A Rage and Sorrow Undiminished by the Passage of Time

In an era in which the popular view--bred from poetry slams and other populist movements--holds that poetry is the collision of rhyme and fury, W.S. Merwin stands apart. To him, poetry is a discipline, and the art of wrestling words into meaning and taming your emotions is the work of a lifetime, not a diversion.

From his early formalism to his later lyricism and then romanticism and now to narrative and political activism, he has for five decades been praised as one of America’s most original voices in poetry, translations and criticism.

So just how important is Merwin, who will soon have his 45th volume published? Important enough that Carol Muske Dukes, poet and creative writing professor at USC, says simply, “Merwin’s influence on all of us is tremendous.” And J.D. McClatchy, poetry editor of the Yale Review, credits him with returning “narrative grandeur” to American poetry.

In fact, he’s important enough that there is a joke in literary circles that if Merwin has not won a particular prize, it obviously is not worth winning.

A Merwin poem is often a cry of pain or despair or indignation as passionate as any coffeehouse oracle but crafted in a tight, spare manner, a controlled anger that informs much of his work.

In “The River of Bees,” he writes:

He was old he is not real

nothing is real

Nor the noise of death drawing

water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to

survive

But we were not born to survive

Only to live

This October, Merwin’s longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, will issue “The Pupil,” a collection with such disparate themes as the government-sponsored torture of bears in Pakistan and the beating death of a young gay man in Wyoming. “Few poets remain active after a certain age,” said Peter Davison, poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. “What is extraordinary about Merwin is that he remains prolific, always cutting-edge, always pushing out to new things.”

At an age--73--when he might be expected to relax on his plantation in Hawaii and assume emeritus status, Merwin has instead launched on one of the most productive periods of his career, finding new forms, new themes, new causes. A gracious man with an unassuming stage presence, Merwin occasionally ventures to the mainland to read his own words to kindred souls and to speak quietly but passionately about the need for poetry in American life, for children and adults.

“Children love the sound of words, not the rational communication maybe, but something in the words themselves,” he said recently before a reading here. “Somehow that gets discouraged in this country during the course of their lives, which is [tragic].”

On stage at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, Merwin, his once dark and unruly hair having long since matured into a distinguished white, looks positively professorial--an irony since, unlike many poets, he has steadfastly avoided seeking a university sinecure. “I didn’t want to become dependent upon an academic career or an academic community; I would have found that claustrophobic,” Merwin said. “I tried to live a more free world and have a lot of existence.”

Two years ago Merwin released his translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Just a year earlier he had published perhaps his most ambitious work: a 330-page poetic narrative of 19th century Hawaii, “The Folding Cliffs.”

The environmental rape of Hawaii remains a poetic and political concern of overriding significance for Merwin. From archival sources, “The Folding Cliffs” tells of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by a coup backed by the U.S. government, the economic subjugation of the Hawaiian people and the ruthless internment of Hawaiians afflicted with leprosy (a disease brought to the islands by white men).

The lines are longer, more prosaic, more immediately accessible than Merwin’s other works. Long stretches are almost novelistic, but shorter ones are lyric and mythical:

Born on a dark wave the fragrance

of red seaweed

born on the land the shore grass

hissing while the night slips

through a narrow place a man is

born for the narrows

a woman is born for where the

waters open

the passage is for a god it is not for

a human

the god is a gourd full of water and

vines climbing from it

there the forest rises to stand in the

current of night

with time moving through it and

the branches reach out

into darkness the blue darkness at

the sea’s root.

William Stanley Merwin, son of a Presbyterian minister from the coal country of Pennsylvania, graduated from Princeton in 1947 and worked on Majorca as a tutor for the young son of British poet Robert Graves. In 1952 he burst onto the literary scene by winning the Yale Younger Poets prize, whose judge was W.H. Auden. It was the beginning of a friendship that grew to include other well-known poets of the time.

The Yale prize launched a career that has few rivals in terms of stylistic range, prolific output and the ability to shift topics and forms but retain a unique voice.

A Merwin poem is deeply rooted in a sense of place. For 25 years that place has been a former pineapple plantation on the Hawaiian island of Maui near an extinct volcano. Merwin’s Hawaii has both natural beauty and enormous sadness caused by the destruction of the native environment, culture and language.

In the middle stanza of “Anniversary on the Island,” from his collection “The Rain in the Trees,” Merwin writes of the daily discovery of living on Maui:

day after day we wake to the island

the light rises through the drops on

the leaves

and we remember like birds where

we are

night after night we touch the dark

island

that once we set out for

A literary detective exploring Merwin’s work, particularly his early poems, can find, as the critic Vernon Young has noted, traces of “biblical tales, classical myth, love songs from the age of chivalry, Renaissance retellings . . . carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas, the masque, the zodiac, the dance of death.”

Although the forms may be different, the new poems have the characteristic Merwin anger, anger at man’s cruelty to man, man’s betrayal of nature. Merwin’s anger is more of a lament than a tirade, never the kind of venting found in much of modern poetry.

“Occasionally, I’ve abandoned something I’m writing because I felt the anger was so [large] that I was completely lost,” said Merwin. “Anger is the most difficult of all emotions to have in poetry.”

When Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote of the Vietnam War, his poetry was an explosion of scatology, obscenity and outrage. Merwin, no less horrified at American involvement in the war, picks his words carefully in “The Asians Dying,” which reads, in part:

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.

Poetry, Merwin said, can be beautiful and demanding but, if it is good, truly good, it is not easy, not for the reader and certainly not for the poet. “Poetry is impossible,” he said. “You are trying to make your language do something it never did before. . . . It’s never done quite satisfactorily. It’s a most extraordinary exercise.”

By any measure, Merwin is a member of the poetry establishment. He has been a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, won the Pulitzer in 1970 (for the collection “The Carrier of Ladders”) and has known many of the great and near-greats of modern poetry.

Auden was a mentor, although Merwin ignored his advice to temper his public opposition to the Vietnam War. While he was a student at Princeton, he went to see the incarcerated Ezra Pound, who counseled him that poetry comes from “a kind of spontaneity which arises out of discipline and continual devoting to something.”

He studied with Robert Lowell while the New England poet was suffering intermittent spells of madness. He knew lyric poet John Berryman and was both enthralled by his devotion to poetry and repelled by Berryman’s insulting manner as he fell deeper into alcoholism. During a recent speaking tour, Merwin visited the the bridge in Minneapolis where Berryman leaped to his death in 1971. “He was the kind of poet that you could love one moment and then want to punch in the face the next,” Merwin said.

Merwin was part of one of the most celebrated brawls in literary history when, in 1975, fists and furniture flew at an off-campus event of the Ginsberg-inspired Naropa Institute, a Buddhist university in Boulder, Colo. The spat began when Merwin and his then-lover, Hawaiian poet Dana Naone, refused entreaties by a drunken Tibetan guru to strip naked and join in a round of chanting. Merwin has written about the seriocomic scene but has since decided enough is enough. “That man [guru Chogyam Trungpa] should never have been allowed near students,” he said.

He also declines to talk about his friendship with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath during their tempestuous marriage. Plath loyalists are forever looking to add to the list of men they feel victimized their hero, and Merwin has no desire to be the object of their fury, even though he says he and Plath were only friends.

After living for decades in New York, Boston, Mexico, France and England, he moved to Hawaii in 1975. A pacifist and Buddhist, he was drawn to Hawaii by a master Zen teacher, who also instructed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.

Merwin and his third wife, Paula, live modestly, and somewhat reclusively, on 18 acres near the forested village of Haiku on the Hana coast. When not writing, Merwin spends his days restoring the plantation to its natural state, planting and nurturing native flora.

He has lent his support to the island’s environmental movement, arguing against cutting down an ancient grove of trees for development, against expanding the Maui airport to increase tourism, and in favor of declaring Maui a “nuclear-free zone” to prod the Navy to keep its nuclear submarines away from the island.

“Hawaii is being turned into some sort of spread-out Disneyland, degraded by tourism,” Merwin said. “You get up in the rain forest, a silent place, and the next thing, you get a [sightseeing] helicopter coming right down. Their noise is damaging to the place, damaging to the beauty.”

In “Rain at Night,” Merwin writes:

after an age of leaves and feathers

someone dead

thought of this mountain as money

and cut the trees

that were here in the wind

in the rain at night

Reviews of “The Folding Cliffs” were mixed. McClatchy, long a champion, praised its sweep and grandeur. Renowned naturalist and author Peter Matthiessen called it “bold and stunning.”

But Richard Hamasaki, a Japanese American writer living in Hawaii, faulted Merwin for not giving greater credit to his sources and for not emphasizing the poetry of Merwin’s real-life heroine, Pi’ilani. Feminists objected to a man telling a story from a woman’s point of view.

If Merwin was disturbed by the criticism, he has not shown it. To be a poet is to be open to criticism and its twin: self-doubt. “When I finish a poem, I think it’s probably the last one I’ll ever write,” Merwin said. “You live with that fear. You know it, and you live with it. Otherwise, you get arrogant, smug and think you know all the answers.”