FINISHED READING - W.S.Merwin - Migration

'I have been a poor man living in a rich man's house'
*

W.S Merwin compiled this selection of his poetry in 2004, fifteen years before he died. I'm not sure, when it comes to assessing the quality of their work, its best to leave that in the hands of the poet. Authors tend towards including too much, as is evidenced by this tombe, all 529 pages of it. Not that what is contained within this compendium is without merit, far from it. Similar to a blockbusting exhibition of a painter's entire oeuvre, the comprehensive scale can so easily swamp or diminish the value of an individual piece. There is then, an element in this volume of the unwieldy retrospective, that doesn't encourage the poems to speak freely of themselves. When they enter, they walk into a very cacophonous crowded room. And as I reached near the end of it,I found myself growing tired of the tumbling ramble of his words, that out of my weariness I wished to quickly skip. To find they have nothing to recommend them other than the convulsive propulsion of their nature.  

'The stones were skies with skies inside them

and when he had worked long enough

he saw that a day was a stone and the past was a stone

with more darkness always inside it'
**

Migrations, is an apt title. It is a characteristic of his writing that he would wander off piste to explore a new approach, a fresh way of structuring a poem, a new subject matter, a new way of composing the struggles and contingencies of his life. He ended up quietly covering a lot of territory. Writing initially in the heroic shadow of Robert Graves, his earliest work has the sense of being written in awe, as a reverent homage. But gradually Merwin does break free to discover his own voice, protesting and passionate. Undoubtedly an extraordinarily fine poet, it is in the diversity of poetic forms present in his output, where you'll locate the particularities of his aesthetic muse and authorial voice. Just occasionally he returns to lay a poetic wreath, in memoriam, at the grave of Graves.

'Sitting over words

very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing

not far

like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark

the echo of everything that has ever

been spoken

still spinning its one syllable

between the earth and silence'
***

His writing does not possess an overtly masculine muscularity or the bold imprint of an intention to make this an important utterance. As one might find with contemporaries such as Thomas or Hughes. Merwin was not interested in the place or branding of his poetry, or for forging a myth of himself as a writer. By contrast he is hard to locate, because his expressiveness is often written in a small vocal scale. When he did compose poetry larger in ambition and size, one poem here is over fifty pages in length, it gains nothing through its verbosity. He wrote mostly about the minutiae of the moment that it was an outpouring of. His affinity with Buddhism becomes increasingly apparent. Interested in capturing the butterfly fleetingness of experience, thoughtful reflections composed in a loose chain of words. Poetry for him, like human existence, reluctantly had an affinity with ephemerality.

'At night the veins of sleepers remember trees

countless sleepers the hours of trees

the uncounted hours the leaves in the dark'
****

There are times when experimentation with structure in a poem, was in danger of completely dominating, to the detriment of comprehension. These are short lived shifts of emphasis, lasting barely the length of one quite slim poetry volume. Merwin aimed to capture the paradigm of each moment, the colours and textures of its patterning, whether that was in the urban cityscape of New York or a rural setting. These poems paint a very personal event or recollection that are on occasions opaque for the reader to place in their own experience, as beautifully expressed as they are. Reaching out towards some profundity, but falling short. He was consistently a good poet, who occasionally became truly great when he happened to stumble upon a mode of expression that opened up something far vaster and more universal in scale.

'Inside this pencil

crouch words that have never been written

never been spoken

never been taught

they're hiding'
*****

One repeated theme in Merwin's poetry is at the point where prosaic language fails us, the ecology of our language, where words easily lose their meaning, the names of places, plants and tribes, whose origins fast disappear from folk memory. Those things that we no longer remember the detail of, the what or who they were, what something was made for, what job did this once do. We are a species that continues to be fired by its migrations, perpetually emigres leaving home, moving on, forgetting, forging a new vision for ourselves in a new place. One of the purposes of Merwin's poetry was as a reminder to us, to keep the ecology of language alive, to preserve what has become unspoken, the no longer heard cadences. Ideas and ways of being on the verge of being forgotten or erased by blind adherence to the notion of progress.

'Finally the old man is telling

the forgotten names

and the names of the stones they came from

for a long time I asked him the names

and when he says them at last

I hear no meaning

and cannot remember the sounds' 
******

Lines taken from the poems
* Piere Vidal - 1996
** Romanesque - 1996
*** Utterance - 1988
**** The Counting Houses - 1977
***** The Unwritten - 1973
****** Hearing The Names Of The Valleys - 1988

All extracts from
W.S. Merwin - Migration - New & Selected Poems 2005