W. S. Merwin was most recently named the first Laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Lindsay Ahl: What is poetry about, for you?
W.S. Merwin: I’m very old fashioned in what I think poetry is about; I think it’s about people’s lives. And it exists in some mysterious place between the unknown experience of the original writer, and partly unknown experience of the reader, who responds to it in ways that are never completely worked out. I mean, we don’t know why we love a particular poem. We don’t stop to think why we do. We just do, you know.
Ahl: Eliot talked about an objective, or impersonal stance, toward writing poetry. Did you ever think about that in relation to your own work?
Merwin: I didn’t ever do that. I did grow up in the shadow of that. Eliot was a very large figure in the literary world that I grew up in. I still admire him enormously, the Four Quartets in particular, but he’s not as important to me as he used to be. But he was very important—his criticism was important to several generations of teachers, including the ones who taught me. And his idea that the life of the poet was of no importance, and you kept it out of the poems as much as you could, was prevalent. I understand why it worked for Eliot, but after all, he stopped writing. He didn’t write after a period of time in his life. But I don’t think it’s something that a whole literature can survive. You know, I think one of the sad things of modern, contemporary literature, is the way that aspect of Eliot was followed by the deconstructionists who ended by saying the subject is of no importance, it’s the commentary that really matters, and all of the constructions that you put on it by deconstructing it. I never could swallow that. I think that literary commentary, literary response, cannot exist without the poetry there to begin with. The poetry can exist perfectly well without the criticism, but the criticism cannot exist without the poetry. And the poetry, this idea that there’s no subject, no experience, I think is a very dangerous path to travel and I think it’s a dead one. I think it’s very bad for poets and writers to get mixed up in.
Ahl: In the end, after loving his work, I was frustrated by Joyce, who seemed more concerned with the language and how to work it than with the emotions of real life.
Merwin: But certainly, the life and the experience were there for Joyce. They were extensively there for Joyce. And they were there for all the people who talk as if they weren’t there. I mean, Beckett is full of Beckett’s life. The myth of how it’s not there is part of Beckett’s huge joke on everybody, including on Beckett.
Ahl: (laughter) Yes, Beckett is cool.
Merwin: Very cool indeed. What a great writer. And you know, since we’re talking about prose writers now, Sebald is one of my absolute heroes.
Ahl: He’s amazing.
Merwin: And I was talking the other day with Adrienne Rich about Faulkner; both of us love Faulkner. Faulkner is fantastic, and the idea is that there’s no subject, or that the subject is just bursting the page, and I think that’s true of most poetry. It’s true of the poetry of our time, too.
Ahl: Faulkner is a favorite of mine as well, which reminds me, (because his writing is like music), I wanted to ask you how Beethoven might have informed you.
Merwin: Well, I guess he did. I mean I’ve loved him all my life. And he was one of the heroes when I was 17 and 18 working out some very difficult things. Oddly enough, Pound and Beethoven in very different ways, exemplified people who insisted on being artists—who insisted on being a musician or on being a poet—in circumstances that didn’t encourage the way they thought about it. Beethoven was obsessively a great composer, that was what he really cared about most, and Pound, coming from a very middle class background, was determined to be a poet, and he did it in a very swashbuckling way and with politics that I later learned about and was very upset by, but at that time, when I was in my late teens, he was very important to me. And they helped me with a decision that I came to then, and haven’t really changed my mind about. And the third person who was really an influence on me was Spinoza, if you can image that. Spinoza’s Ethics, I read when I was 17.
Ahl: I know you’re interested in nature and the environment, and there’s a book, called The Spell of the Sensuous, in which David Abrams suggests that it is written language, in part, that has separated us from ourselves, and separated us therefore from the world. And I’ve been thinking about the way words contain, or define, or limit, or separate one thing from the other. The example David uses is about how the Indians wouldn’t say necessarily, “there is a squirrel in the tree,” but assume that the squirrel and the tree are linked; somehow, they are one happening. And then a related idea, on how they wouldn’t even say the word squirrel, they would say, “that one there in the tree,” because to speak the word is to desecrate the spirit of the squirrel. So, I wanted you to talk about your experience, or your ideas about words, and the way in which they’re very powerful and great, and they take as to something, but also the way in which they take us away or separate us from the world and ourselves.
Merwin: I think this is part of what is mysterious about poetry. If you ask a student where a poem is, they rapidly reach a point where they can’t answer the question. Because of course, there is no answer to the question. Where does the poem exist? Is it on the page? Is it in your head? Is it in time, at the moment that you’re looking at it? Has it been there all along? Where is it? You don’t know. You don’t know where it is. You know that it is between two other mysteries. One was the original experience of the poem; the other is your own experience, which allows you to respond to it. None of these things can be defined or turned into something you call the squirrel or the tree. They’re all of them amorphous, they’re moving in time, changed by everything, but they are a constellation that works together. And that is far more mysterious than critical theory. When you read a sonnet of Shakespeare, you don’t think about Shakespeare’s love life, you probably don’t understand your own love life very well, but something in between them, which is these extraordinary words, wakes them both up and makes a link between them. And yet it is something completely unresolved, too. Because that’s the thing about a poem, a poem is a primal thing. It’s about something maybe, but it is something itself first, and we respond to that fact too. These things to me seem so obvious about poetry, but they’re sometimes overlooked when one is writing about it. I think the Abrams you quoted is amazing and I certainly agree with him, and I love the thing about the squirrel and the tree, which is very close to some teachings of Buddhism, of course. I think when you begin to have theocracy and theology with a monotheistic god, and monotheistic system, you begin to have that dualism. The “I” becomes separate from the world around it. Then the words become separate from the things around them. One of the things that is fascinating about pre-written language is exactly what Abrams is talking about, that attempt to get past that difference between language, and what it is referring to, leading to, pointing to.
Ahl: Talk a little about your syntax, and your lack of punctuation.
Merwin: Well, syntax is the grammatical organization, grammatical logic of your language, and I think one of the most valuable exercises in learning how to do that and having some flexibility with it is translation. Translation is teaching you all the time that there’s not one way of saying it, there are always better ways of saying it, and by listening and working with the language, you can find them. You might not find the ultimate best one, but you can find better ones. You start out feeling like there’s one way of saying something, and there isn’t one way of saying something. There are infinite ways. Translation helps you to do that, because you’ve got some sort of ultimate ideal you’re heading toward, which is something that is close to the original, so that’s a big help to you. When you’re doing your own poems, it’s a different thing, because you end up doing the same thing, but you’re still looking for the language that’s really alive and that will help you say it. But the language is the poem—you’re not trying to get it to be like something else like you are with a translation. You want it to be like itself. But the fact that there are many ways of expressing something, that there are many ways of expressing every phrase, is a very valuable one to keep learning. And translation is one of the best ways of doing that.
Ahl: You haven’t used punctuation in your poems in a long time, have you?
Merwin: Oh, no. I stopped doing that in my thirties. But it wasn’t as though I was suggesting that everybody else do that. I wasn’t even suggesting that I should do that as a general thing. But once I got started, I got fascinated by it and wanted to stay with it because for me it made sense. It’s a form like any other and it has its restrictions, it’s difficult. You have to be able to hear the poem or I think it may lead to confusion. But you have to be able to hear poems anyway.
Ahl: For yourself, do you define yourself as a poet or writer, or do you get your identity in other ways?
Merwin: Sometimes a tree, you’re looking at one branch or you’re looking at another, but it’s always a tree, you know? And sometimes a poem will begin when I’m out working in the garden, when I’m not thinking about it at all. That’s the way I would like it to be. I think if I were doing literary work, or even teaching all the time, it might be harder, but it’s marvelous living in a way that if I stop writing I can do something which is not really having to do with words, but physical activity, in the garden, or something like that. I love gardening, and a lot of other things. And I don’t stop to think, I’m a poet loving these things. If you’re lucky, you can forget about yourself completely.
Ahl: I find your work to be playful and odd and funny. The humor is always there, in slant.
Merwin: I’m glad you say it’s funny.
Ahl: It is. I read one story, in The Miner’s Pale Children, about the guy who puts the boulder in his living room, on the carpet, and the cat and the dog piss on it, and his wife complains, but he wants it there, because it stands for that feeling of peace that he was missing, as though the boulder is his connection to himself.
Merwin: Well, I’m so glad. You know Pasternak, when someone asked him what the most overlooked aspect of his writing was, he said humor.
Ahl: Even in something so serious as the poem, To ________, in Present Company, which is a deep and sad poem, there is an edge of play.
Merwin: I think that’s something that runs through a great deal of the poetry that I love, from the Greeks right up to the present. Sometimes the deepest feeling is accompanied by laughing at oneself too. You were mentioning Joyce and Beckett, I mean they do that all the time. So often where the feeling is deepest, it has a funny edge to it. And they’re making a joke and the joke is always on themselves.
Ahl: When I was young, and I was reading Eliot and Pound, I very much got the feeling that I was supposed to be the kind of writer who would contribute to the entire history of poetry. You’re not just allowed to do your little self-expression; you’re responsible to the past, to continue on their conversation, or to speak to them, and to the future, to say something worthwhile about the conversation that is going. Did you experience that feeling when you were young, or do you have a more organic approach in which you write what you need to write, and let it fall where it will?
Merwin: The latter, but I grew up on all of that. When I was in college that was what was all around, but I couldn’t follow it, I couldn’t stay with it, it was too restrictive, and I don’t think it’s a question of what one should do. I went ahead, and just listened to the poems. I had no idea where they would come from. I still don’t have any idea where they will come from. But they don’t come out with me thinking they ought to happen in a particular way. I don’t know what in particular way it is that it ought to happen, and I don’t think that this allegiance to the literary tradition is of great importance either. I think it’s like our relation to our language, I mean we don’t speak English out of some allegiance to Chaucer, but Chaucer’s English is part of what we’re saying. All of the emotional and imaginative experiences of the English language are in the language somewhere. They’re embedded in the words and in the phrases and in the usages of this wonderfully rich and wonderfully messy language we have. And this is true of poetry too. The whole of poetry is somehow there in every new poem that works. It’s marched over its cradle, brought it to birth, and it’s there. You don’t have to worry about it, it’s there, and alive, and it’s there in the language and it’s there in the poetry. Poetry is part of a living tradition. And if we’re lucky, we should be able to feel that in the language and when we hear something that might become a poem. That’s part of the excitement. But you don’t think about that as a theoretical thing, it’s just there. If you’re lucky, if we’re lucky.
Ahl: Is there a question you’ve wanted to answer that hasn’t been asked of you?
Merwin: Students, young people who want to write, ask, where does a poem come from, how does a poem start? And you know even if I could answer clearly, for me, it might not be of any use to them. All of those things are, in a way, gossip. I think the nearest thing I can say that might be of general truth to me, and maybe to other poets, is that a poem, very seldom, for me, begins with an idea of something, it almost always begins with hearing some language, a phrase, or some part of a sentence. It may be something that I’ve heard all my life, that I hadn’t paid any attention to, and then all of a sudden there it is, as though a light went on and it had a whole life that I had never heard before. And I know that that could be part of a poem, or a part of a line of a poem, and I don’t know what the poem is about, but it’s hearing something. Poetry to me is always connected to listening. It’s always physical in a way that prose may or may not be. It’s not essential to prose, but it is essential to poetry. So, I just want people, and I want readers, to listen. I want young poets to listen to themselves. That’s what you want poets to hear. And what is it that you hear? I don’t know. Just that. You hear a phrase, or a word, or a way of saying something that you hadn’t heard before, and that’s the beginning of something.