New Laureate

The best reading of poetry requires deep and sustained attention, it demands a retreat from the noises that surround us and a quieting of the voices within us, and it rewards our concentration with a more finely tuned awareness of truths, an awareness that is affirmative even when the news is bad. Few poetries at once demand and reward this kind of careful listening as richly as does W.S. Merwin’s finest work. For over fifty years now, since his first book (A Mask for Janus) was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Merwin has produced poetry that answers to and embodies the deepest difficulties inherent in language and life. He has also published volumes of translations (from, it seems, half the poets who have ever written in three-quarters of the world’s languages, including, most recently, Dante, the Gawain poet, and Follain), and four books of breathtaking prose. Now, this craftsman is the Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Much has been made of the stylistic shifts that have marked Merwin's career, that have, indeed, demarcated its eras. It is true that Merwin began by mastering the intricate and lapidary forms bequeathed him by the European lyric tradition and then, in the early and middle 1960s, published searing, stripped down, fragmentary poems that read like the eroded remains of lyric inscriptions. It is true that the early poems bear little resemblance to a poem like “Gift,” written twenty years later and including such lines as “I am nameless I am divided / I am invisible I am untouchable,” and that “Gift” is not much like the politically aggressive “Questions to Tourists Stopped By a Pineapple Field” published ten years later and that neither of these poems compares in philosophical density and wealth of historical detail to more recent poems like, say, “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” which is itself different from the thrilling autumnal auroras of The River Sound, which, if we really want to compare apples and oranges, cannot approach the epic sweep and episodic pathos of the brilliant book-length narrative poem on nineteenth-century Hawai’i, The Folding Cliffs.

At the same time, a rereading of this long and varied career yields surprising continuities. Merwin’s has always been a poetry crafted amidst and in the full awareness and acceptance of mortality. It is, as life is, a preparation for those last fires. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenarios of the early books continue in the later work, in, for example, the devastating representation of sandalwood logging and its associated natural and human destruction in The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s passionate care for the natural environment and his passionate critique of human rapacity have energized his poems throughout his career. So have his convictions about injustice and what he has called “the shamelessness of men,” from 1967’s “The Asians Dying” to 2001’s “The Fence,” dedicated to Matthew Shepard.

More central and enduring even than these specific political energies, though, has been Merwin’s understanding that language is at once what enables and enacts those extinctions and injustices and what might help us to find other, better ways of being in the world. Indeed, Merwin’s famous abandonment of punctuation (about halfway through 1963’s The Moving Target – I like to date it, conveniently, to “The Crossroads of the World, Etc.”) can be read as one of his most powerful strategies for loosening the determining and debilitating hold syntax so often has upon us. His unpunctuated lines, whether the short, almost groaned lines of The Lice or the long and limber lines of Travels, involve us in repeated dramas of resolution, revision, and renewed meaning.

Don't take my word for it. Here is "December Among the Vanished," one of my favorites from The Lice:

The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Birds with it

The beasts hide in the knitted walls
From the winter that lipless man
Hinges echo but nothing opens

A silence before this one
Has left its broken huts facing the pastures
Through their stone roofs the snow
And the darkness walk down

In one of them I sit with a dead shepherd
And watch his lambs

And here is "Cold Spring Morning," from Merwin's 2008 volume, The Shadow of Sirius:

At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled wlanut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go

To parse these poems is to engage the rules for sense-making, to admit our own wrong-footedness, to rethink relationships (grammatical and otherwise), and to engage a mind that will shrink neither from conviction nor from complexity. To read Merwin is to become a better reader, and to share his cautious hope that better readers might be better people. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest wisdom we might hope for from a careful communion with the mind embodied in Merwin’s poems: an intertwined distrust of language as that which categorizes and prioritizes and, too often, dehumanizes, and as at the same time, also, always, that with which we might come more tentatively, tenderly, but fully to be human together.