Mixed Messages as W. S. Merwin Is Named Poet Laureate at 82
July 3, 2010
News stories reporting this week that W. S. Merwin had been named the 17th poet laureate of the United States were quick to note that the 82-year-old poet leads a relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii. (I always thought poets were supposed to lead relatively reclusive lives. Isn’t that how poetry gets written?)
These stories seemed to ask, albeit gingerly, whether Merwin would be vigorous, public, or peripatetic enough to promote poetry in our celebrity and internet-dominated age. After all, Merwin (Heavens!) even eschews the computer for his writing of poetry.
I found myself wondering about the subtle ways of ageism.
Were Merwin younger, wouldn’t reporters have been curious if the poet, who has written deeply for years about the environment, saw irony in being named poet laureate as the worst environmental accident in history, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, was still unfolding? I wondered, too, at the curiosity that one of America’s most mindful poets would assume office at the very moment there is a debate roiling over whether life on the web is harming our ability to concentrate and think profoundly.
Forty years ago, Merwin, the Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister who won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971, was well-known as a powerful voice in protests against the Vietnam War. Last year, he won his second Pulitzer for his most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, in which he writes about memory and mortality.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Lund reported that there were those who were disappointed that a poet more like “Robert Pinsky, the most effective laureate to date,” had not been selected. She commented that Pinsky had, as laureate, exhibited the “zeal of an activist and the charisma of a celebrity. The George Clooney of the poetry world, if you will.”
New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, noted that Merwin “retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth,” and reported that after he had learned of the announcement of his appointment, he told her by telephone he wasn’t looking forward to having his life disrupted, though he does “relish” taking a more public part in the conversation about poetry. “I do like a very quiet life,” he said. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.”
It should be said that in their stories both reporters ultimately embraced Merwin’s masterful, elliptical, and frequently mysterious poems. Rooted in mindful attentiveness to the everyday, his poems often have a quicksilver quality to them.
“It’s a joy to be part of everything that’s living, and to be able to give something back sometimes,” Merwin, who moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, told NPR’s Melissa Block. His move to Hawaii was inspired by his interest in Zen Buddhism and the notion of living a wholistic life. He has said that he plans to use his new post to draw attention to the poetry of indigenous cultures and the power of translation, something at which he has also given great service in his career as a poet.
What’s important about naming Merwin poet laureate is the degree to which his mind, not the lineaments of his face, has retained and deepened a life and a body of work made of the mix of devotion to craft, consciousness, and imagination. Perhaps his tenure will be quieter and more contemplative than Pinsky’s was, but it will be the manifestation of his way of being in the world, not solely a function of age. And it seems that we could, at this moment, profit considerably from his mindful example.
Here’s “Separation,” a beautiful 3-line poem he wrote early in his career and which Block asked a surprised Merwin to read on air.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—
And here’s one I like a great deal:
“I Live Up Here”
I live up here
And a little bit to the left
And I go down only
For the accidents and then
Never a moment too soon
Just the same it’s a life it’s plenty
The stairs the petals she loves me
Every time
Nothing has changed
Oh down there down there
Every time
The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood
In the pans of the scales the helmets
Brim over with water
It’s perfectly fair
The pavements are dealt out the dice
Every moment arrive somewhere
You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs
Their bells stalling
And then silence comes with the plate and I
Give what I can
Feeling It’s worth it
For I see
What my votes the mice are accomplishing
And I know I’m free
This is how I live
Up here and simply
Others do otherwise
Maybe
——
And here’s Merwin talking to NPR’s Terry Gross in 2008 on memory, mortality, and the writing process.
Poet Joe Enzweiler and His Cabin Door in Alaska
May 8, 2010
There are days I truly love the Internet. This morning was one of them. Searching for news from the frontiers of neuroscience, I found Joseph Enzweiler. He is a physicist-turned-poet and stone mason who remade his life in rural Alaska, rejecting a life defined by a career in favor of one defined by his attention to life.
“Time—not cash—is the treasure in life,” he recently told the alumni magazine of Xavier University. “That’s what I wanted. I understood the bargain: I gave up a career-type job so I could write poetry and live a life more in keeping with the cycles of the seasons. I’m off the grid, no plumbing, no mortgage, no bills. It’s not for everybody, but this way of life has suited me.” In a story posted on the website of the Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center, the author of five books of poetry added his rationale: “I want my silence.”
During the summer of 2009, Joe was diagnosed and later treated for a brain tumor in his native Ohio. I’ll post the links to the excellent stories in Xavier Alumni magazine and on CBTC site below, but first I’m hoping you’ll read Joe’s poem “Cabin Door,” from his collection A Winter on Earth, published by Iris Books, and listen to him reading it during an interview with Barbara Gray @ wxvu 91.7 radio in Cinncinnati.
It is a poem of considerable beauty and depth and humanity, built with the kind of word-by-word craft with which, easy to imagine, Joe also builds his walls. I love that I can see and feel the door at the same time I can feel it opening a portal in my own brain through which I enter Joe’s life, hearing the voice of his father come back to him in the voice of the door, the door through which he passes into the physical world and back into the world of mind and memory. Its closing line contains a wish I share with the readers of What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life?
“Cabin Door”
Friend, mute thing
I shake hands with
every day, who for
twenty-five years
let me escape
in both directions,
I remember the night
of the Coleman lamps
when I was so young
the world was all
fiberglas and plywood,
my breath an apparition
in the block of cold
that would be home.
And you, too heavy
to lift, sledded here
by moonlight, shimmered
and bolted on, felt
around the edges to seal
out the rapier wind.
As if this was my
spaceship to the stars,
emissary in a corner chair
from a world that,
as I arrive in greeting
light years hence,
is no longer there.
You watched it all,
June’s leafy sun, winter
loosening into sap and mud.
On the other side,
old loves of mine
and meals alone.
Till I stand up
one more time, put on
my coat and greet you.
Daylight floods in hinged
and white. Don’t wait
for me. Can’t promise
I’ll be back, as you
repeat what my father
told me once, from your
deepening veneer:
“I hope you find
what you’re looking for.”
Radio interview with Barbara Gray at WVXU:WXVU interview with Joe Enzweiler
Here are the links to the story from the Xavier Magazne by Greg Shaber Xavier profile Enzweiler and the Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center - Enzweiler .
Farewell to Poet Lucille Clifton, 73, Her Voice and Hips
February 20, 2010
Lucille Clifton had one of those voices that rises from somewhere deeper than throat or chest, stomach or hips. Body and voice were one. And no, like her hips, Clifton, a National Book Award winner who died on Feb. 14, at 73, did not “fit into little/ petty places.”
Nor did her words, which she spoke directly to the listener, inflected with the blues and a head-wagging humor that forgives everything and nothing. Each drop of language revealed layers of personal, familial, and racial history. But as it did, it transcended the experience with vision. She transformed her immediate life into mythologies that, in turn, reverberated like depth charges with delayed truths of deeper places.
Before you read her obituary in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/17clifton.html, listen to her read her “homage to my hips” via poets.org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15599, or watch her at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.