Finding W.S. Merwin
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1I grew up on a farm in northwestern Illinois. My dad is a poet, my mom a voracious reader. The front room of the farmhouse was rich with books. One whole wall of built-in bookcases and a few standing ones, in one of which the thin-spined poetry books were kept. I was drawn to the poems, how sparse they were, a few black words against a white page like the woods in winter. I found myself hungering for them. Just one more, I’d tell myself, reading Rexroth’s translations from the Chinese and Japanese, or, wide-eyed, poems from the battered Beat Reader (reading Ginsberg at twelve is an experience). During one of these ritual perusals of the poetry shelves, I found a thin book called Finding the Islands. The cover was a colorful, abstract rendering of islands and ocean. Which islands? I wondered. And who was finding them? And why? Maybe it was on the back cover of that collection that I saw him for the first time, shirt saucily unbuttoned, blue eyes filled with two types of light—the light of wherever he happened to be living, as well as the inner light that wells up in the eyes of the inspired poet. The poems themselves, brief as haiku but more personal, like snippets of love letters, were astonishing, powerful as swallowed pills. The poems were laid out in a staggered way, islands of text in the white sea of the page, so that, in reading the poems, one felt one was finding islands of language. Later I would find the awkwardly titled First Four Books of Poems, the images arising like things remembered from dreams. Or nightmares. Mice with broken necks pushing balls of blood with their noses. Men cutting a tree down and getting its shadow on them like paint, falling down blind when it got into their eyes. And always the poet of his author photos—knowing and wise but also mischievous and boyish. Precociously, I wanted to be like W.S. Merwin when I grew up, to do to others, via language, what his poems did to me.
2Because Copper Canyon Press published Merwin, and other poets I loved—Jim Harrison, Ted Kooser, many others—I applied to work for them as an intern in the summer between my two years in an MA program in poetry at U.C. Davis. I drove north through gray Oregon to the Olympic Peninsula, an adventure. Copper Canyon is housed in an old wooden building, white with green trim, in Fort Warden, a former military base turned park. Where munitions used to be stored, poetry is published. Cue the expected metaphor of poems being as dangerous, as capable of detonating. The editor, Merwin’s editor, Michael Wiegers, met me at the door on my first day. He told me calmly that I was never to send him a manuscript, something most interns seemed to do a few days after leaving the press. I obeyed this command, though I would, in subsequent years, send various manuscripts to Michael that I claimed to have discovered, including one by a hired hand I’d invented, making up an elaborate story about discovering the manuscript in one of the old buildings on the farm. But while I was an intern I was relatively well-behaved. I did what they told me to, carrying on my shoulder that invisible chip borne by all interns and young poets, working on manuscripts I thought were mediocre, though it’s difficult now to say whether they really were or if I was merely envious. What interested me more was the fact that Copper Canyon was preparing to publish Merwin’s exquisite late collection, The Shadow of Sirius, which would earn him his second Pulitzer Prize. Michael talked casually about traveling to Maui to sit with Merwin, who was beginning to lose his eyesight, to work on the manuscript. I was invited to write the copy on the back inner fly leaf, and so had to struggle, as I am doing here, to put into words what his words do to me.
3When I returned to Davis, I decided to write Merwin a letter, asking if he needed any help in his garden. I wince now to think of what I might have said. Surely something about having grown up on a farm, knowing which end of a shovel is which. That his address was Haiku, Hawaii seemed further proof that he had established a life in poetry, down to the name of his town. Not surprisingly, I heard nothing back.
4Until one day I did. Excitedly, I opened the letter. The letter itself opened by making clear that I should not come to Hawaii, but then softened to offer me advice about being a young poet. He encouraged me to focus on writing and not let myself become distracted by publication, something I had sensed was important already, but that I needed reminding of, being as I was in the MFA system with all of its competitiveness and insecurity. Not long after receiving this letter, I would have the chance to finally meet Merwin for the first time, an occasion upon which I completely embarrassed myself.
5Merwin was coming to Santa Rosa, CA for a reading and conversation with the poet Robert Hass. I drove up from the Bay. It was quite a large auditorium, built with wine money. It happened to be Merwin’s birthday. He sat on the stage, diminutive, already quite elderly, his white hair glowing in the stage lights. Hass stood at the podium, fumbling in his pockets. He’d misplaced his glasses, which he needed in order to read his introductory notes. Apologizing, he went backstage to find them, leaving Merwin sitting there alone, perfectly content with the silence. Nervous chittering from the crowd. Then someone began, bravely, singing happy birthday, and soon the whole audience was singing. I can’t remember if we said Bill or William. Likely William. Just as we were finishing, Hass emerged, still flustered, having found his glasses. Merwin joined his palms in gratitude and bowed his head. I remember nothing else from the conversation or reading.
6Afterwards, he was signing books in the lobby. I never like to actually meet the writers I admire. Nor have I ever understood readers’ desire to have their books signed. But I had just published a chapbook I wanted to give to him. My girlfriend at the time, less starstruck than I, had been encouraging me to give it to him, arguing that if I didn’t I would always regret it. I knew she was right, but had she not been there, I never would have gone through with it. The line was getting shorter and shorter. People who’d already had their books signed passed against us, smiling, their eyes bright from the encounter. I felt strange, bringing him my book when everyone else was bringing him one of his. It was only when it was just about to be our turn that I opened the chapbook to find that I had dedicated that copy to an uncle who I’d failed to ultimately send the book to. “Uncle Mike…” it said, or “Uncle John…” In a panic, I tore the page out, roughly I’m sure, as Merwin watched in a combination of shock and horror. Then I stepped forward and handed him the mangled copy, wished him happy birthday, and fled.
7After graduate school I returned to the Midwest to work on a huge organic vegetable farm, living in my parents’ barn. A coworker had found a cat I decided to adopt, an ancient black-and-white tom with snarled, redneck teeth, tattered ears, fight scars. I have a habit of naming pets after writers I admire—my dog Wendell, after Wendell Berry, and a subsequent cat I named Colette before I realized she was a he, whereupon I continue calling him Colette, much to the confusion of the veterinarian’s office. I named the cat Merwin. Maybe in my longing to be closer to these writers than was possible by merely reading them, I named my pets after them so they would have no choice but to come nearer, to be fed, finally, after feeding me. Fitting considering his namesake, Merwin the cat would disappear for days at a time, only to reappear just as I was beginning to make peace with the fact that he’d been run over, or had gone into the woods to die alone, as cats are famous for. What was actually happening, we would come to learn, was that Merwin was walking down the road to another farm, where he was known as Stan, and had, apparently, an entirely separate existence, as beloved by the crippled-up retired farmer who lived there as he was by us. And then one day he disappeared for good—really and finally vanished— leaving all of us, whether we’d known him as Stan or Merwin, equivalently bereft. Even my dad, who has never exactly loved cats, declares to this day that Merwin was the greatest cat who ever lived.
8The last time I saw Merwin alive—the poet, not the cat—was at a reading in a bookstore in downtown San Francisco. I’m sure the store itself is gone now. I’d learned my lesson from the chapbook incident and kept my distance, sitting in the back as he read. It must have been amongst his last trips to the mainland, if not the last. As everyone who loves Merwin knows, there was something sage-like about him, a presence I have sensed in spiritual teachers more often than I have in poets. He seemed composed mostly of light, suggestive of the fact that poetry is more verb than noun, more practice than product. At the same time, this numinous quality, in both his poems and his person, was part of the reason he seemed so unknowable and untouchable. There is almost no humor in all of Merwin. I could be wrong about this, and would be happy to be proven so. In his prose, especially the exquisite memoir Summer Doorways and in the book he wrote about the troubadours, The Mays of Ventadorn, one hears another side of him, literally more prosaic of course. But for all his earthliness, there is something otherworldly about the poems. Unpunctuated, they feel as if they never quite end, like the dying away of a temple bell. His poems—especially the work after The Lice—feel less like poems and more like ineffable moments of perception and awareness made tangible in language.
9I had remained friends with Merwin’s editor, Michael Wiegers, who told me about his visits to Maui to work with Merwin on his last book, Garden Time. His eyesight had grown so bad that, like Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters, he was dictating those last poems to his wife Paula. It seems almost too simplistic to see his blindness as a triumph of inner vision over external sight, but I cannot help but imagine that he didn’t so much go blind as turn inward.
10In January 2020 I received a call from a law office in Boston, informing me that I’d been awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in poetry. The only stipulation was that I had to leave America for a full year, not a very arduous task. But a few months later, Covid hit, and instead of going to France or Greece or any of the other places I had fantasized about disappearing to, I went back to Illinois, to a farmhouse I’d found to rent near where I grew up. I had learned that the old house in the south of France that Merwin had found while working as a translator might be available to rent for a few weeks, and, when the pandemic waned and I could travel again, I went there to salvage the scholarship I had won. I rented a car in Paris and made my way with difficulty out of the city, unsure of traffic circle etiquette. It seems to me that every city is different, while the countryside everywhere is the same. When I reached the Dordogne River valley, it reminded me of the Midwest. Cold, sluggish rivers, scrappy woods, cattle guards, scattered farming equipment, backroads. The house itself—the house where Merwin and his first wife Dido had hosted Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—was stone, in which was set a beautiful blue door with a decorative knocker dead in the center. The floor was covered with a patchwork of old rugs, and sagged in places, giving the whole house a creaking, arthritic quality. To enter that house was like crawling into the arms of a very old woman who loves you. The furniture was antique, the dishware dusty, the bedding musty. I walked around the property, ducking into the old stone sheds, feeding the two donkeys that lived on there like guardians of the place, and read Merwin by the light of fires laid in an old woodstove. A week or so after I arrived, my girlfriend of the time flew over to join me. I drove back to Paris and picked her up at the airport and drove her back down. A musician, she didn’t know much about Merwin. She was there not for him but for me. It was around Christmas. We bought a small tree and a few cheap ornaments and set it up in the living room. We cooked while listening to French songs on the old kitchen radio, and took long walks along the sheep lanes, and played chess in front of the fire. When we ran low on firewood I pushed the wheelbarrow down to the barn and filled it up and on my way back often stopped to marvel at where I was, smoke chanting up from the chimney and a woman I wanted to marry sitting in the warm house, studying the chess board. I felt closer to Merwin there than I had upon meeting him. In a way, I felt I was intruding upon the privacy that was the ground the poems sprouted from. But I still hadn’t found him. I was only there because he was gone.
11A month after returning from France, my girlfriend abruptly broke up with me, so that my last memories of her are also memories of that house where, for a time at least, we were happy.
12Heartbroken, I decided to travel, the way someone who stubs their toe walks swiftly around the room, as if they could outpace the pain. Michael invited me to come to Maui, to visit the Conservancy established there after Merwin died. Having seen where Merwin had lived as a young poet and translator, I was now going to see where he had lived out the second part of his life. I rented a white camper van and drove to Haiku, where I met Michael. We walked the trails through the palm forest William and Paula had planted on land that had been destroyed by the Dole pineapple plantation. The house, of dark green and weathered wood, seemed part of the forest. We sat on the screen porch, drinking William’s tea, then went downstairs to go through his library, which the damp Hawaiian climate was slowly destroying. We had to sort out what was worth keeping and preserving, what could be donated, what should be thrown away. I found in old copies of, say, Donne’s poems, Merwin’s marginalia from his time as an undergrad at Princeton, the name of one of his great teachers, William Arrowsmith, written in the inside cover along with the time and building where the class met. Lots of the books were damaged beyond salvation. You could tell, before even opening them, what you were going to find. Bugs had tunneled through the pages, indifferent to whether there was text there or not, leaving their dusty frass behind. It seemed a premonition of the fate of all literature. At some point, with a mischievous smile, Michael led me to a little closet where hung some of Merwin’s clothes—old raveled sweaters, cardigans, shirts he’d worn for gardening. I tried a few on, feeling sheepish, and not just because most of them were of itchy wool. There was talk of me taking something—after all, they were just hanging there—but between his feeling that we should ask permission, and my skittishness about taking something so intimate, we hung everything back up and closed the door.
13While I was at Merwin’s house in France, I had discovered something I thought significant about his poems. Halfway through his famous collection The Lice, he ceases using punctuation. The last poem of his that is punctuated is called, fittingly, “The Last One,” and is radically punctuated, as if to get it out of his system, nearly every line ending with a period. I had become obsessed with the French poet Jean Follain, whose work Merwin helped bring into English. Follain’s work is unpunctuated, as well, and I thought I divined a connection between the freedom and surprise of Follain’s unpunctuated lines and Merwin’s. It is often argued that Merwin’s decision to eschew punctuation was political, an attempt, as he says in an interview, to return poetry to the air rather than letting the poems be stapled to the page by periods and commas. But for whatever reason, this theory annoyed me, even if Merwin himself had suggested it, as it foreclosed the possibility of influence, the influence I believed translating Follain must have had on Merwin’s aesthetic. While in France I’d begun drafting an essay on all of this, bringing in the work of the American poet Frank Stanford, who I believed had been influenced both by Follain and Merwin. I was trying to trace a lineage here, to argue that three of my favorite poets were connected across time and language. There was to be a big conference in Paris on Merwin, bringing together preeminent Merwin scholars, and I hoped to present my paper there in person.
14But as I’ve written about above, between the time I spent at Merwin’s house in France and the time I spent at his house in Hawaii, my life had fallen apart. My fiancé left me. Disappointed by my students, I quit teaching and moved to a small town in Wisconsin to work for Organic Valley, a dairy products company where I’d been hired as a writer. On my first day in the office, after being shown to my cubicle, I sat down and laughed humorously at the awful turn my life had taken. Less than a year before I’d been pushing a wheelbarrow of firewood towards a farmhouse in the south of France, and now I was Googling articles about the international dehydrated milk market. I had already told my supervisor that I would have to miss a week of work within a month of starting in order to go to a conference in Paris. She’d never heard of Merwin, and the idea of traveling to France for a poetry conference must have struck her as deeply strange. Having already gotten a sense for the drudgery of my new job, I was looking forward to the trip, which seemed like the final thread connecting me to my old life in the literary world. But I wasn’t feeling well. Sober a year, I had relapsed upon returning to Wisconsin, a place I couldn’t imagine living without drinking beer. I spent all my time fly fishing and drinking alone at the VFW. A psychiatrist I’d begun seeing during the pandemic via telehealth had decided I might be on the wrong medication, and had switched me to something that was making me feel much worse, though in the naïve obedience of patients I continued to take it. It became increasingly difficult for me to do the simplest things. Even going to the grocery store felt like a Sisyphean task, and I began to spend more weekends with my parents, watching football with my dad and eating the good meals my mom made.
15After the Merwin conference, the plan was for a number of us to take the train south to the farmhouse in Lacam, and the thought of returning to that place where I had spent the last happy days with my fiancé filled me with fear. I was afraid I would suffer some sort of breakdown amongst the Merwin scholars. So it was both an immense disappointment and a relief when, the night before I was supposed to fly from Chicago to Paris, the United app wouldn’t let me check in for my flight. It was October. My passport expired in January of the new year, too soon upon arriving in France for French customs to allow me into the country. I wrote to the organizers of the conference and told them what was happening, though I didn’t tell them that I was suffering a mental health crisis that was becoming increasingly dire, to the point where I could hardly leave the house much less fly to France. It was decided that I would present my paper on Follain and Merwin and Stanford via Zoom. Because of the time difference I would have to log on early. I was at my parents’ cabin, at their kitchen table, but also, somehow, in Paris, my face projected upon a huge screen behind the panelists I should have been sitting amongst. My parents had gone for a walk to give me space. When I was a boy I was terrified of public speaking. It was my greatest fear. I was the kid in sixth grade who trembled as he read his paper to the class, his voice breaking, palms sweating, mouth cotton-dry, struggling to ignore the snickering, growing dizzy as he trudged through the words, conscious, all the time, of how many he had to get through yet, reading faster and faster, beginning to skip sentences now, whole paragraphs, wanting only for it to be over. I believed that a decade of teaching had wiped this phobia out entirely. But as soon as I logged on, the old fear, never entirely vanquished, reappeared. I began my remarks by making a joke about the deer head on the wall above me, shot by my brother two decades prior. I thought it would be funny to contrast where I was with where the Merwin scholars were, a cabin in Wisconsin being about as different a place as I can imagine compared to Paris. But because I was on Zoom, I could neither hear nor see any response to this attempt at levity. It struck me that it had been a weird thing to do, pointing out the deer head hanging over me, and thus began what all who fear public speaking recognize as the first stage of panic—while speaking, one is thinking about what one is saying, judging it, growing increasingly certain that the audience is judging it, too, so that everything one says is inflected by what has been said before. My paper on Merwin suddenly seemed silly. Surely these scholars had noticed the same thing I had. What had seemed, in the farmhouse in France, an incredible discovery seemed obvious now. I had intended to read my paper, but now, losing confidence in its claims, I began doing what one with a fear of public speaking should never do—I began to try to summarize it, as if I might, in the moment, spontaneously find something worth saying in what was starting to seem increasingly worthless. But as soon as I started jumping around, I lost all sense of what it was I was saying, all the while unable to forget that, in a conference room in Paris, the people who knew more about Merwin’s life and work than anyone in the world were stuck listening to my drivel. I just wanted it to be over, for them and for me, so I sped up more and more, skipping the parts that were necessary to connect one claim to the next. In one instant I was talking about Follain, then about Merwin, then about Stanford, but there was no throughline. What was written on the page didn’t matter—what I was saying made no sense. And then, abruptly, I hit a wall. I couldn’t go on. I was only digging myself deeper and deeper. It occurred to me that the best thing to do would be to stop. I stopped. As the panel opened up for audience Q&A, I sat back, stunned by my failure, more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my life. I texted Michael something along the lines of, “Well that was a disaster.” He told me, simply, that he loved me, which I took as evidence that it had been even worse than I thought. When the panel mercilessly ended, I logged off, closed my laptop, walked outside. Melodramatic as it seems now, I was certain that my life was over. Indeed, I kept saying to myself, “It’s over…it’s over…it’s over…” I felt I’d sullied not only myself and my reputation, but Merwin, too. Given the opportunity to convey my admiration for his work in the presence—albeit virtual—of the very people who could most appreciate this admiration, I had bombed it. I remembered the baffled look Merwin had given me upon watching me tear a page out of the chapbook I was giving him. It was like that, only worse. That night, it had just been a page in a chapbook. Now, it was my very life that was torn apart.
16That was the nadir of my life. From that point on, things could only improve. I got sober, got back on the right medication, quit my milk writing job, returned to California, resumed teaching. One day, Michael Wiegers texted me, asking for my address. I thought I knew why but didn’t ask. The box arrived from Port Townsend. Inside, one of those itchy sweaters I’d tried on that day in Hawaii. In one of the pockets, a crumpled Kleenex I can’t bring myself to throw away. Shrunk by humidity, the sweater is too small to wear, but that’s fine. I don’t want to wear it. It hangs on the wall next to my desk. I touch its sleeves from time to time.
17We can never truly meet the poets we love. To read their poems is like entering a room they were just in, a room we couldn’t enter were they still there. Their absence is necessary. Were they not gone, there would be no need to find them.
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Austin Smith, « Finding W.S. Merwin », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 07 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/24102 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134gr
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