Poetry &Sprituality Entropy | 01 Jul 2010
A Gardener of Verse
Poetry can’t be done as an act of will. You can’t say, I will now write a poem.- Poetry always begins and ends with listening, – W. S. Merwin
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 US. Library of Congress’s recent announcement naming him the country’s poet laureate. – Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets.
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.
He feels deep connections to the environment. And like the great haiku masters, he sees both the present moment and something more eternal:
A man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out
-From “The Dreamers
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.”
Throughout his career Mr. Merwin has also been a respected translator of writers like Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, and of works like “El Cid” and the “Chanson de Roland.”
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:
Worn Words
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
Mr. Merwin has come the whole way, too, and now to Washington in spirit if not in actuality.
©- Via NY.Times & other features
on 01 Jul 2010 at 7:51 pm 1.Jo Chopra said …
Lovely, thoughtful piece. Thanks, Ajay.
on 05 Jul 2010 at 11:26 pm 2.Sandy said …
Ajay, as you know, Merwin is one of my favorite poets.
There is something so sparse yet rich in poems; meditative and full.
I loved his memoir, Unframed Originals…dark, musty, real, poetic.
Thank you for your thoughtful offering…