, the grammatical construction, is exact, but the reader has to spot where periods and commas
would normally be for pauses, and where, by contrast, one must read on past the end of a line without pausing
(so as to complete the phrasing). Merwin makes do with a basic, simple vocabulary--generic terms that would
not send anyone to the dictionary. His aim always is thoughtful probing rather than vividness, philosophic
musing (although he scorns philosophy!) and geographic or biographic reference. His poems often refer to
valley, river and ridge, but with no detail that indicates Hawaii, where he has lived for 30 years.

The Shadow of Sirius--winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize--is a book of retrospection. He revisits his early
life, touching on so much that he cherishes--his parents, to begin with (see the touching elegy "Secrets");
incidents of youth; his dogs; his wife, Paula. But how fugitive is this memorable world!

Laboring to sew on a button, the poet says of his mother, "I open an old picture of you/who always did such
things by magic." The poem has to conclude, however: "but the picture has/faded suddenly/spots have marred
it/maybe it is past repair/I have only what I remember" ("A Likeness"). Alas, we are not mindful of the
marvelous when it happens, for we are too busy somehow; and then it gets away.

In a poem recreating the house and fields where he once lived, Merwin writes: "here surfacing through the
long/backlight of my recollection/is this other world veiled/in its illusion of being known/at the moment of
daybreak/when the dreams are all at once gone" ("The First Days"). Merwin ends the poem "in a dream of
clear depths," with what seems a wistful smile: "I glimpse/far out of reach the lucent days/from which I am
now made."

The aging master, all too aware of the shadow obscuring our sight of things and aware of the
encroaching darkness as well, can still ponder what is on the other side of night and still be lucent,
thank goodness, about the great benefit of living.

ON THE WEB

This month's Catholic Book Club selection. americamagazine.org/cbc

JAMES S. TORRENS, S.J., is the poetry editor of America.

Gale Document Number:A214937568

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Writing outside the self: the disembodied narrators of W.S. Merwin.(Rhetoric

and Poetics)

Frazier, Jane. "Writing outside the self: the disembodied narrators of W.S. Merwin." Style
Summer 1996: 341+. Academic OneFile . Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

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Abstract:

M.S. Merwin's disembodied narrator seems to project a dark outlook on the world. However, this may also be
read as an attempt towards a detachment from the materiality of the world or as a separation from the ego
to attain a spirituality which cannot otherwise be reached. Such impersonality also brings out the visionary
and prayer-like nature of his poems and emphasizes the on-going quest for the completion of a partial
knowledge presented in the poems.

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 1996 Northern Illinois University

The search for an original, natural world - or origin - is perhaps the single most distinct topic to be found in
the poetry of W. S. Merwin since the The Carrier of Ladders (1970). To achieve the participation in nature that
they desire, Merwin's narrators betray little or no personal identity and often seem as if they are voices
speaking free of the body. These "disembodied" narrators lack a particular self so that they may make their
quests without the burdens of the ego. In the vast majority of Merwin's poems, their actions remain part of
a journey or process, far from restoration of origin. But this is not to say that their efforts are
futile. Disembodiment aids them in avoiding realities that are restrictive; that is, it helps them to make
steps toward origin and it translates the experience more readily to the reader. All of this corresponds
to psychoanalytic discussion of symbolic death and rebirth in the landscape; however, "death" and "rebirth"
need not always signify regression toward a primal parent but, rather, may indicate exploratory steps
toward plenitude.

Charles Molesworth notes Merwin's prevalent use of a disembodied narrative agent and believes that
the disembodiment typically appears figuratively or as a desire toward such a state because the speaker sees
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the world as "irremediably fallen, so that to be entangled in materiality is synonymous with evil" (152).
Molesworth also sees this technique as a method of gaining knowledge metaphysically, a knowledge not
available to those in the body. Though I disagree with Molesworth's estimation that a "kind of rarified
second-degree allegory" unsuccessfully runs through Merwin's work, he nevertheless brings up a valuable
point when he notes Merwin's attempts to remove himself from a physical circumstance that is imperfect (148).

One short poem from The Carrier of Ladders, "Lark," presents a speaker who wants to get out of the body,
who wants to relieve himself of his humanity in his desire for a more integrated being and understanding.
Merwin begins the poem by addressing the lark, but by the second stanza the subject of the wished-
for transformation has become the narrator:

In the hour that has no friends above it you become yourself voice black star burning in cold heaven speaking
well of it as it falls from you upward

Fire by day with no country where and at what height can it begin I the shadow singing I the light (38)

The speaker disembodies himself by taking himself out of charted time and into "the hour that has no friends"
and by taking himself out of the world and into the "cold heaven," which is no traditional heaven but
merely another uncharted realm "with no country." Merwin's scheme is to remove the body from spatial
and temporal restrictions in order to liberate the spirit. Though many critics see Merwin's disembodied voice as
yet another manifestation of his occasional gloom, here and in many other poems the loss of self works toward
a spiritual fulfillment. But the desired spirituality also reflects Merwin's usual paradoxical mode: it must be
both "shadow" and "light." When the speaker ends this future journey out of the self and into a more direct
contact with the universe, we are not quite sure where he is. Our best prediction may be to say that he will be
in no place and in no time. The loss of the body, the plunge to the essential self, is part of a process, a
continually ongoing effort that seldom finds its end.

Through disembodiment, Merwin tears away from his narrators nearly everything that would allow us to
identify them. Lacking outward identity, the narrators are subsequently liberated to express their desire to join
the self with the universal. Yet, as in "Lark," the universal that Merwin seeks to attain is experienced through only
a few elements at any one moment, as opposed to the universe for which Whitman reaches, one that contains
as much as the poet can enumerate. Merwin attempts his encounters with spareness and concentration; in
this, similarities may be drawn to Thoreau and, oddly, to Dickinson. His process, as of those writers of
the nineteenth century, is metaphysical, although his teleology is not.

Part of Merwin's mission here, as Neal Bowers notes, is to imitate myth and avoid the conventions of "the
breath, the pulse, or the movements of the mind" that characterize the poetry of most of his contemporaries.
To reach outward situates the self in the universe, and not vice versa. On the question of structure,
Bowers categorizes Merwin as a free-form formalist, observing that in one poem the poet makes ample use
of alliteration, assonance, repetition, and self-contained syntactic units (249). Merwin's use of traditional
poetic devices places his work within the long historical chain of lyrical poetry, while his imagery and subjects
drive its character toward fable.
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In this mythical and lyrical mode, "Apples" describes only a few images in a surreal manner in the
speaker's encounter with the world. We know nothing of the speaker of the poem, whose literal and
metaphorical awakening occurs in a place once inhabited by others and redolent of their ignorance of the
meaning of original song:

Waking beside a pile of unsorted keys in an empty room the sun is high

what a long jagged string of broken bird song they must have made as they gathered there by the ears deaf
with sleep and the hands empty as waves (The Compass Flower 10)

Remembering the "birds," the speaker strives to discover the means to bring back their song. The birds are keys
to a natural world he has lost and whose meaning remains hidden: "I remember the birds now / but where are
the locks // when I touch the pile / my hand sounds like a wave on a shingle beach" (10). He realizes that
the sounds he makes are merely echoes, like "someone stirring / in the ruins of a glass mountain /
after decades" (10). Or, to phrase it another way, he recognizes his division from the original natural world,
the mysterious liminal remembrance of origin.

Understanding comes at the end of the poem, when all of the keys to living "melt" under the narrator's
touch except one, "to the door of a cold morning / the color of apples" (10). The speaker's link to nature, to
an early, mythical world, is slight, but it is present. The "cold morning" contains a "door," a symbol of
opportunity recurring frequently in Merwin's poems. "Apples" has a well-known classical basis in the tale of
the golden apples of the Hesperides as well as a common identification with the fruit of the Eden story. The
poem's mythic reverberations allow Merwin to enter into a brief narration without concentrating on a local
self. While the narrator moves through the poem's landscape, the implications of his observations point toward
a larger world.

It is also a disembodied narrator in "Midnight in Early Spring" who must recognize the remnants of origin
among the barrenness of the present. We know nothing more of the narrator than we know of the "us" as
he discerns that the happenings around him are omens:

At one moment a few old leaves come in frightened and lie down together and stop moving the nights now go
in threes as in a time of danger the flies sleep like sentries on the darkened panes

some alien blessing is on its way to us some prayer ignored for centuries is about to be granted to the prayerless
in this place (The Carrier of Ladders 75)

That revelation from nature may arrive in awe- or fear-inspiring circumstances has long been a tradition
in romantic literature, as evidenced by the famous boat scene in Wordsworth's Prelude and the
harrowing experiences of Coleridge's mariner. Eliot's The Waste Land brings this motif to the modern day
through the grim landscape of the first section, which later serves as the scene of a soft-spoken prophecy.

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In the second half of the poem, the speaker addresses the revelation as if it were a human:

who were you cold voice born in captivity rising last martyr of a hope last word of a language last son other half
of grief who were you (75)

His repeated question, "who were you," is one we could equally ask of the speaker in the present tense: "who
are you?" But the speaker does not exist in the poem to identify himself; rather, he is there to serve as
listener, and as a good listener he knows that original unity must be heard if any liberation in the future is to
take place: "so that we may know why / when the streams / wake tomorrow and we are free" (75).
Although Merwin describes such restoration positively, since in most of his poetry he is unconvinced of
its happening, we should not infer that he is certain here. Restoration of origin can no more be predicted than
can the ecological future of the planet. Here, the voice of the ancient complements the apocalyptic position
often taken by Merwin. In short, we may say that Merwin's poetry is filled with earthly beginnings and endings
that have at their root the same purpose: in writing about potential tragic endings, the poet hopes to help
prevent them; in seeking beginnings, he hopes to bring their value to the calamitous present day.

Merwin's desire for what is very close to a mystical union with the living world is regarded by Laurence
Lieberman, as well as by Molesworth, as a key indicator of the poet's philosophical end. To Lieberman,
Merwin's impersonal narrators are evidence of his longing to become "a tool, an instrument, a pure vehicle for
the 'one truth,' the vision that suddenly fills the fertile, incubating emptiness" in which the spirit is free from
human needs. This freedom is the condition of self-purification and independence that allows for the reception
of images from the subconscious mind or from the racial preconscious. Furthermore, Lieberman states, it has
its role for Merwin the translator since it establishes a "psychic medium for the poetry of foreign tongues" (603).

The concept of self-emptying in order to attain religious enlightenment and even identification with the "one
truth" or deity is common among religions of the East. Contrasting the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam to those of the East, Joseph Campbell remarks that in the latter a principle of identification with the
divinity through self-loss is often professed. Loss of self leads not to negation but, on the contrary,
to transcendence:

Gods and Buddhas, in the Orient are, accordingly, not final terms - like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West
- but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And
in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of
his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in
experience (not simply as an article of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows. (197-98)

The individual's "shift of his plane of vision" out of the present and the identification of the self (which
is paradoxically suspended) with an original world (which must serve in place of the absent deity) is what
Merwin attempts. The end of the effort has necessarily been secularized and "naturalized" for this postmodern
poet of the earth, but the concept remains analogous.

The impersonal, lone narrators that Merwin employs are the best vehicles for the delivery of these often
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prophetic and prayer-like poems. Separate from the everyday world and all of its strictures, Merwin's speakers
are something like wandering prophets, able to hear the voice in the desert since they apparently have no
strong ties to the world. Sometimes, however, although these speakers have made themselves available to
such intuition or intimations, they also have a tinge of fatalism about them. Merwin's listeners may
seem astonished at finding themselves in their position as readers of the universe. When, in one poem,
the narrator says, "This must be what I wanted to be doing, / Walking at night between the two
deserts, / Singing," the lines ring with surprise rather than certainty (The Moving Target 50).

Usually, the narrators appear more willing, and often they are active seekers of knowledge. What stops this
poetry short of being truly prophetic is that the narrators generally come away with only intimations rather
than large answers. The poems close with the sense of the speakers having acquired a small parcel of
knowledge in a world filled with questions. But the narrators also seem as if they will continue their
wandering, carrying their small packages.

This standard partial illumination, coupled with the disembodied speaker, is apparent in "To the
Rain" (from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment), where understanding is sought during a shower of rain.
As in "Apples," the physical circumstance is described in a fashion as elliptical as the speaker's character. Of
the rain, we know only that it is ancient, colorless, and nameless:

You reach me out of the age of the air clear falling toward me each one new if any of you has a name it
is unknown

but waited for you here that long for you to fall through it knowing nothing (95)

The narrator does not identify himself as the one who has "waited" for the rain, nor does he make it clear that
he is the one who has known "nothing." This ambiguity, achieved through the dissociation of subject and
modifier, intensifies the sketchiness of the speaker. By not providing the proper connections between himself
and his actions in this passage, he appears almost as ephemeral as the rain, and he seems ready to make
an ontological move.

Addressing the rain as "hem of the garment" - a reference to the biblical stories of people who touched the hem
of Jesus's garment in order to be healed - and repeating his wish to love what he cannot know, the speaker
picks up the personal pronoun again: "hem of the garment / do not wait / until I can love all that I am to
know / for maybe that will never be" (95). Willing to forgo logical and emotional preludes, he admits his
self-distrust, and self-loss must take over in order for him to proceed. His admission that he is in a lost state
may, through its release of the ego, lead to understanding:

touch me this time let me love what I cannot know as the man born blind may love color until all that he loves
fills him with color (95)

The request for "touch" mixes the language of the body into the poem, but only enough to prevent it from
slipping into abstraction. Phenomenological progress, not earthly absorption, is the immediate goal of the
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work. Atonement with the body may come later, after the self has been allowed its atonement with the
larger universe.

Questing speakers are common to twentieth-century poetry, yet the particular impersonality of Merwin's
figures sets them apart from others. Jarold Ramsey observes that modern parallels to Merwin's searching might
be found in Lowell and Roethke, but that their journeys are influenced by psychological factors, whereas
Merwin's are largely free of the personal. Other than the poems about his family, which appeared in the fifties
and early sixties, Merwin's work largely avoids personal detail, but manages to acquire a directness
nevertheless (36-37). To these poems we should add a few more (some of which have appeared since
Ramsey's essay): the family poems in Opening the Hand such as "Sun and Rain" and "Strawberries" and those
in The Rain in the Trees such as "The Salt Pond." Though the dominant mode of the middle of our century,
the confessionalism of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton stands in contrast to Merwin's existentialism. While Merwin
may have his moments of "confession," it would be difficult to imagine his poetry without the reach outward.

Instead of characterization, disembodiment is put into play for the directness of experience it allows. And,
as Ramsey states, this impersonality leads to a message with more widespread availability: "Thus the task of
self-orientation is made that much more difficult, one would think, but its successful completion in poetry
that much more capable of universality of meaning by not being composed of personalized details" (36-37).

The abandonment of the personal, the self-emptying of Eastern religions also shares strong affinities with some
of the beliefs of the Native Americans Merwin has studied and translated. In the traditional Native American
vision quest, an individual cuts himself loose from the bonds of the tribe and its support in order to experience
the spiritual. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux from among the last generation to be raised
in the traditional manner and an author of numerous books on the Sioux, relates that in the first hambeday,
or religious retreat of the youth, the individual seeks out the highest summit in a region but takes with him
no material objects other than those of symbolic value (154). Similarly, in everyday life, "all matters of personal
or selfish concern" are considered to be of the "lower" or "material" mind (155).

Sam Fathers, the aged half-black, half-Chickasaw mentor of young Ike McCaslin in Faulkner's "The Bear," from
Go Down, Moses, instructs Ike that if he is ever to encounter a legendary bear of the north Mississippi woods
he must leave behind the accoutrements of civilization. Although literally a hunt, the search for the bear - for
this particular bear, which is itself mythical - takes on the value of a spiritual journey in the same sense as
the hambeday. At first, Ike leaves behind only his object of physical threat to the bear, a gun, but as he
progresses on his journey through the woods he realizes that even his watch, compass, and walking stick
may stand in the way of engagement: "Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the
compass. He was still tainted. He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from
his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it" (208).

Just as Faulkner's boy-protagonist must free himself of human devices, so must Merwin's narrators free
themselves of the attributes of the personal. In the story, the release to the wilderness brings about the
presence of the bear, with its overtones of the visionary, however Faulkner struggles against it: "Then he saw
the bear. It did not emerge, appear; it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's

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hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimen-sionless against
the dappled obscurity, looking at him" (209).

This extremely rare visionary moment in Faulkner is also rare in Merwin, yet it does periodically happen.
Merwin's "Little Horse" actually presents a speaker in the presence of an archetypal figure from origin, much
like Faulkner's bear. The opening stanzas of "Little Horse" indicate the speaker's longing for origin, his long-
felt sense that something unidentifiable has been missing and a sort of personal "lostness":

You come from some other forest do you little horse think how long I have known these deep dead leaves
without meeting you

I belong to no one I would have wished for you if I had known how what a long time the place was empty
(The Carrier of Ladders 54)

His willingness to meet the horse on its own terms and, as in "Finding a Teacher," to refrain from
demanding answers is the openmindedness that those on a quest must demonstrate:

what can I show you I will not ask you if you will stay or if you will come again I will not try to hold you I hope
you will come with me to where I stand often sleeping and waking by the patient water that has no father
nor mother (54)

Merwin's vision may even go so far as to psychically incorporate the individual with the natural as in "The
Biology of Art": "after a long time you look down / into a valley without a name / after a long time as water
you look up" (The Rain in the Trees 75).

The processes involving the exchange of nutrients, water, and vapors among the living beings of the planet
and the exchange of elements among the nonliving are real, biochemical transfers constantly being enacted.
Plants take up water, but they also release it through transpiration. Plants absorb the soil's nutrients, but these
are returned in the decay of organic matter. Carbon dioxide enters the plant; oxygen exits it. This is but one
very simplified sketch of biological exchange, which is to say nothing of the transfers going on, for example,
within and among soils, the air, or rivers, or of the subatomic transfers of all matter. Interaction is vital to
the existence of the earth, and not unlike the self-loss of Buddhism or the journey out of the material in the
Native American vision quest, Merwin's mythologized disembodiment has as one model the concrete and
ongoing movement of molecules. Parts of the planet do not exist in isolation from one another,
and phenomenological growth also demands fluidity.

The persons whom Merwin chooses to narrate the poems of origin are not as detailed as the specific
individuals one might find in a long narrative poem, nor are they the particular egos of the confessional
school whose psychological idiosyncrasies we cannot escape. They appear in circumstances that evoke myth,
and their search for origin takes on its own mythic significance. Without the self, without the body, they are free
to move through the natural world and to seek out its beginnings, whose remnants are all they are usually able
to discover in a fallen modern world.
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Works Cited

Bowers, Neal. "W. S. Merwin and Postmodern American Poetry." The Sewanee Review 98 (1990): 246-59.

Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. 1951. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

Eastman, Charles Alexander (Ohiyesa). The Soul of the Indian. Masterpieces of American Indian Literature.
Ed. Willis Regier. New York: MJF Books, 1993. 143-91.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. New York: Random, 1942.

Lieberman, Laurence. "New Poetry: The Church of Ash." Rev. of Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, by
W. S. Merwin. The Yale Review 62 (1973): 602-13.

Merwin, W. S. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

-----. The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

-----. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

-----. The Rain in the Trees. New York: Knopf, 1988.

-----. Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Molesworth, Charles. "W. S. Merwin: Style, Vision, Influence." W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Ed. Cary
Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 145-58.

Ramsey, Jarold. "The Continuities of W. S. Merwin: 'What Has Escaped Us, We Bring with Us.'" W. S.
Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 19-44.

Jane Frazier received her Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi and teaches English at East Georgia College
in Dublin, Georgia. She has published one article on Merwin in South Dakota Review and has another
forthcoming in Weber Studies. She will also have an essay in the textbook American Indian Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues (Peter Lang, forthcoming).

Gale Document Number:A19175946

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Title:
W.S. Merwin and postmodern American poetry. By: Bowers, Neal, Sewanee Review,
00373052, Spring90, Vol. 98, Issue 2
Database:
Academic Search Premier

HTML Full Text

W.S. MERWIN AND POSTMODERN AMERICAN
POETRY

When W. S. Merwin's first book appeared in 1952, literary taxonomists had no trouble
classifying it. W. H. Auden, who selected the volume as that year's Yale poetry prize-winner and
wrote a preface for it, led the way, commenting on Merwin's respect for the "traditions of poetic
craftsmanship" and identifying the young poet as an inheritor of the universal mythic tradition. In
fact Auden went so far as to distinguish Merwin's work from the "I"-dominated "occasional"
poetry of the age, thereby lending his authority to the classification process; so things seemed
neatly settled. A new poet had arrived on the scene and been quickly conscripted into the ranks
of the formalists.

W. S. Merwin had his own agenda, as it turned out, however; and his strict formalism soon
evolved into something else, something resembling the confessional poetry of the 1960s--but
different. Some critics have dismissed the change as a pragmatic defection; others have seen it as
postmodern entropy; and a few have even argued that the "fastidiousness" characteristic of
Merwin's earliest work suffuses his later poetry, that the change has been only rhetorically
cosmetic.

What these reactions reveal about critics and their urge to box and label poets is more significant
than anything they tell us about Merwin's work. Literary critics, it seems, have difficulty
handling a poet who resists classification. If he moves from class to class and doesn't exactly fit
any particular category even when he appears to be holding still, then the fault must be his.
Somehow the proposition that the system of classification may be flawed never arises.

If Merwin defies classification, it is because we have failed to view him from the right distance,
through a lens only recently available to us in this waning century. Rooted in the best of the
modernist tradition, his poetry embodies many aspects of postmodernism but is most notable for
those features it eschews: the clinical self-obsessions of confessionalism and the ramblings of the
solipsistic voice, in particular. Small wonder he's been so hard to locate, with critics expecting to
find him in the psychiatric ward or sitting like a version of the RCA dog, head cocked into the
sound of his own sweet maundering.

Taken collectively, from A Mask for Janus to The Rain in the Trees, W. S. Merwin's poetry
brackets the postmodern period and, most significantly, extends beyond it. Yes, difficult though
it may be to contemplate, postmodernism has run its course, just when the term had finally
seeped into our psyches alongside Post Toasties and postnasal drip. No need to grieve, however,
because the movement has buried itself, as anything existing after its existence must. All that
inward tunneling was bound to lead to a bad end, the frail beams tremoring and the poor light
finally suffocating. Meanwhile, happily for us, Merwin and a handful of poets were laboring
above ground, in the sunlight, building a bridge over the sunken field.

Merwin's distinctiveness is more apparent than ever, now that he is being joined in the bright air
by a great many others. Desperate to find a way beyond the limitations of self and the
enchantments of their own voices, a new generation of poets is engaged in an old confrontation.
Having discovered that traditional form may provide a necessary distance-at least a slight
movement off the dead-center of the ego--poets born into postmodernism are today experiencing
the classic approach-avoidance: syndrome as they search for a way to move beyond an exhausted
age.

You've probably heard them talking--the poets--in corridors and bars, around departmental
coffee pots, or in the elevator between corporate floors. "The New Formalism," they chatter, and
the tired debate goes on, has gone on now for more than a decade. To villanelle or not to
villanelle is one of the burning issues of our day. In one camp the New Formalists, their proud
label flashing like the banner of a religious cult, drone on and on, often in couplets, about the
laxity of free form, its sad excesses. And from the other bunker the free-form poets (who
suddenly find themselves in dire need of a snappy name) lob back grenades marked fascist and
reactionary. They want to keep things strictly "democratic," free from formal elitism.

Although it sounds with new and ardent voices, this debate is as old as the century, and it makes
about as much sense as W. C. Williams made when he grumbled that The Waste Land had set
modern poetry back at least a generation, presumably because of Eliot's devotion to tradition.
What both sides have always implied is the volitional nature of form, as if a poet could wear one
style or the other, off the rack. Also implicit in the manifestoes issued by both groups is the
understanding that form, specifically the pursuit of form, is the central aesthetic issue of our
time.

W. S. Merwin's poetry--stylistically, aesthetically, philosophically--in every way is engaged in

the struggle for form. That Merwin has shown the wonderful capacity to cause both forrealists
and free formalists to claim and reject him suggests that he has found his own direction. Unlike
many of his younger contemporaries who are sitting somewhere at this moment trying to gather
the will to write or resist writing a sonnet, Merwin has always known that his efforts to
understand what it means to be human and alive in a living world are integrally bound up with a
search for form. As the religious pilgrims say in "Rime of the Palmers," "Our motion is our
form/And our passage raiment."

In 1952 A Mask for Janus delivered Merwin straight into unsettled times, after Charles Olson's
essay "Projective Verse" and a few years before Ginsberg's radical Howl. What would come to
be known derisively as Academic Verse was still the major force in poetry, characterized
primarily by its verbal exactness and its attachment to an assortment of literary traditions. Dylan
Thomas, who killed himself with drink the next year, was the most celebrated poet of the day,
praised for his opulent romantic style and an almost obsessive mastery of form. Privately,
though, John Berryman had already adapted the sonnet to his confessional purposes; and
Theodore Roethke had veered significantly away from formalism in his "Lost Son" sequence. No
young poet could miss the rumblings of change, both within and outside the poetic
establishment. The moment, for Merwin, was pivotal, as it was for his contemporaries: Adrienne
Rich, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, and numerous others. The alarum being
sounded was eerily like the one we hear today, although the camps blowing the trumpet have
been reversed. Why, then, didn't Merwin answer the call and east his lot with the ascendant
powers?

The most common (and facile) explanation given for the early formalism of Merwin, Rich, Plath,
and others is that they needed to master traditional forms before going on to write their truly
important work. This notion, which grades both formal and free-form poetry, is one of the
abiding misconceptions of our age--that an artist must attain mastery of whatever is traditional
before he is free to be original. The maxim is applied equally to jazz, abstract expressionism,
free-form poetry, and even architecture. While a knowledge of tradition is essential to any artist,
mastery of its arcane ways is not. Surely no poet with an authentic urge to say what must be said
ever confused the shaped vision of an earlier period with the shaping forces of his own life and
time.

From the beginning of his career Merwin has adhered closely to the dictum that form must be an
extension of content. If that seems an odd assertion, particularly when applied to Merwin's early
work, it's only because Creeley and the free-form poets of the 50s and 60s are so closely
identified with the concept. Undoubtedly, though, it must apply to traditional as well as to open
or free form. Otherwise poems written in traditional verse patterns can never be anything more
than linguistic practice pieces. From the lush prosody of A Mask for Janus and The Dancing
Bears to the spare language of The Moving Target, The Lice, and The Carrier of Ladders,
Merwin has always integrated form and content, regardless of any current trends or fashions in
poetry at large.

As with Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Hart Crane, Merwin's search for a form
expressive of its content is bound up in the dilemma of how to reconcile a lyric gift with a
narrative impulse. How can one sing the story of the human race? That's the question he and his
predecessors have tried to resolve; and although their efforts have produced widely divergent
styles, they share a remarkable unity of purpose. From Whitman's multitudinous self to Eliot's
singular multitudes, from Williams's and Crane's particular locales to Pound's universal
community, all have attempted to find a coherent structure within which the altered concept of
self and humankind may be accommodated. Collectively theirs is the adumbration of the modern
myth of identity--the fractured, fragmented, often dissonant song of the modern branch of the
race.

This is the tradition Merwin inherited--not one part of it, as the Beats and confessionalists did--
but all of it: Leaves of Grass, The Waste Land, Cantos, Paterson, The Bridge, the whole modern
mythic impulse. Chosen by the shaping power of myth, he followed a course that was parallel to
but separate from the hectic highway of his contemporaries. Choosing synergy over schism, he
was able to avoid the divisiveness of the 1950s and 60s, was left free to follow his own true
impulses.
In pursuing myth, Merwin removed himself from the narrower, more personal concerns of most
of his fellow poets; and while they were trying to make poems that corresponded to the breath,
the pulse, or the movements of the mind, Merwin was busy enlarging the temple. What he
discovered was that myth, by its very nature, is narrative, and yet it offers the opportunity for
lyricism. Opening outward, it also shines a light inward, revealing the self in the cosmos rather
than the cosmos in the self. This is the profound difference in Merwin's poetry, the element that
sets him apart from a majority of the poets of the past forty years. The mythic perspective has
enabled him to transcend the strictest limitations of postmodernism.

Consider, as one illustration of this transcendence, a short poem entitled "Ascent," from
Merwin's Pulitzer prize-winning volume, The Carrier of Ladders (1970):

I have climbed a long way

there are my shoes
minute larvae
the dark parents
I know they will wait there looking up
until someone leads them away

by the time they have got to the place

that will do for their age
and are in there with nothing to say
the shades drawn
nothing but wear
between them

I may have reached the first

of the bare meadows
recognized in the air
the eyes by their blankness
turned
knowing myself seen by the lost
silent
barefoot choir

While this poem has certain confessional elements--first-person point of view, the seemingly
private content of shoes and parents, and a melancholy tone--it also insists on a larger frame of
reference. What at first seems to be an introverted reflection is, in fact, an outward projection.
The speaker has risen beyond the quotidian life of shoes and parents and is moving toward "the
first/of the bare meadows" and the "lost/silent/barefoot choir." In the simple image of shoes,
Merwin concentrates a feeling of mortality and the inherent sadness of human life. Who but the
shoeless dead ascend into the nothing represented by the blank-eyed, unsinging choir? And who
but Merwin could elevate such potentially maudlin imagery beyond the merely personal and self-
indulgent, leaving us with a poignant sense of our own transience?

The title itself--"Ascent"--indicates the poem's rising momentum, not simply out of life but also
out of self. As Merwin's speaker climbs to a higher plane, he attains a generic human quality,
becomes a myth for all of us. To appreciate the difference between Merwin's enlarging view and
the closeted atmosphere of confessionalism, we need only think of Plath or the later work of
Lowell. Invited to share their various neuroses, we find ourselves wondering if we privately hate
our fathers and if a scavenging pack of skunks is indeed a suitable emblem for what we are led to
view as our pathetic loveless lives.

The chief characteristic of postmodernism was a further movement into self, beyond the initial
forays of modernism. For the postmodern poet the self was more than a subject for poetry: it was
the only point of reference. In its earliest manifestations this restrictive view was communicated
as hep antiestablishment yowls and the assorted notes of the clinically depressed; but as the way
led further inward and became more self-reflective, poets soon found themselves writing poems
about writing poems. They stood, finally, at the aesthetic center of themselves. The end of this
process is epitomized by the postmodern architectural design which put plumbing, ductwork, and
all the guts of the building on the outside of the structure. This is the point beyond which no
further inward movement is possible, because the inside has truly become the outside. Ironically
the supreme goal of the postmodernists-to arrive at the outside by moving inward--was
accomplished finally only as a result of the complete exhaustion of their technique.

Saved from this dead-end route by his natural inclination to question the reality of life, Merwin
has, through an odd combination of skepticism and humility, been led down another path.
Following through on his modernist predecessors' efforts to fashion a modern myth of identity,
Merwin is obsessed with his own version of the task, investigating the myth of existence. In an
early poem, he sets himself a lifelong challenge:

There must be found, then, the imagination

Before the names of things, the dicta for
The only poem, and among all dictions
That ceremony whereby you may be named
Perpetual out of the anonymity
Of death.
--"Canso," The Dancing Bears

Merwin is concerned with ultimate causes, the "imagination" behind everything, and he equates
the Godhead with aesthetic power, the source of all poetry. This merging of poetic imagination
and the animating force of the universe reveals what importance Merwin places on language. At
the very least, our notions of reality are affected by language; but language also has the greater
power to create reality, as the following passage argues:

The idiom of order is celebration,

An elegance to redeem the graceless years;
So those the nine-years-enraged for a filched doxy
Who contend forever in the fanciful song
Are the real, and those who with tangible
Bronze fought are now the unbelievable dead,
Their speech inconceivable, their voyages vain,
Their deeds inaccurate, save as they coincide
With the final tale, the saving celebration.
--"Canso"

The celebration is, of course, the poetic account of the Trojan war, which has attained a reality
far more believable than that of the actual historical conflict. The mythic song creates its own
order and wins credibility because it has a permanence not enjoyed by the flesh-and-blood
soldiers who fought and died and thereby fell beyond our belief.

In these early passages, representative of others too numerous to cite here, Merwin embarks on
his pursuit of Logos, the Word behind everything. His journey is, in many respects, archetypal, a
search for a verbal grail; but the hunt is enacted in the context of a contemporary cosmology.
God, or Logos, is the nothing behind everything, and so Merwin's drive is toward that
nothingness. Some critics regrettably see his quest as negative, failing to recognize the essential
paradox that informs Merwin's vision. What he strives to attain is not an arid obliteration but a
perception of that original, fecund nothing.

Despite their obvious differences there is in orthodox Christianity and current cosmology a
remarkable parallel. The biblical assertions that the word was in the beginning and that God is
are no more tauto-logical than the Big Bang theory with its explosive particle of dust that existed
because it must have existed. The question--What existed before God or that necessary mote of
dust?--has only one possible, albeit vertiginous answer: Nothing. With the implicit authority of
science and religion behind him, Merwin persistently seeks that mothering emptiness.

Frequently regarded as a poet of apocalyptic unhappiness, Merwin is misunderstood. For there is

in his pursuit of the silence behind all words and lives the same impetus found in the brighter
visionaries. Whereas poets like Theodore Roethke and James Wright moved toward light and a
final unity, Merwin travels into darkness and dissolution. For each poet, however, the final terms
of his pursuit are abandonment of self and immersion in the larger Other, whether it is described
as bright or dark or darkly brilliant.

Unlike Roethke, Merwin has not insisted that he be counted among the happy poets, but there is
often a quality of joy in his work. Consider "The Drive Home," from The Compass Flower:

I was always afraid

of the time when I would arrive home
and be met by a special car
but this wasn't like that
they were so nice the young couple
and I was relieved not to be driving
so I could see the autumn leaves on the farms

I sat in the front to see better

they sat in the back
having a good time
and they laughed with their collars up
they said we could take turns driving
but when I looked
none of us was driving

then we all laughed

we wondered if anyone would notice
we talked of getting an inflatable
driver
to drive us for nothing through the autumn leaves
The "special" car may be anything from a hearse to the "sweet chariot" swinging low, feared as it
is by the speaker. But his concerns are obliterated by the young adoptive couple laughing in the
back seat, and he joins in their merriment, all of them joking about the driverless car. In many
respects this poem calls to mind Emily Dickinson's carriage in "Because I Could Not Stop for
Death," particularly in its view of death as a perpetual journey. And one of Plath's poems, "Death
& Co.," also echoes through, although her two repulsive visitors are obviously not stopping to
take her on a joyride.

Of course the most powerful line in Merwin's poem is the final one: "to drive us for nothing
through the autumn leaves." Wonderful in its ambiguity, the line suggests who is really driving
the car and, if an archaic reading of "for nothing" is allowed, implies that the occupants of the car
are also nothing. So this is what it's like being dead: to be nothing, driven for nothing, by
nothing. Not a particularly happy prospect, but everyone does seem to be having a good time
laughing at the absurdity of it all.

While laughter may not be a conspicuous feature of Merwin's poetry, a peaceful resignation
often is, as in "Finding a Teacher," from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment:

In the woods I came on an old friend fishing

and I asked him a question
and he said Wait

fish were rising in the deep stream

but his line was not stirring
but I waited
it was a question about the sun

about my two eyes

my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

it slipped through my hands

as though it were water
into the river
it flowed under the trees

it sank under hulls far away

and was gone without me
then where I stood night fell

I no longer knew what to ask

I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him

Hungry for an answer to his existential question, the speaker is invited to dine on nothing, which
is, at Merwin's table, the piece de resistance. Essentially the speaker arrives at his final
understanding through silence. Forced to wait before asking his jumbled question about life, he
relinquishes his anxieties while contemplating the line with no hook. The process is meditation,
and the lesson has the quality of a Confucian riddle: "What does a line with no hook catch?" The
answer, although inevitable, is not the one the speaker had anticipated. Still, he accepts it and, in
so doing, finds both peace and sustenance.

The similarity between this speaker and the child in "On the Subject of Poetry," from The
Dancing Bears, is so striking that the opening line's reference to "an old friend fishing" may be
an allusion to that earlier poem, which begins with this stanza:

I do not understand the world, father.

By the millpond at the end of the garden
There is a man who slouches listening
To the wheel revolving in the stream, only
There is no wheel there to revolve.

Listening to what is not there is the poet's occupation, and it perplexes the child just beginning to
confront the essential questions of life. More than a statement about the power of imagination,
this poem is an onto-logical challenge, with Merwin's generative void roaring silently in the
background.

Challenges to logic are frequent in Merwin's poetry, and they are always calculated to shake the
safe constructions of reality, to tumble the facade that disguises the abyss. If this sounds like
bleak work, that's only because we are so loathe to confront the ultimate existential questions. To
look directly into the gaping maw of nothingness takes courage. And if one happens to be a poet,
to try to speak for the great silence takes even more courage.

Ineffability is nothing new to poets, of course, especially those with a mystical orientation.
Vaughan, Traherne, Blake, Hart Crane, Roethke, and James Wright are among the poets who
have tried to capture their inexpressible sense of wholeness in mere language. Naturally the
effort is doomed to failure, for no one can say what cannot be said. And yet that is precisely the
task Merwin has set himself--to utter the unutterable silence of nothing. For his trouble he has
been spectacular]y misread by some critics, one of whom cautions (from behind her smug
quotation of Wittgenstein): "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The mind
balks trying to imagine the purely empirical poetry that would result from such advice. Even
confessionalism, with its tireless catalogues of mundane details, frequently rises above the flatly
literal.

In an age of cynicism and technological certainty--the Age of Information, we are told--Merwin

has given us the perfect adaptation of traditional mysticism. His is not the vision of numinous
rose or radiant Godhead, but of Nothing, the perfect deity for a time of unbelief. The odd twist in
Merwin's work, however, is that believing in nothing is still belief. Perhaps that should not be
surprising, given his devotion to myth, which is kin to religion. Like those believers before him
who pushed beyond illumination to attain a perception of the Ultimate One, Merwin delves the
darkness looking for the chaotic order, the formless form, the silent word.

Although I said at the outset that Merwin has been difficult to classify, he can be described
through a curious list of paradoxical features: He is (1) a free-form formalist, (2) a mythic
confessionalist, (3) an heretical devotee of language, (4) a devout believer in nothing, and (5) a
singer of silence. These are the essential tensions that move his work forward, simultaneously
withholding and disclosing. When all these opposites are considered, Merwin's choice of title for
his first book, A Mask for Janus, takes on a broader significance, for Janus is the resident spirit
of all of Merwin's work. Looking two ways at once, Janus must process what he sees through a
single consciousness, which is exactly what Merwin's poetry. does in its consolidation of
opposites.

Despite his movement from fixed to free form and from a romantic enthusiasm for language to a
less effusive diction, Merwin has displayed a remarkable consistency throughout his career,
owing in large part to the double nature of his muse. So it's not surprising to find, in the middle
of his first book, among all that opulent language, the Janus face looking forward in the shape of
"Epitaph":

Death is not information.

Stone that I am,
He came into my quiet
And I shall be still for him.

Although it would seem more at home in one of Merwin's later books--The Lice, perhaps--its
presence in A Mask for Janus, located between a poem dedicated to Sisyphus and another
entitled "Ode: The Medusa Face," is appropriate for a poet intent on adapting both myth and
language to his urgent needs.

As "Epitaph" pointed ahead to Merwin's future style, much of his later poetry looks back at his
formal beginnings; and passages like the following from "Rain at Night" resonate with the music
some tone-deaf critics thought Merwin had abandoned in the mid-sixties:

This is what I have heard

at last the wind in December

lashing the old trees with rain
unseen rain racing along the tiles
under the moon
wind rising and falling
wind with many clouds
trees in the night wind

Rich with alliteration and assonance, this passage shows Merwin in full control of all the formal
strategies of free-form poetry. Lingering in the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds and,
most audibly, in the -ing suffixes and such combinations as "wind in December" and "unseen
rain," rhyme has been transformed. Similarly, a definite metrical power echoes in the self-
contained syntactic unit of each line and, especially, in the emphatic repetition of the word wind.
To appreciate Merwin's full technical mastery, I invite you to look at some of the conversational
blather that passes itself off today as free-form poetry or, from the other camp, some of those
lifeless, mechanical attempts at formalism. You won't have to look hard.

Merwin's most recent collection, The Rain in the Trees, which in-eludes "Rain at Night," the
poem just cited, reveals a poet at the height of his powers. All of his technical brilliance and old
obsessions are on display there, and so is a cautionary edge which lends a greater sense of
urgency to many of the poems. In "Losing a Language," for example, Merwin insists that "many
of the things the words were about/no longer exist/the noun for standing in mist by a haunted
tree/the verb for I." Successive generations are taking language farther and farther away from its
original magical source, leaving only the "extinct feathers."

By comparing lost words with extinct animals, Merwin attempts to close the gap between the
word and the thing it represents. He suggests that, once separated from the thing it signifies, the
word is as lifeless as the feathers of an extinct bird and has value only as a museum curiosity.
Here and in other poems in this volume Merwin advances a new theory of ecology, one in which
language and the world depend upon one another. Because we perceive the world through
language, any damage done to the world must ultimately affect the words we use to shape our
lives. Similarly the loss of such extraordinary words as "the noun for standing in mist by a
haunted tree" and "the verb for I" has permanently changed the way we experience the world.

The dangers of a weakened language are made plain in "After the Alphabets":

I am trying to decipher the language of insects

they are the tongues of the future
their vocabularies describe buildings as food
they can depict dark water and the veins of trees
they can convey what they do not know
and what is known at a distance
and what nobody knows
they have terms for making music with the legs
they can recount changing in a sleep like death
they can sing with wings
the speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without
horizons
they are wholly articulate
they are never important they are everything

The notion that insects may some day rule the world, after we have obliterated ourselves in war
or garbage, is not especially new. But Merwin's version of the fable implies that the insects will
inherit the planet because of their superior language. The significance, of course, is that death of
a language equals death of a species, that through the progressive diminishment of our
word/world, we will eventually reach the point at which there is no longer a word for what we
are.

Apart from these admonitions, Merwin is still capable of expressing his own sense of hope, as in
"Tracing the Letters":

When I learn to read

I will know how green is spelled
when it is not green

already for all

the green of the years
there is only one word
even when the green is not there
and now the word is written down

and not only spoken

so it can be closed in the dark
against an unknown page
until another time

and still the green comes without a word

but when I see it
a word tells me it is green
and I believe it
even in the dark

I will be glad to learn to read

and be able to find
the stories with green in them
and to recognize
the green hands that were here before
the green eyelids and the eyes

The playful tone doesn't disguise Merwin's serious intent--to find the lost words (to trace the
letters). He wants an animate vocabulary, filled with words that are the things they represent.
Like a child who has been tracing letters, Merwin longs for the full power of language. More
than that, he wants to receive the essence green as it was at the moment of its creation, in the
beginning, when the word was.

The Rain in the Trees is one of the most remarkable books of the past decade--and certainly one
of the most important. Rising above the fiat postmodern terrain, it is a hill from which we can see
the plain that lies behind us and the one that stretches out before. Below, the two encampments
are clearly visible--New Formalists on one side and free formalists on the other. Territories have
been staked out, and the battle is being waged in earnest. Because the fight over form has
preceded the arrival of a new literary period twice this century, the conflict may have
significance for the future. Above all the noise, however, W. S. Merwin keeps on saying, quietly
and persistently, that form is more than a topic of debate for technicians. It is the word made
visible, our very lives lifted out of nothing. And he shows, through his concern for the
preservation of language and the green planet it creates and depends upon, where the fight for
tomorrow must really be joined.

The poems quoted herein appear in W. S. Merwin: Selected Poems (Atheneum). Copyright (C)
1988 by W. S. Merwin. And in The Rain in the Trees (Knopf). Copyright (C) 1988 by W. S.
Merwin. They are reprinted by permission of the author.

~~~~~~~~

By NEAL BOWERS