Number 291
Summer 2003

Moving Target:
Merwin’s Elusive Music
STEPHEN KESSLER
Copyright © 2003 Poetry Flash

Seated onstage in an armchair at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, W. S. Merwin looks relaxed. Legs crossed casually, crown of white hair radiant under the lights, Merwin is clearly comfortable in the role of distinguished man of letters as he deftly fields the questions of designated interlocutor Renee Rothmann of City Arts & lectures in what is billed as a California Academy of Sciences Conversation. Sciences? Well, it’s Earth Day, April 22, National Poetry Month, and in addition to his eminence as a poet and translator Merwin’s environmentalist credentials are impeccable, cultivating as he does what is no doubt the planet’s most famous “garden of rare and endangered palm trees” at his home on Maui. So he’s here to discuss not only literature but nature, and maybe a bit of politics too, given his recent public denunciations of the president and his policies in a much-circulated statement for Poets Against the War.
Now seventy-five and at the peak of a more than fifty-year career, turning out books of poetry, prose and translation at a pace that only accelerates with age, charmingly avuncular and sprightly at the same time, Merwin cuts an attractive yet unapproachable figure, his tenor voice smooth and melodic as a Ben Webster saxophone solo, his demeanor cool yet warm, serious yet witty, low-key, twinkly-eyed, modest reserve recurrently broken by the subtle trace of something like a smirk—his signature expression, mischievous and maybe a little smug. One can hardly fault him for this attitude of evident self-satisfaction: he’s published more than forty books and won nearly every prize of any consequence.
Yet given his towering stature, something about this evening is out of joint. The spacious hall is barely two-fifths full, and while nearly four hundred people is a respectable turnout for such an event, I had expected, as in the past, a sold-out crowd to hear this poet’s poet. San Francisco after all has one of the more dynamic poetry communities in the country. But perhaps its billing as a science program, the eighteen-dollar ticket price (sure to discourage low-budget bohemians), the exodus from the city of many writerly and artistic types during the dot-com boom of the nineties, a freshly depressed economy, low-grade terrorism scares, and the fact that this isn’t a reading but an interview have all combined to keep away a larger cross-section of the literati. Despite his fame in literary circles, Merwin has managed to maintain an almost invisible public profile—unlike such poetry stars as Billy Collins and Maya Angelou—and his deliberate abstention from celebrity may be another factor in the failure to fill the house.
But I can’t help thinking of another aspect of Merwin’s prodigious career that may have contributed to the number of empty seats. Since being anointed by W. H. Auden the Yale Younger Poet of 1952 (when that award was virtually the only one of its kind and either the launching pad or the kiss of death for a bard on the way up) Merwin has been such a constant presence in American poetry that it’s easy to take him for granted, like some monumental feature of the natural landscape. He writes books faster than most people can read them, and his name turns up in the respectable highbrow and progressive press (The New Yorker, The New York Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The American Poetry Review and countless other journals) almost as often as that of the ubiquitous John Updike. Thankfully, Merwin lacks Updike’s smarmy glibness, but in terms of sheer production he’s comparably phenomenal; so perhaps it’s that omnipresence in print that makes his appearance in this poetry mecca too routine to cause much of a ripple.
Still, those of us who’ve shown up to hear him are getting our money’s worth, as Rothman’s questions are evocative enough to get the great man talking. She opens with an Earth Day reference to his “palm tree forest,” and he seems flattered by the designation but corrects her: “We don’t know how to make forests. Forests make forests. We know how to plant trees.” He explains that the depleted state of his land has required years of corrective cultivation, and from there digresses into a discourse on natural ecosystems and how they’re composed of multitudes of species interrelating in webs of interconnection too complex to be replicated by anything man-made. This strikes me as an apt metaphor for Merwin’s literary career, the fertile interaction of his original poetry with translation from several languages (sometimes working with other scholars) and various forms of prose (fictions, memoir, essays, criticism) amounting to a kind of artistic ecosystem in which no individual element can be separated out from the others without diminishing the integrity of the whole.
As a translator alone Merwin’s contribution has been immense, from his versions of such contemporaries as Jaime Sabines (Mexico) and Roberto Juarroz (Argentina) to the resurrection of such classical epics as Poem of the Cid and Dante’s Purgatorio, and outside Romance languages from collaborations on Osip Mandelstam through Sanskrit love lyrics to renderings of little zingers from various East Asian languages and cultures. His translations are characterized by a lightness of touch, a graceful ability to stay out of the original’s way while attempting to convey its meaning and a trace of its music—unlike some other translators who, consciously or not, tend to interpose their own personalities between the original and the reader. “What fascinated me about poetry as a child was hearing differences in the language,” he says in response to a question on how he got started. “Poetry is not like prose,” it is “a different kind of language,” and from early on he set out to explore those differences.
A visit to Ezra Pound when he was nineteen proved formative. Pound told him that if he was serious about poetry he should write seventy-five lines a day. Since nineteen-year-olds don’t have much experience of their own to write about, Pound advised: “Translate, you will learn your own language.” (Merwin noted as an aside that if he had known at the time about Pound’s politics—the old man was imprisoned in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital for his pro-fascist ravings on Italian radio during World War II—he wouldn’t have gone to see him. Now, he added, he’d go to see him in spite of his politics.)
While Pound’s bizarre and often noxious political and economic theories frequently infected his poetry, Merwin has very seldom written explicitly political poems. His longtime commitment to pacifism has manifested in other forms—like counseling draft resisters during the Vietnam era, writing a letter to The New York Times in January 2001 denouncing the stolen presidential election, and publishing his even more scathingly critical “Statement” for Poets Against the War. His political prose is forceful, precise and economical, but it is indeed a different kind of language from his verse, which tends to be enigmatic and ambiguous. “The poem should come first,” he says. “That’s one of the problems with political poetry. That’s why most political poetry is so bad. You know what you’re trying to say. You’re trying to persuade somebody.”
His environmentalism is easier to detect in the poems because his regard for nature is suffused with religious awe, a humble reverence for the cryptic workings of the elements. Apart from such nearly satirical poems as “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field,” or fabulist parables like “The Last One,” Merwin’s take on landscapes tends to be both specific and archetypal, precisely descriptive of places where he’s lived (France, Mexico, Hawaii) yet at the same time strangely elemental, as if these mountains and trees and rivers and animals exist purely in some universal consciousness of which the poet is merely a medium. The heart of Merwin’s lyric verse resides in a sense of immanence—as in Hawaiian myth, where the natural landscape, as he says in San Francisco, “is the gods, not representations of the gods.” This surely relates to his Buddhism, but he nimbly deflects a question about his own religious practice by citing the Hawaiian archetypes invoked in his epic The Folding Cliffs. It’s a tasteful way of avoiding any claim to spiritual authority or enlightenment, and typical of Merwin’s cagey evasiveness when it comes to revealing too much of his personal self.
That a core thematic element of his most intimate lyric verse should also inform his most ambitious historical narrative poem only serves to illustrate the ecosystemic interconnectedness of everything he writes. And if one were to think, on the basis of what I’ve said, that Merwin is merely or mainly some kind of tree-hugging pastoralist, you would have to ignore his numerous vivid evocations of urban experience in such poems as “The Crossroads of the World Etc.,” “St. Vincent’s,” “The Plumbing,” or the more recent and deeply nostalgic “227 Waverly Place” and “Sixth Floor Walk-Up.” For many years Merwin kept an apartment in Greenwich Village and spent about half his time there. His New York City poems are some of his finest, in the same way the best of his nature poems resound in multiple registers: the specificity of perception is closely entwined with a sense of cosmic mystery, so that no matter how precisely evoked a particular streetscape or sensory mixture of urban sights and sounds—the rich Whitmanic multiplicity of the actual city with its wealth of human solitudes—there’s always a sense of some truth or understanding that’s just beyond reach, a feeling of comprehension we never (as poet or reader) are able to grasp. It’s this intangible quality, this elusive fluidity of awareness and expression that gives these texts their hypnotic power and invites us back in to read them again and again.
Fluidity—it’s not just The River Sound or The Rain in the Trees (to cite the watery titles of two of his books) that give his poems their elemental slipperiness but the physical construction of the verse itself running along unpunctuated with only line breaks or extra spaces to indicate caesuras, or pauses, or eddies in the flow of the song. Merwin’s mastery of prosody, his uncanny control of poetic technique, has been evident from the beginning—it seems to be half the point of his early poems, many of which now read like rhetorical exercises designed to impress his teachers with their formal elegance and classical décor. Then, about half-way through his fifth book, The Moving Target (1963), punctuation begins to evaporate until, in his next collection, The Lice (1967), one of the landmark books of its era, scarcely a comma can be found. He has since gone on to purify his technique to resemble, as he put it in an interview, the nailless construction of some traditional Japanese buildings, notching his lines so precisely and seamlessly that the weight and rhythm of the words themselves are held in a natural equilibrium that is in fact the result of extremely sophisticated artifice. The poems, made purely of words, at times have the feel of subverbal thought-streams, preconscious apprehensions of reality mysteriously seeping into speech. Yet the deeper you go into their obscurity, the clearer they get. (To write without clarity, Merwin says, is “bad manners.”)
His facility with both traditional forms and those of his own invention, the subtlety with which he sustains syllabic structures and patterns of rhyme, make most of the “neoformalists” look like amateurs; but beyond this technical virtuosity, and its deployment to suggest what is ultimately inexpressible, it is the metaphysical aspect of Merwin’s work that may be its most pervasive characteristic. In San Francisco, for example, he speaks of “all the different ways in which time is a fiction.” This leads him to the Heraclitean observation: “The creation is happening even as it’s happened. At the same time. Everything is always beginning.” Like this statement, many of his poems dwell less on particular images than metaphysical principles in progress, states of awareness working themselves out, thought in pursuit of the ineffable. Resisting the comfort of neat conclusions, declining to draw lessons or offer instruction, Merwin’s best poems embody the poignancy and pathos of human ignorance. One of the few consolations we have, he implies, is the music (or poetry, as the case may be) with which to lament our lack of understanding.
If this sounds excessively pessimistic, I would argue that it’s more a kind of mystical skepticism, a surrender to or immersion in the incomprehensible combined with a constantly questioning discontent that refuses to take anything for an answer. And it isn’t just in the poetry that this questioning occurs. One of Merwin’s most amazing books, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970)—as well as its companion volume, Houses and Travellers (1977)—explores in brief prose fables or parables many of the same thematic preoccupations that run throughout his poems. Neither stories in any conventional sense, nor essays, nor prose poems, nor “tales” exactly, the prose in these books appears to be yet another instrument the writer has devised in order both to examine and embody the largely metaphysical questions (as in “Unchopping a Tree” or “Where Laughter Came From”) that lines of verse could never quite account for. These strange proses defy description because they themselves are impossibly successful attempts to describe the indescribable.
Even in his more conventional books of prose—the memoiristic portraits of Unframed Originals, the regional narratives of The Lost Upland, the medieval literary history disguised as travel guide in The Mays of Ventadorn—Merwin’s writing subverts existing genres. It is as if he is compelled to reinvent whatever form he puts his hand to, in this way honoring the absence of definition that is in some sense his philosophical signature. Only in his critical writings does he sound anything like a normal practitioner of the genre he’s chosen (the book review, for example), and even then his particular intelligence and unusual turn of mind tend to give his insights and arguments a distinctly Merwinian twist. It’s true, of course, that any writer evolves characteristic idiosyncrasies, but in Merwin’s case it’s all the more surprising, after the weirdness of his imaginative inventions, to hear him sound like the erudite scholar and sober critic he also is.
It’s worth noting here that, unlike most American poets of his own and subsequent generations, Merwin has somehow managed to make a career as a writer without ever taking a job in academia. Perhaps part of his singularity has to do with having steered clear not just of universities but schools of poetry as well. While identified by some with the “deep image” poets of the sixties and seventies, he’s never been associated with any group or movement, has managed to outmaneuver his imitators by frequently changing styles even while maintaining an unmistakable voice, and has remained largely above and beyond the various esthetic and ideological altercations among American poets over the last half century, patiently and relentlessly proceeding with his own project. At the same time, in recent years especially, he has judged contests, sat as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, written blurbs for books of the lesser known, and accepted the various honors that have steadily come his way. In short, he has remained outside all the mainstreams, keeping to himself while still participating in the literary community, a loner with a sense of social obligation.
“One of the things that makes poetry different from prose is that a poem is physical,” Merwin says. “If you don’t hear poetry you don’t get it.” He speaks of the necessity, for both poet and reader, of “learning how to listen” and “suddenly hearing something.” I believe what he’s talking about here is a quality of attention crucial not only to the act of composition and the pleasures of appreciation but to a way—a specifically “poetic” way—of being in the world. One needs to be receptive in order to be creative. You must allow the information, the music, the river of language to flow through you in order to find the inspiration that informs the active work of the artist. Composure, discipline, humility are required in the service of something greater than yourself.
At the end of the evening an audience member asks Merwin to describe the relation between his writing and his person, to explain how it is in his experience that a poem comes into being. “I don’t know,” he replies, “and I don’t want to know. I think that poetry comes out of something you don’t know. And the unknown is all around us. It’s inexhaustible.”

Stephen Kessler’s new translation, Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda, is due out next spring from City Lights. He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review and a contributing editor of Poetry Flash.