Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

Listening to W. S. Merwin

Listening to W. S. Merwin Born in Union City, New Jersey in 1927, W.S. Merwin’s life in poetry has been an Odyssean journey through New York City, southern France, London, Mexico, and finally Hawaii. His poetry has embodied a constantly evolving style and vision rooted in the moral necessity of bearing witness, of testifying to the times, whether the voice of the poem is that of seer or fool, knowing or unknowing, public or intimate. The son of “a strict, unemotional Presbyterian minister,” Merwin claims to have been more interested in riding horses at the Princeton University stable than in his classwork there, except that he began writing poetry under the tutelage of the poet and critic R. P. Blackmur and the poet John Berryman. The latter told the young poet to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day,” adding that he meant it literally, and that what “permitted everything and transmuted it / in poetry was passion.” From the beginning, Merwin has been a poet of doubt, a poet whose vision is realized through a state of unknowingness. In an early ars poetica, “On the Subject of Poetry,” he writes in part, 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. The strange man who sits in the garden listening to the wheel that is not there, “always before he listens / He prepares himself by listening.” The speaker is made uncomfortable, but insists that it is the world he does not understand. In another early poem, Merwin observes that poetry’s “mumbled inadequacy reminds us always / In this world how little can be communicated.” In his insistence upon acknowledging the “inadequacy” of poetry and thus language itself, he follows in a tradition that would 224 Avocations include such ancient Chinese sages as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and such modern philosophers and the existentialists, abd indeed one finds elements of existential doubts throughout Merwin’s body of work. The young poet went into the world and became a tutor for Princess de Braganza of Portugal, a tutor for the son of Robert Graves on the island of Majorca, and translator of French and Spanish literature for the BBC. In 1954, he bought a farmhouse in southern France, writing, “I realized that I did not know how to grow a single thing that I ate every day, and I decided to go back there and try to learn to grow food in the garden—something which all my peasant neighbors knew how to do.” Nearly fifty years later, W. S. Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he works to preserve Hawaiian culture, flora, and fauna, and tends a garden that is famous in literary circles. He still spends a part of each year in southern France. His bibliography is staggering, and includes such diverse translations as Dante’s Paradiso, Spanish ballads and romances, The Song of Roland, and Poem of the Cid, the Zen poetry of Muso Soseki and brief poems and epigrams drawn from all over East Asia, the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Porchia, Roberto Juarroz, Jaime Sabines, and Jean Follain. Not to mention translations of poetry from Swedish, Russian, Urdu, Greek, Mayan, Incan, Sanskrit, and more. On a recent visit to the Pacific Northwest to make this recording, he was most eager to visit a major local botanical garden. Confucius wrote of the ancient Chinese Poetry Classic says that poetry functions in part by teaching us the proper names of plants and animals and relationships, whereby “we can watch with affection the ways things grow.” It is helpful to understand that Merwin’s study and practice in the garden, including planetary ecology, is not separate from his practice of poetry. Poetry and language are not self-originating. Nothing is. “My words,” he has written, “are the garment of what I shall never be / like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.” What is unsaid is as important, perhaps more important, that what is said. Part of what remains unstated is that which is simply unsayable, while another part is left in deliberate ambiguity or silence. Surely, a part of his doubts about language and communication spring from his experience as a translator. One who has no knowledge of a second language has a very tentative grasp on a first one. Merwin’s...