A student of John Berryman and a classmate of Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin (born in 1927) has been at the center of American poetry since his first book was selected by W. H. Auden in 1952 for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Among his many awards are the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the Bollingen Award. This year saw the publication of two books by Merwin, Migration: New & Selected Poems, as well as Present Company, Merwin's 24th collection of verse.
How has your poetry changed over 50 years of writing?
One thing that I've tried to do since I was around 30 was to write more simply and directly and it probably didn't seem that way to people at the time. The poems in The Moving Target (1963) and from then on seemed to me to be trying to be direct. But they were being direct about things that people found difficult to understand. The poems were getting simpler all the time. The strange thing is that some critics found them difficult, but children never did. Children got something from the poems that wasn't just the rational surface of the words. Children are marvelously honest. They don't worry about understanding it; they respond if something gets through to them or not.
Has the sort of poetry you enjoy as a reader changed over the years?
When I was in college the first poet who really seized my imagination was Milton. It was like discovering music or something. I still have long stretches of Milton in my heart. Milton was very important to me for a while. Milton is a very complicated poet. By the time I was 30 I went to the other extreme. My ideal is the kind of poetry that seems very simple and appears to be doing nothing at all as though it just happened by itself. Of course, that is never what happens. But it looks that way. And, I love that in music and I love that in poetry.
Why did you abandon almost all punctuation in your poetry after "The Lice" (1967)?
There was less and less punctuation coming and I was beginning to feel it was unnecessary. I began to feel that punctuation was invented for prose. It has to do with the written word and the printed word. You don't use it in the spoken word at all. The one end of poetry is always the spoken word. If you don't hear a Shakespeare sonnet it doesn't matter how smart you are, you don't get it. I thought if you don't have punctuation you have to hear it. There was really one model that I really loved and that was Apollinaire who didn't use punctuation, and it works wonderfully in French. It was a kind of liberation and a form of its own, because if you don't use punctuation then you have to write it so it can be heard, and that's a form.
To the Shadow |
Only as long as there is light as long as there is something a cloud or mountain or wing or body reflecting the light you are there on the other side twin shape formed of nothing but absence made of what you are not and we recognize you when we wave a part of the darkness waves at the same moment not answering though nor mocking us no no you are not the self we know from night to night
—from W.S. Merwin's Present Company (2005), appears courtesy of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. |
Has your process of writing poems changed over the years?
I suppose it has. The one thing that they (my poems) have in common is that I have been listening for something. I've been listening for when something happens in language that has a different dimension and the whole thing comes to life. When the phrase strikes you with its power that for me is the beginning of a piece of writing. In prose you start with an idea, you are writing about something. But in poetry the whole thing begins with something happening in language.
You've written a lot of prose. Is that as important to you as poetry?
No. I think of poetry as a complete use of language and the imagination that prose can never have.
There is a cliché about creativity belonging to youth. Is it harder for you to write now?
No. As you get older you learn the things not to waste time on.
Biographies or memoirs have already appeared covering the lives of many of your peers like Ginsberg, Sexton and Merrill. There have already been books studying your poetry published. Even your letters written to friends will most likely wind up one day being collected into a book. How are you affected by being a public figure?
I never quite believe it. I am told it, and obviously people talk about it. I lead a very private kind of life. I suppose it (a biography) will happen. I just don't know what to do about it. I never wanted it to happen. I just wanted the poems to exist on their own. But what can you do? I grew up in a time when the life was supposed to be not of much importance to the writing. And I think that is silly. Of course, the life is of great importance. But a lot of what we talk about in literary history is gossip and a lot gets distorted.
Who among your contemporaries do you admire most and still read?
The one that I probably feel closest to in some ways was James Wright. Then the other person I admire for very different reasons was (James) Merrill. He was an amazing guy. What people didn't understand about Jimmy, because he covered it up with all this incredible brilliance, was that he was so shy. We knew each other from the time we were 19 and we were totally different. He was gay and I was straight. He was so rich you couldn't believe it and I never had a penny. But over the years, gradually, we became friends and trusted each other. But I don't feel nearly as close to Merrill as I do James Wright. My sensibility is much closer to James Wright.
Do you think that the poetry is now more marginalized by culture than it was for your generation?
Poetry in our culture has never been center stage. It has always been marginal. I used to think of it as a weakness and now I think of it as a strength. The artist is always a marginal figure, because the artist is always to some extent a dissident and critic of the civilization.