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W.S. Merwin

Visiting Poet

W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin began his life in poetry at age five, writing hymns for his minister father’s Presbyterian services. Author of eighteen books of poetry, five books of prose, and translator of twenty works of European and Asian languages, Merwin has been awarded most of the major prizes in American letters, including the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (1952, for A Mask for Janus), the Pulitzer Prize (1970, for The Carrier of Ladders), the Bollingen Prize, and the first Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry.

As a Princeton graduate in the 1950s, Merwin traveled in western Europe, finding his affinity for translation while tutoring Robert Graves’ son in Majorca. His translation work has ranged widely, from The Song of Roland to Euripedes to the poetry of Russian Osip Mandelstam to Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Recipient of the 1968 PEN Translation Prize for his Selected Translations, Merwin’s more recent translations include East Window (The Asian Translations), collections by Jaime Sabines, Roberto Juarroz, Muso Soseki, and Dante’s Purgatorio.

The influence of Graves and Blake are evident in the formalism and mythological themes of Merwin’s own early work. By the sixties, though, with The Moving Targetand The Lice, he was experimenting with metrical irregularity and “open forms,” creating the signature enjambment and syntactic suspension that has allowed him to dispense with punctuation entirely, even in recent long narrative poems.

A typical Merwin poem – easily identifiable and widely imitated – is elusive, enigmatic, and often disquieting. Merwin’s varied and prolific literary career is entwined with his pacifist, anti-imperialist, environmentalist values and activism. Merwin has a “talent for the desolate and dismembered,” writes the critic Helen Vendler. “He is one of the voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells . . . finding his hollow divinities.”

In poems marked by a severe and tenuous beauty, Merwin explores human perception and the capacity of language to express experience; he ponders the passage of time, the unreliability of memory, and man’s perplexity in the face of a troubled planet. As the poet Peter Davison writes, he “engages the underground stream of our lives.”

W.S. Merwin lives in Hawaii where he keeps a garden of rare and endangered palm trees.

Select Poems

Naturally it is night.

Under the overturned lute with its

One string I am going my way

Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.

I listen to both sides

But I keep right on.

I remember the leaves sitting in judgment

And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.

The rain taking all its roads.

Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.

I forget the life among the buried windows.

The eyes in the curtains.

The wall

Growing through the immortelles.

I forget silence

The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,

Walking at night between the two deserts,

Singing.

From THE MOVING TARGET (Atheneum, 1963)

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

what for

not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit

is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands

in the earth for the first time

with the sun already

going down

and the water

touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead

and the clouds passing

one by one

over its leaves

From THE RAIN IN THE TREES (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

My face in the train window no color

years later taking me by surprise

when remembered looking older of course

behind it the fields I had known that long

flashing through it once again before I could

catch them the afternoon light the small lane

swinging by where an old man was walking

with a dog and their shadows while the face

raced past without moving and was neither

the daylight going nor the sight of it

once a snake left its whole skin by my door

still rustling without breath without a sound

all of a piece a shade out in the air

the silent rings in which a life had journeyed

From THE PUPIL (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)

About W.S.

Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2003, April 2013