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Like many young poets, W.S. Merwin is an Auden baby. We have featured some of our favorite Merwinity here, here, here, and here. Here is some more for the discerning reader. Share it with your close ones.
Berryman
by W.S. Merwin
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
Berryman
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his view about poetry
Merwin in the New York Review of Books
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
Merwin in the Cortland Review.
Timbaland aka Timothy Z. Mosley
“2 Man Show” — Timbaland featuring Elton John (mp3)
Daniel Bourne: Your poem on Berryman last night was interesting. It seemed rather un-Merwinlike, a very traditional focus, little elliptical movement. Is this a kind of departure, something new, or a return to the roots of an earlier literature, with that kind of poem?
W.S. Merwin: I have no idea. I don’t have any ideological sense of what is Merwinlike or un-Merwinlike. I’m always happy to find I’m writing a poem which is different from anything I’ve written before, but I don’t think you can really write out a paradigm. To be surprised is to find new directions and new regions you haven’t been into yet, to be surprised by your own writing,that’s what I would always be hoping for.
DB: Does that poem surprise you more than any other poem you’ve written recently?
Merwin: No. I don’t feel that very much about my own writing. I very much don’t want to repeat myself or imitate myself or find myself doing something I’ve already done before. If anything feels as if that’s what’s happening, then I try to move away from it.
Merwin wrote the introduction to The Dream Songs.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
We got a sweet new TV.
New York, 9/11, and us.
Black cat, ever heard of a courtesy flush?
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[...] The Merwin-Berryman connection. [...]
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