A Brief Introduction to the Work of Our New U.S. Poet Laureate

08/16/2010

Most Americans have heard by now that W.S. Merwin is our new U.S. Poet Laureate; but given the relatively small readership poetry commands in this country, many may know little or nothing about his work and accomplishments. Merwin, 82 now, has written over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose and has won countless awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Now that I’ve said something about his awards and prolificacy, I thought I would post some of his poetry. Even if you’ve already read the below poems, they're worth revisiting. Great poems always warrant and reward rereading.

Here’s a haunting poem of his that condemns the Vietnam War:

The Asians Dying

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future

Over the centuries many poets have written about death—Dickinson, Keats, Milton, Thomas Gray and Yeats, to name a few. In the below poem, Merwin finds an ingenious way to talk about his own future death:

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

As for analyzing and summing up Merwin’s entire body of work, I won’t attempt to say much here. So much has already been written—and will continue to be written—on that subject. What I will say is that Merwin’s poetry, initially formal, soon evolved into an impersonal free verse that dispensed with punctuation. J.D. McClatchy adds, “Merwin’s early work absorbed the major traditions of English Romantic poetry; it is mythic or emblematic and richly rhetorical. By 1963, however, he had evolved a new style—austere, impersonal, disjunctive, often surrealistic.” While Merwin’s style has changed over the years, a major consistency in his work is the theme of humanity’s alienation from nature, an alienation he sees as catastrophic not only for the environment but for humanity itself.

Links to Merwin’s poems and basic info on him:

Link to an archive of literary criticism on Merwin’s poetry:

LiteraryHistory.com

Comments

Noel Jones

08/27/2010 1:39pm

My favorite lines:

"Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises"

Brilliant.

As for mankind's separation from nature, I share that sentiment acutely--out here in Pennsylvania, verdant farmland is forever being paved over for parking lots, malls and McMansions--these developments are thrown up in a matter of years--the terrain forever changed, green for gray, soft for hard, earth for concrete. And who today knows how to grow his food or build her house from the ground? I grew up in Alaska, where people do that--I had no idea how rare it was. I used to hate oil paintings of farmlandscapes--found them boring and corny. Now, I find myself yearning after what they have captured with a fierce sentimentality for something going, going, gone. I have grown a similar appreciation for the romantics recently. It is also why I love the image at the top of your blog so much.

Zina

08/27/2010 7:01pm

Dana, thank you for the introduction to the work of our new U.S. Poet Laureate and for the two poems you selected. I really enjoyed browsing through the rest of your blog as well. Zina M.

Dana Crum link

08/29/2010 11:23am

Hey, Noel. Like you, I love the lines “The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed / The dead go away like bruises” (from “The Asians Dying”). I’ve always wished I’d written those lines. Which is a sure sign (to me at least) that the lines are brilliant.

You used the word “McMansion” to describe the large houses that are being mass-produced in Pennsylvania. Great word! Its connotation is so apt.

I share your and Merwin’s concern for the environment. You asked, “Who today knows how to grow his food or build her house from the ground?” and you pointed out that in Alaska, where you were raised, many people did grow their own food and build their own homes. It might interest you to know that Merwin for over 30 years has lived in Hawaii on a devastated, dilapidated pineapple plantation, which he has laboriously restored to its former rainforest state. He also helped design and build the home he lives in. Merwin practices what he preaches.

To give a sample of how environmentalism surfaces in his work, I thought I would share the below poem. It’s certainly pro-environment, but it focuses on some of the animals that are extinct or endangered because of humanity’s actions:

FOR A COMING EXTINCTION

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

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Dana Crum link

08/29/2010 11:28am

Hey, Zina! Thanks for checking out my latest post! At some point, I’ll blog about novels and nonfiction books, too. I may even blog about movies.

All the best,
Dana

Dana Crum link

08/29/2010 11:54am

Hey, Noel. I'm a big fan of the English Romantics, too. They were some of the first poets who took my breath away. They still take my breath away.

Noel Jones

08/29/2010 12:28pm

Dana,

Back at Hunter, I wrote a found medley compiled with random lines that I liked from the Romantics. I wanted to harvest the lines that seemed the most contemporary--enjoy:

Found Poem Medley of Lines from the Romantics

We are led to believe a lie
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards
I am the self-consumer of my woes
And yet I am and live—like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
She stood in tears amid the alien corn
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
Getting and spending, we lay to waste our powers
And are gathered up now like sleeping flowers
I have been half in love with easeful Death
A dove house filled with doves and pigeons
Each outcry of the hunted hare
Are the fruits of the two seasons
And leaden-eyed despairs
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
Yellow, and black, and pale and hectic red
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low
Each like a corpse within its grave
I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
That had no need of a remoter charm
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South
And purple stained mouth
To take into the air my quiet breath
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone
Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
A dog starved at his master’s gate

Dana Crum link

08/29/2010 1:06pm

Great found poem, Noel! It’s a postmodernist pastiche! I recognized lines from Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Blake, especially Keats. If I were to comb through your poem again, I’ll bet I’d find that some other major English Romantic poets are represented. But who else is left, other than Byron and Coleridge?

Noel Jones

08/29/2010 3:25pm

John Clare--one of my favorites. Here's the poem of his I borrowed from:

I Am

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Dana Crum link

08/30/2010 1:29am

Hey, Noel. Thanks for sharing the John Clare poem! I can't say I know much about him and his work. What I do know is that his poetry languished in semi-obscurity until the 20th century. It looks like his work deserved recognition all along but (except for his first book) didn't get it during the 19th century because "ploughman poetry" fell out of vogue, because Clare avoided the artificial poetic diction common during his lifetime and because of some other factors.

Clare seems to be getting props now, though. I just Googled him. His biographer Jonathan Bate called him "the greatest laboring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.”

Sounds like I should read more John Clare!