FEATURE - W.S.Merwin (1927-2019)

 

'What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass' **

As I'm reading his poetry at the moment, I thought I'd see what I could unearth about W.S.Merwin and his life. Whilst there is not an awful lot of detail, he nonetheless had a long and extraordinarily productive creative life. By the time he died at the age of ninety one, he'd published thirty four volumes of his own poetry, plus twenty eight translations, three plays, nine prose works and edited two poetry anthologies. He'd been given most of the poetry awards available in the US. Winning the Pulitzer Prize twice, for the Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) being most significant. And was the United States Poet Laureate, also not once, but twice, in 1999-2000 and 2010 -11. So he was no bohemian slouch. 

I Have Been Younger In October Than All The Months Of Spring

Sweeping in to New York to be born on the last day of September 1927, William Stanley Merwin always had this rhapsodic appreciation for the welcoming in of October. In 1936 his family moved from New Jersey to Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Uncannily precocious by the age of five William was already writing hymns and illustrating them. His love of nature was also apparent, coupled with an instinctive mind that found history embedded in the fabric around him. Providing a sense of the ancestry of a place. 

By A Swooning Candle, In My Porchless Door.

After finishing a degree at Princeton, William then embarked on the first of his three marriages, number one was to Dorothy, moving with her to Spain, where there were two significant meetings, one with his hero Robert Graves and the other was with Dido Milroy, his second wife, with whom he later live with in London, where he was actively sought out and befriended by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, followed by much Trans-Atlantic flip flopping, till recently divorced from Dido, he relocated to Hawaii, later to marry Paula Dunaway, with no biological offspring to bring up, but inheriting her two. 

I See Only The Flatlands And The Slow Vanishing of Windmills
Poetry rarely feeds and clothes you. Merwin like every jobbing poet, took other associated work or adjunct literary commissions, such as playwright in residences, poetry fellowships, poetry editor at The Nation, and became a respected translator of literature in nine different languages.  Meanwhile, privately, he continued writing his poetry, which began by being influenced by Robert Graves with epic thematic verses on mythological legends. But by the mid 60's his poetry had become strongly autobiographical, political and ecological in focus. Never afraid to campaign and protest, he became a significant strong voice in his opposition to the Vietnam War and environmental degradation.

Inside This Pencil Crouch Words That Have Never Been Written

His poetic evolution required an ever shifting emphasis on the exploration of poetic structure, abandoning the conventions of punctuation altogether, dito standard line breaks and sentence structure, imagery folded half between lines, or snapped in two mid sentence. Sometimes his poetry stretches its long limbs across many a page. And then there are those concise freeze dried poems that expand once your eyes land upon them. Merwin's poetry never seeks to force feed you an idea, but opens up an exploratory space, where your imagination can make its own compositional sense out of what it is reading. Sometimes, it's as though he opens up a crack in the ceiling and you briefly glimpse a brighter sky.

On The Last Day Of The World I Would Want To Plant A Tree
In his later life living in Hawaii, Merwin would spend his mornings writing and his afternoons planting out palm trees, bushes and a wide variety of other plants. There was always a deep appreciation of nature and ecology running throughout his poetry. Capturing his momentary feelings and responses, as they flitted from noticing one thing to another, encapsulating how he was struck by it, what it had communicated to him. This was one characteristic of his constantly evolving writing style, it was so intimately personal, though this often remained half opaque to the reader. That all this wonderfully colourful imagery you bathed in, was sometimes left without a frame of reference the interpreting explanation of Merwin. They are snapshots of an experience, that then is move on from. Sometimes you just receive perceptions unadorned, and at other times you do receive the full multi-dimensional perspective. What a glory that is when this happens.

Where Did You Come From This Late Morning?

In 2010 Merwin turned eighty, and ideas about how to preserve his legacy began to be pondered. His papers, a collection of 5,500 items and 450 printed books were housed in The University of Illinois. He and his wife Paula were primarily concerned to provide a means of maintaining his eighteen acre property. Which over the decades he had transformed from a rough piece of scrubland, into a beautiful dense jungle like reserve, where the largest bio-diverse collections of rare palm trees in the world resides. A non-profit organisation The Merwin Conservancy was formed to preserve his hand built home and surrounding estate. His last book of poetry Garden Time, published in 2016, was a meditation on the loss of his eyesight, aging and living in the present moment, dictated to his wife.

Even Our Names Are Made Of Fire And We Feed On Night

Legacies are a difficult thing to plan for and sustain. Books and manuscripts once filed in libraries gather dust. Merwin has undoubtedly been a significant poet and influence upon US literature in his time. It remains to be seen how long after his death that survives. His name is hardly known at all here in the UK, or Europe. Partly I suspect, that in the sixties the Beat Poets somewhat over shadowed his work. His poetry is not overtly counter cultural, its far less vocal, attention grabbing and decidedly un-flashy. Its thoughtful, though often really paired back, almost as if its trying to evade you capturing it alive. We all want to comprehend what any poet is attempting to express. And sometimes, W.S Merwin just will not spoon feed you one single morsel.  Quite prepared is he to leave your hunger unfed.

'Some day it will rain

from a cold place

and the sticks and stones will darken their faces

the salt will wash from the worn gods

of the good

and mourners will be waiting

on the far sides of the hills' ***

***

Taken from the poem As Though I Was Waiting For That
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems 

By Copper Canyon Press. 2005.

**

Taken from the poem A Contemporary
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems
By Copper Canyon Press. 2005