1Writing Living, Living Writing: this syntagm is how we would entitle the subject of this book review.
- 1 The book—at least in the book review copy made available for this review—suffers from typographical (...)
2As Cheri Colby Langdell points out from the start of this vast and capacious collective volume, W.S. Merwin’s work already from the period of his first publications to that of those studied in W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry (1987) edited by Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson, and even more so for the period from that book to the present (2024), has not attracted as much critical attention as its quantity, variety and range could lead one to expect. Dissertations devoted to his work, articles and books, seem to be inferior in number to those for other writers of his period and generation. Notable, with regard to France prior to 2022 and excepting Michael Taylor’s outstanding commentary in L’Appel du Causse, is a sparse bibliography of fewer than a half-dozen articles altogether (one in the 1970s, and then only in the past decade), the absence of any doctoral dissertations on his work, and finally his work never having been placed on the program of the concours de l’agrégation, that is, the competitive national examination by which high school teachers are recruited to their civil servant professional life (in contrast with, say, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop or Adrienne Rich, to mention only poets of the contemporary period). After the publication in 2012 of Until Everything is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Work of W.S. Merwin, the book edited by Jonathan Wienert and Kevin Prufer consisting mostly of essays by poets on the poetry of Merwin, this present book is already important as a counter-indication of longstanding and also ongoing serious and deep engagement with his colossal corpus and perplexing legacy as “American” or “United States” poet and writer. In her “Introduction,” Langdell provides a long thorough summary of the content of all the chapters in the book that are grouped in four main parts devoted, respectively, to “Merwin and Other Poets,” “Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics,” “The Poet’s Craft,” and “The Sense of an Ending.” This grouping distributes the fifteen chapters in essay clusters of 3, 4, 4 and 4. With these fifteen chapters and the ample introduction coming to 347 pages, this book is remarkably long in our age of shorter academic books in literature and poetry studies. With brief exceptions—occasional forays into some of his prose writing, and some decisive analyses of his translations—these essays focus entirely on his poetry, and do so across the entire oeuvre created over seven and even eight decades (in one of his two contributions here, Thomas Festa goes back to an unpublished essay written in 1946, as a student, and therefore this book spans Merwin’s eighty writing years from 1946 to the 2016 Garden Time). This review will provide thumbnail sketches for twelve of the essays, and spotlight three found to be especially relevant today in their attention to Merwin’s ars poetica.1
3Philip Coleman’s essay, “‘High Company’: W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the Art of Poetry,” re-visits Merwin’s oft-recited and well-known poem “Berryman,” summarizing in a first part Merwin’s poem. In its second part, the essay turns to further recollections which Merwin delivered of Berryman, in the poem “Lament for the Makers.” Coleman luminously draws out similarities between the Merwin poem and its template, “The Lament for the Makaris” by William Dunbar from the early 1500s, indicating also how Hart Crane informed Berryman. Coleman writes: “these poems [from Merwin] reveal a poet for whom the examples of the past serve an abiding and enabling function, their words constantly inspiring him to continue on his own poetic journey” (37). An essay that covers the well-known ground of the two poems themselves, this contribution is characterized by anti-climax. However, this piece concludes with important comment on the relative absences in Merwin’s poetic recognition of his debts to other writers. Thrown in as something of an after-thought, Coleman points out that Merwin in his recognitions of poet peers barely mentions women, and not at all non-White people. This after-thought merits further inquiry.
4Ian D. Copestake, in “The Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin,” dwells in particular on a Whitman-Williams tradition which modifies how Merwin’s love for Williams can be understood. For Copestake what distinguishes the relation of Merwin to Williams is the “the underlying shared ground occupied by these poets” that consists in “their commitment to forms of ‘contact’ with reality, and both poets’ insistence on, and unwavering belief in the value of, addressing the nature of that reality in full awareness of the distance inscribed in the language they each use to achieve this” (45). For Copestake, what however separates the two poets is Williams’s pro-violence stance, contrasted with Merwin’s mode of reconciliation. Copestake includes a reading of “Tergvinder’s Stone,” from Merwin’s The Miner’s Pale Children, the first prose book, which has received little attention. Ultimately, this essay is less on Merwin, and more a thematic reading of Williams. The comparisons with Merwin are loose and tend to stay with repeating the idea according to which Merwin wanted to pay attention.
5In “The Lost Steps: W.S. Merwin and the Journey Backward,” Jeffrey Gray argues that for Merwin, the “drive to recover a lost world is directed […] toward the question of recovering a reconnection to primal, even pre-human realities” (61), adding:
[T]he search implies the sense not only that we are lost but that a path to connection exists, whether through immersion in the non-human world; through the recovery of ancient, pre-industrial ways; by the turn to the practices of art and their capacity for restoration; and perhaps most importantly by rediscovering those strata in the psyche that still remain sub-merged in a larger reality. This search implied for Merwin the need for a broader stance on earth, one that encompasses centuries or millennia, and the need to participate in prehistoric cycles. (62)
6Gray charts this journey backward in its different modes: the epiphanic, the elegiac and also the critique of this quest itself. The essay dwells at its outset in particular on The Moon Before Morning, The Shadow of Sirius, and The Vixen, and in its second part broadens its scope to reflect in interesting detail on Merwin’s place in different generations of US poetry and criticism, and contributes to understanding better (especially now in 2024) ways in which the certain (elitist?) condescension toward him emerged. For example, when Gray’s perspective enables him to write:
Merwin was a cutting-edge figure during the period I speak of. (The honors and accolades, on the other hand, continued all his life.) To read his poems was to apprehend something clear and yet elusive, vivid and yet indirect, neither packed with allusions as in the high modernists, nor “confessional,” as in the poetry of some of the poet’s closest contemporaries. Merwin created a distinct kind of reading experience, one of transport in Longinus’s sense but by different means than the Romantics (or, later, the Beats) used. It would have been impossible at that time to imagine his work being seen, as it has been since, as sentimental or retrograde. (66)
7In “Reverence for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Others,” Nancy D. Goldfarb limits her discussion of trees in the poetry of W.S. Merwin to his book The Rain in the Trees, after discussion of trees in Wendell Berry, and before opening to Merwin’s “To a Leaf Falling in Winter” and “Recognitions” (from Present Company and The Shadow of Sirius) in the context of discussion of a poem by Mary Oliver. In Goldfarb’s words, “the poems of W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver reveal the vital role of trees in promoting, sustaining, and enhancing life on earth. Their ecopoetry helps us appreciate the many gifts we receive from trees” (155). The approach is thematic, tending to summarize poems in which trees have a role. More engagement in closely reading how the poems, as specifically poetic language, present or represent trees, would have been welcome.
8As author of the 1981 monograph study, W.S. Merwin (Twayne), Cheri Colby Langdell’s essay has the breadth which knowledge of the entire corpus confers. Langdell refers to many of the poems from many of Merwin’s books: such range enables her readers to better their sense of the corpus (101). In this essay, her argument proceeds by thought-provoking assertions that are structured less as argument or demonstration and more as offerings of her insights gathered from her intimacy with his poetry. As, for example, when she relates Merwin’s writing up to his death, with quotations about nature, about presence, about reverence, from thinkers and critics such as Susan Griffin, Emerson or David Mason. She equates his poetry with spiritual practices, arguing that Merwin’s practice of Buddhism makes his poetry more authentic, but also that his move into ecopoetry expands his inner life and his activism (103). Langdell’s approach is not textual analysis, but associations with what the poems induce her to think of. For example, when quoting “The Present” from Garden Time, her gloss is: “There is only the present moment, it is all we have, so Adam and Eve laugh, delighted to be free of confinement” (104). This, indeed, may be why they laugh, but it is one reading that could accommodate others. She offers an incisive discussion of the poem “No One” with relation to religion and to contemporary US politicians (90). Generally, her approach is a history of ideas, with ideas from a variety of texts by others considered to be a matrix for Merwin. While they might be relevant for accessing Merwin’s writing, how that would be so, via an actual close reading of Merwin, is suggested, if not worked out for the reader. Particularly helpful is her underlining Merwin’s resistance to theory, even to a theory for his poetry, and here she comes close to advancing the idea (if “idea” is the right word for Merwin, perhaps “practice” is better) of poetry as a horizontal conception of living and non-living beings or entities, able to achieve in poetic language what is becoming the frequent basis in much “new materialist” theory or philosophy or simply essays (96). For readers not already versed in Buddhism, her recourse to it is unhelpful because the Buddhist ideas or themes asserted as present lack the demonstration which would in fact have been helpful for the non-Buddhist read (83).
9Tim Langdell’s essay, “The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin,” is perhaps somewhat misleadingly titled. Although it does give the referent in the Zen tradition for the first poem in The Vixen, the essay in fact is on Zen Buddhism, and gives Langdell’s explanations and thinking about it, while leaving to readers of Merwin to then go and do the exploratory reading of his corpus. While he flags different ideas, or themes, or topics, how they might work at the level of the poetry, in particular, the poetry as poetry or even a poetry that elaborates Zen Buddishm, is not the object of the essay.
10Michael Thurston, in “W.S. Merwin’s ‘Retirement’: Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After,” provides a panorama of the longer late poems in Merwin’s corpus, and some of the poet’s innovations after the age of 65, bringing both into focus. It also devotes attention to The Folding Cliffs, describing and commenting interestingly on some of its textual details, while remaining an approach in the mode of overview.
11Diederik Oostdijk’s essay “W.S. Merwin’s Homecoming in the Heart of Europe” explores how Merwin, without extolling American culture, as, say F. O. Matthiessen did when advocating the Europeanness of Europe, was a champion of European preservation. As someone currently teaching a semester-long single course devoted to The Vixen with twenty-five French university students in their final undergraduate year enrolled in the English major (a major that comprises literature, history, translation, linguistics), in the North of France (far from the region Merwin lived in), this reviewer found Oostdik’s conclusion to be of special interest, especially regarding what Merwin was doing in his prose books from Unframed Originals to The Lost Upland and Summer Doorways, and also concerning what it might mean, for French citizens, to read this “American (?)” writer.
12Merwin was so attracted to Europe because it represented everything he believed the United States at the time was not. His hankering after tradition was probably the result of America’s postwar embrace of consumer culture, new technology, and rapid industrialization. The Europe he encountered—or perhaps sought after in the 1950s—seemed the diametrical opposite of that capitalist and futuristic mentality. The notion that many Europeans at the time were eager to imitate the American way of life and that the European continent was rapidly changing escaped Merwin’s attention in his early poetry and in the memoirs which he published afterward; or possibly, he chose to ignore those facts. (225)
13Amanda Golden presents a selection of the archive of letters between Merwin and The New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, regarding the moments in Merwin’s career when he published poems in The New Yorker, and this selection singles out their correspondence about punctuation or rather, unpunctuation, as her title indicates: “Lyric ‘Unpunctuation’: W.S. Merwin’s Early New Yorker Correspondence.” Readers can witness Merwin’s tenacity about, and formulation of, his sensitivity to poetry as oral and hence his first explanations of his “lyric unpunctuation.”
14Natalie Gerber develops an extended listening to Merwin’s poem “Yesterday,” by drawing from composition theorist Peter Elbow, in particular regarding intonation in everyday speech. With comparisons to William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats, the essay draws from grammar and linguistic theory, in particular on theticals, to listen to the different intonations in Merwin’s poem.
15In his essay, “Memory, Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin’s Later Poetry,” that roams with curiosity and passion through almost all of Merwin’s poetry (a splendid opportunity for Merwin readers to re-visit, re-member, mediated by such adhesive guidance), with some forays into his interviews, James McCorkle eschews the mode of demonstrative argument in favor of weaving a gossamer of recurrent ideas and motifs and questions. Such an approach, if sometimes more reminiscent of McCorkle’s own inspirations from, say, a Levinas, a Rilke, or a Heidegger, than of anything explicitly expressed in Merwin, does create a conversation that Merwin himself seems to have avoided in written, recorded, forms, insofar as it is relatively rare to find places where Merwin discusses (or even responds to or engages with) major thinkers and poets of the twentieth century. It is however a conversation that many readers of Merwin and of Merwin’s place in contemporaneity have, even if they might also recall that Merwin singled out Villon and Dante as the writers he felt closest to, and Merwin’s breadth as translator of poetry from dozens of different languages as well as of centuries suggests his dilated temporality.
16Daniel Lambert, in “‘The Last Days of the World’: Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats,” compares six poems by Merwin with Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” around end of the world imagery, using a “reader-response” method that directs the reading of its corpus. This rich essay begs for continued discussion, less of the symbolism of apocalypse and more with what others, such as Jacques Derrida, express when addressing the “end of the world” as every time unique, to each living organism, on the planet.
17As indicated already, three essays merit longer consideration, because of the inroads their attention to poetics make into how Merwin wrote, thought, and lived poetically.
18In a long and rich essay, “Resilience of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin’s ‘Forgotten Language’,” Alan Sodofsky, admirably follows Merwin’s style in particular across the middle and later period, at the level of line length, syntax, caesura, audible music, aphorism, epigram, parable, for example, but also in particular amphiboly and anacoluthon. The essay might be termed an excellent rhetorical reading, and in this regard is of significant practical help in reading how Merwin crafted his poetry. The essay also includes important analysis of what Merwin learned and appropriated from the poets he translated (in particular Antonio Porchia and Jean Follain). In this exploration (in which he gracefully acknowledges his predecessor Anthony Libby), Sodofsky’s specific results (especially regarding aphorism and anacoluthon) should instigate future readers to take this avenue of translation into Merwin’s poetry. Regarding Merwin’s debt to Porchia, he writes:
Porchia’s fragmented sentences form a nexus of utterances that could be classified as examples of anacoluthon, besides exposing the reader to the whiplash of verbal irony. Often seemingly ambiguous, anacoluthon—because the syntax doesn’t correlate with what’s expected—usually produces a semantic rupture and a resulting sense of enigmatic expression, built upon a discontinuity in the logic of a sentence’s syntax. While translating Porchia, Merwin was also writing poems that would be collected in The Lice, poems which contain increasingly more daring interruptions of syntactical logic. These poems are an extension of the new style that Merwin’s work gradually metamorphosed into, toward the end of The Moving Target. But more starkly constructed, depending upon a greater brevity and velocity of images, images often distilled from abstract ideas and frequently empowered by a form of implied personification that anacoluthon engenders. (235)
19Sodofsky also forges his own concepts, for example “shadow-signification,” which he builds from the poetics of Jean Follain, in which an element is taken out of a frame but left hors cadre thereby creating shadow in the poem. Both these features and Merwin’s translations of them are, and become, per Sodofsky, virtual templates in much of Merwin’s own writing. Sodofsky also, with graceful acknowledgment of critic Jarold Ramsey’s earlier discussion of Merwin’s translation of indigenous poetry, recalls and refreshes the importance of orality in, or for, Merwin. Yet he advances beyond his well-explained crucial quotations from Merwin himself, and makes important contributions for apprehending Merwin, via his well-informed critical developments on enigma (and aphorism and riddle) in what he terms the Delphic-style oracular rhetoric sometimes used by Merwin. Dwelling on books of the middle period, Sodofsky explains helpfully the rhetorical devices of amphiboly and anacoluthon, and how these create an oracular or prophetic voice, but as if not coming from Merwin, an ambiguous multiple-site oracularity. It would be interesting to hear Alan Sodofsky comment on Merwin’s reticence about rhetoric or rhetorical poetry (as expressed, relative to Whitman, to Folsom so many times, as Folsom recalls in the interview in this issue of Transatlantica). In detailed readings, his attention to rhetorical figures, and tropes, is productive and shows how the poem means the things it does mean which sometimes—without the attention to them—would not appear. His extended reading of “The River of Bees,” to name just one, unfolds how its ambiguities are built and can be variously understood, and thus gives practical reading. With readings, in particular, of The Lice (drawing on riddle scholar Daniel Handelman or Merwin scholar Norma Procopiow), this is a go-to article for readers drawn to Merwin’s middle period (“Perhaps one of Merwin’s finest achievements is constructing a wholly new and original oracular idiom in his middle period” [256]).
20The title of Thomas Festa’s essay, “Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy,” brings together the intrinsically related activities of Merwin, his caring for the earth and for poetry—his inhabiting the earth as poet—and the essay itself is, in this reviewer’s experience of reading work on Merwin (and perhaps also on “ecopoetics”), a most perceptive analysis and reading of how Merwin did what he did. With multiple fine and precise examples, Festa consistently shows how “[f]or Merwin, making a garden is a conscious, revisionary act of imaginative resistance to the endangerment of species that preserves living forms of great antiquity” (111), and that “Merwin’s palm forestry illuminates his evolving practice of transplanting elements of traditional form and structure into free verse” (111). Festa’s reading always shows how Merwin worked poetic form: “The ‘open form’ poems of his celebrated, experimental middle period employ devices such as traditional English meter and rhyme to voice the unconscious ideology he opposes,” such that “‘open form’ harnesses unfree verse” (112). Festa is repeatedly able to show that Merwin’s vast knowledge of the history of poetry and poetic form is itself intrinsic to, inseparable from, his knowledge of forms of life, such being the continuum from Pound’s seed to read to the seed to reed growth that is both Merwin’s poetic leaves of grass and his garden plants: “A dedicated eco-formalist, Merwin was never, in his mature poetry, sanguine about salvation through traditional forms of writing or living but remained elegiac in his love and care for what is disappearing from our ecosystems” (112). He is spot-on when asseverating that Merwin’s commitment “to translating world poetry suggests his innovative pathway to renewal of poetic form in the Anthropocene” (112), with this commitment paralleling his renewal of palms from across the planet. Festa yokes especially well translation and transplantation and thereby attenuates readings of Merwin’s career that suppose breaks or ruptures, bringing out instead more interesting continuities in his poetic life:
Merwin’s special contribution to ecopoetics lies in translation’s hybrid activity of conservation: the relationship between the palm garden and the wild forest he originally hoped to restore is comparable to the relationship between an original text and a translator’s rendition by means of what Merwin calls “the impossible, unfinishable art.” (112)
21In precise readings of how meter and verb tenses (for example in “What is a Garden” from The River Sound) form what his poems are elaborating at their ideational or experienced levels, Festa shows that “Merwin everywhere in his later writings [both prose and poetry] entwines the making of poetry with the imagining of a future forest, which cannot be made, but only hoped for within certain contingent conditions” (114). Festa also backtracks through The Lice in astute examinations of “The Finding of Reasons” and “Caesar” that show unequivocally what Merwin is doing and how the poet makes do: “traditional form mostly appears to manifest ironic disdain for conventional thought and attitude. Often, the appearance of conventional meter accompanies a polyvocalism in the lyrics, where the tone of the instrumental, oppressive voice arises from iambic or rhyming lines” (116). In fine attentions to meter that also join Merwin in “Convenience” instantaneously to John Donne’s verse, Festa’s reading concretely points to how “Merwin sardonically ventriloquizes the voice of unconscious cultural conventions through metrical regularity and its upheaval” (117). Such alertness to how Merwin writes poetry and composes a line reveals beautiful connections in poetic form, from the ghost of ballad form interrupting trochaic tetra- and trimeter in “Is That What You Are” (The Lice), to the resurgence of set form in which the Chinese setting of “Wild Geese” (Garden Time) strikingly “migrates into iambic pentameter” at its “line of geese” (118). The analysis of the shifts from Merwin’s use of form, from the “unpunctuated, and without regular lineation, meter, or stanzaic structure” to the recourse to a “cadence of iambic pentameter” in “For a Coming Extinction” (The Lice), are the kinds of reading Merwin as poet deserves but receives rarely: going far further than thematic and semantic glosses. Festa is able to show how the endangered species that is the poet adapts to changing conditions: “for Merwin, a rejection of both national and species exceptionalism—what he calls ‘a cultural and […] a specietal chauvinism’—drives the radical innovation of open form” (120). Festa shows what is otherwise so strongly repressed: that Merwin articulated in specific, precise ways, in the 1950s and 1960s, and then for many decades, that which so belatedly made its way into discourse that we might refer to as Environmental Humanities, Earth System Humanities, Anthropocene Studies, and so on:
Merwin intuits the way in which untimely similitude replaces the experience of causality in the long view of the Anthropocene, the uncanny doubling and warping of the present when viewed from the perspective of ambiguous “hyperobjects” such as capitalism and global warming (Morton 54, 90). (120-21)
22Here, the verb “intuits” should have been replaced by something that expresses better not intuition but precise knowledge. In readings of “November” (The Compass Flower), “The Archaic Maker” (The Rain in the Trees), “Shepherds” (The Lost Upland), “The Cold Before the Moonrise” (The Lice), “An Encampment at Morning” (The Compass Flower), “Beginning of the Plains” (The Carrier of the Laddiers), Festa shows how traditional poetic form intervenes in order to mobilize diaspora, temporal and spatial poetic eco-awareness: “Traditional form provides the context in and against which Merwin stakes his claim for poetic conservation in parallel to his conservation of land. A whole ecology of feeling surrounds this emphasis on the necessity of dispersion, giving rise to a unique yet traditional poetic voice” (122). Particularly beautiful and convincing is his reading of the form—rhyme, the volta, the meter—of the Italian sonnet, “To Moss” (Present Company). Through a wonderful bringing-together of “Place” (the often-quoted, rarely but here astutely, read poem from The Rain in the Trees) and “The Laughing Thrush” (the final poem in The Shadow of Sirius), Festa truly yokes the compound noun “eco-poetry” by carefully demonstrating how poems can stand “as the becoming-garden or becoming-conservancy of language” (125). Bringing them together in an elucidation of the ‘yes’ that Merwin’s work affirms, he writes of them:
That song of praise [in “The Laughing Thrush”], defiant in its dismissal of use in the phrase “whether or not anyone is listening,” embodies the ecopoetic signature of Merwin’s late verse, a conservancy merging eastern and western poetics from the “what for” of planting a tree on the last day of the world in “Place” to the “song unquestioning” of “the first daylight” in “The Laughing Thrush.” (126)
23Festa concludes with how Merwin’s conservancy (in poetry, in gardening) speaks “to the future elegiacally, yet not without hope” and contends—importantly, im-portantly, we think—that in there is the “utopian flicker” and the “great transformation of Merwin’s later career” (126). Linking “The Laughing Thrush” to Merwin’s uncollected epigraph-poem “Peahi” (Collected Haiku), Festa situates Merwin’s affirmation of the voice in song, the old story in the new song, the past as the possibility of the future, in this line from it: “Let the laughing thrush / sing the new morning like this / wherever I am.” Odd echo to the last written words of Jacques Derrida, written on a scrap of paper and read by his elder son Pierre at his father’s burial, and which read, “Prefer always life (la vie) and affirm unceasingly survival (la survie) .[…] // I love you and smile to you from wherever I be (vous souris d’où que je sois)” (6-7), Merwin’s letting and leaving the new morning to sing, “wherever I am,” as relayed by Festa, attests a voice that “prophetically responds to a future that might be able to hear what tragically our public discourse ignores” (126).
24Thomas Festa reads Merwin’s poetry as it is composed, made, i.e. poetically, and he demonstrates in fine and perceptive ways the intrinsic relation of that poesis (that process of turning the swirling of words and memories into a set verse or lined writing) with Merwin’s ecological awareness, his way of living on the earth poetically, which for Merwin meant, without his having himself to use the word, “eco-poetry,” which for Merwin would be a pleonasm. For these reasons, Festa’s essay is must-reading not only for those interested in Merwin-the-poet (or Merwin-the-conservationist) but for all who have had any contact with what comes under the name of eco-poetry or eco-poetics (and from which poetry or poetics sometimes gets neglected behind thematic approaches). Its publication simultaneously in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (29.1 [2022]: 97-116) befits such opening.
25The other essential essay in this collection, “Merwin’s Epic of Dispossession,” is Thomas Festa’s daring, expansive and magisterially informed study of the chef-d’oeuvre The Folding Cliffs. In ways parallel to Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, who begin their Introduction to Anthropocene Reading with Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the temporality of the epic and its replacement by the temporality of the novel, or Menely’s account in Climate and the Making of Worlds of the changes from epic poetry to loco-descriptive poetry to lyric poetry, Festa places his consideration of Merwin’s epic poem in the framework of debates on the epic versus the modern forms, and traditional literary history on the rise of the novel and fall of the epic, but his larger context is, ultimately, to return to the epic via the Anthropocene, the human species as a geological force, and on the way there to stress the context of empire, and in this case, the United States empire, relative to Merwin’s project. Situating himself relative to David Quint, Franco Moretti or Edward Said, Festa isolates the specifically subversive conception or purpose of epic for Merwin insofar as Merwin is the exception that Moretti saw: contrary to the totalizing view of epic as expressing victorious empires, Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs is an epic that opposes the centripetal imperial impulse to totalization.
26Admirable in Festa’s essays on Merwin is his acknowledgment of other readings prior to his, such as, here, Françoise Palleau-Papin, David Mason, or H.L. Hix, on, respectively, what U. S. Intervention in Hawaii caused to be lost, the defeated victims of modern imperial corporate schemes, or how most readers stand accused by the poem. Where Festa takes a significant step further is to link the oppositional epic to environmental history: “Merwin’s poem extends Ezra Pound’s maxim that epic in the modern era must be a ‘poem including history’ into a poem including environmental history as a part of his larger protest against the exploitation and expropriation of Hawaiian resources through American imperialism and evangelistic exceptionalism” (283). More significant than “the pernicious collusive effects of capitalism, imperialism, and ideology” is the necro-teleo-logical threat to “the whole biosphere,” “rendered inhospitable to life when human behavior impacts Earth’s atmosphere, water, and land” (283). Festa shows Merwin’s prescience: “Merwin’s genealogy of climate change urges that we extend Hix’s ethical injunction to ‘stand accused’ by the historical poem and consequently raise interpretive stakes existentially by addressing the ecocritical implications of The Folding Cliffs as an epic of the Anthropocene” (283). Such an insight dramatically raises the stakes. To my knowledge, this is one of the strongest formulations of why Merwin’s achievement as poet (and of The Folding Cliffs) not only merits but requires an attention that it has at best very marginally received. Having taught the literary history of the epic continuously for 20 years, Thomas Festa possesses the contextual knowledge of the epic as form in which to comment on Merwin’s achievement as epic in that history, but he also is the first (on Merwin) to make the connection between the relevancy of the form’s return and the changes of scales whereby the Anthropocene re-opens the temporality of the epic as grasped by Benjamin et al.
27Festa’s essay is particularly interesting on the figure of the forty form—the forms of life for the principle god, Kane, of the Hawaiians—as put into poetic form by The Folding Cliffs, indexed to deforestation of Hawaiian sandalwoods (a historical phenomenon and context in the poem). Linking the epic genre (deforestations for example in the Epic of Gilgamesh) to its specific reinscription in this epic, Festa explains usefully and practically what the poem is doing and how. To those who might want to teach The Folding Cliffs but balk at trying, he gives ways of making the teaching of a text as difficult as The Folding Cliffs concretely work. Acknowledging the important work of other readers such as C.D. Wright, Festa also tackles the figure of synecdoche (for example of the warrior, Ko’olau’s death), and how Merwin resists its historical aggrandizing precedents in the traditional epic, such that Merwin’s inscription of the epic in Hawaiian deep time is an inscription not in national or even chronological time. The scale is not nation but the planet. In this regard, Festa’s attention to how Merwin inscribes the ancient mythic origin in modern geological science, or his representation of the natural world before the arrival of humans, are ways in which anthropocentrism, and the normativity of the Anthropocene, are eschewed, but equally important is the dovetailing performed by Merwin between the entrance into time (specifically the Anthropocene) and the arrival of Westerners. Of great importance is one of the central thrusts in the essay: “In the case of The Folding Cliffs, Merwin found it necessary to hybridize Western literary tradition by crafting a line in imitation of Greek and Roman elegy yet capable of representing incantatory oral Hawaiian” (292), both creating “an environment of critique” “to expose the interrelations among ideologies of capitalist neoliberalism, evangelistic Christianity, logocentrism, imperial domination, and ecological exploitation” as well as opposing to it “a tragic view of heroic life” that attests and continues another life and other possibilities. The result, as Festa formulates it, is that “Merwin’s epic of dispossession unearths a counternarrative within the triumphal celebration of imperial conquest so often presumed to be the ideological freight of the genre” (297).
28A question that Festa leaves us asking is, why did / does Merwin’s book get such sparse notice? Our inability to recognize the changes in categories that re-made the epic a form of our time? A hard to shake dumbness about what in fact is happening to the planet? His designation as a white male? Is it simply that Merwin’s anti-imperialist and anti-necrological vision is in such a minority position? Is it that our complicity with comfort is so great that he has to be not studied? Yet, how to reconcile, on the one hand, his unequivocal denunciation of settler colonialism (that some see as the start of the Anthropocene, this notion not being reduced to the relatively minor phenomenon of climate deregulation but synonymous with Aurélien Barrau’s diagnosis of a human species’ necrophilia and necrology, the modern human species equalling the cancellation of life on the planet and its replacement by artificialisation) with, on the other hand, his being not once but twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize (and of many other awards) and being appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, all the while that any academic work on him, even among “eco-critics,” remains sporadic, against which infrequency this very much-needed collection of essays firmly resists?