LA JOLLA — 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.
