1“Is it I who have come to this age / or this age that has come to me” (2016 5). In “Not Early or Late,” a poem from his last collection Garden Time (2016), W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) wonders about what it means to come together with an age, his, that his oeuvre has indeed met, time and again—from his early political activism against the Vietnam war to his longstanding ecological investment. This question of coming together with a moment, ours, also speaks to this collection of essays, reminiscences, and new performances of his oeuvre. Merwin Recollected obviously takes a step back to re-read Merwin’s oeuvre through the act of recollection, of interpretation, of translation, but it also celebrates a voice whose vibrant presence, now, still troubles our own ephemeral present and asks us again and anew to inhabit this our world differently, poetically. A coming together of readers, editors and translators, of friends and artists whose voices and bodies read and sing and dance Merwin now, Merwin Recollected hopes that new or as yet uncharted paths to his oeuvre will emerge or merge with those that have, over time, begun to be opened.
Fig. 1. The door to Merwin’s garden, in Lacam (Lot). Personal collection.
- 1 The conference took place at University Paris Cité, at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm), and at t (...)
- 2 Merwin liked to remember the springing of wild grass in the city. For example, in the poem “Decembe (...)
2Poet, prose writer, translator who was born in New York City and died in Maui, Hawaii, W.S. Merwin lived many years in the south-west of France (Lot), in England, and in the United States, in New York City where he was born, and in Maui, where he planted a “garden” of 14,000 seedlings of palm trees (Becker) and spent the end of his life writing and botanizing. Merwin, physically, geographically, travelled across numerous borders. Merwin across Borders1 was the title of the international conference that we organized in October 2022 with a view to bringing Merwin home—in French and in France, a country and a language that had surprisingly paid little attention to him—but also to complicating the image of the Hawaiian recluse by adding to it that of the French troubadour, the saunterer of Lacam, in the Lot. Across: across national borders, across the borders of genres (poetry, prose, translation), across the borders of time, from the deep time of volcanoes to the “coming extinction,” from the Indigenous stories that he relayed to the ballads of the troubadours that he loved and translated, some of Merwin’s artistic particularity might stem from his geographical and temporal range across the history of poetry: a poetry that dwells as much in specific regions—be they in France, in Europe, in the “flagstones” of New York City2 or the spaces inscribed with the dire legacy of U.S. westward movement, or, yet again, in the ecozone of Hawaiian history and climate—as in the inexhaustible resources of memories of his own life experiences, from childhood to the most ephemeral instants stored and restored in countless poems. Recollecting Merwin also means to gather, to sew together, these places, temporalities, languages, without dismissing their uniqueness nor downplaying the tensions between them.
3A settler upset at human settlements, the divided Merwin is an agitator of the line, who worries the contours of Western epistemologies, unsettles fundamental distinctions between silence and sound, voice and writing, sadness and joy, the one and the same. The dark, the place and time of the unformulated, crosses over into the enlightened realm of knowledge. Merwin is hard to grasp. A borderer, his poetry moves across protest and acquiescence, the thing and its shadow, the name and what it names, the self and the world. Rid of the punctuating axe that cuts the continuum of the sensible (punctuation began disappearing in The Moving Target [1963], and capital letters at the start of lines, with The Carrier of Ladders [1970]), his poetry of respiration leaves the reader free to select yet to unsettle the syntax, to embrace the “shadow questions” (2016 37) in the twilight. Merwin’s writing does not discriminate so much as it quavers back and forth between darkness and daylight, between the elusive “now” and the delusively foreign country of the past, when forgetting is the condition of memory, when leaving is the only thing you can keep across the non-divide that death is. This is maybe why his voice is recognizable among many, yet always hard to place. A man of his time, he is far from the disheveled line of a Ginsberg or an Olson; he is far also from the experimental gymnastics of a Reznikoff or the willful obscurity of an Ashbery. Simple, deceptively so, Merwin, is a master of the taut line—something that has been praised by W.H. Auden on to Harold Bloom or Jorie Graham. Maybe in his unsettling lives and lines lies his quiet legacy, the perfection of a poetic form. Merwin recollected also means Merwin composed. A composedness and a composition that never cease from being political.
4In his “Note” that precedes his Unframed Originals: Recollections (1982), W.S. Merwin presents “things that originally happened in a sequence but now occur in the same moment in my mind, and so have become simultaneous, like flakes of snow that have fallen from different heights into the sea” (2005b ix). To our knowledge, “recollection,” is a word used only one time in Merwin’s corpus of poetry, but, arguably, all of Merwin is written to counteract what he calls in the 1994 “Foreword” to Unframed Originals “the agreement,” “of every social group,” “to obliterate origins” (2005 2 xv). Reading together, & co- and eco-reading, we wish to affirm reading itself as the element of memory that gathers every one of Merwin’s books like so many unique yet related flakes of snow, the lakes of his nows. This introduction hopes to collect, and recollect, flakes or leaves from each publication of this surprisingly understudied poet, translator, essayist, and gardener. We aspire to secure and attest the place of his immense work and its conjugations with the present of diction, performance, and meta-reflexivity on the literary map—here in France, where we are writing, and where he wrote many of his poems, and in the United States, where his two Pulitzer Prizes have not yet turned him into a twentieth-century classic. For better or for worse.
5Recollections are gatherings-together, co- and legere, whose originality consists in the revenance of their advent, event or adventure. The gathering—and therefore also the reading—occurs only once but for that reason is promised to recollection, remembrance, with otherwise intervals of disconnection. In much of Merwin, the element of elements that is the earth and the element of language join in his practice and conception of poetry.
6Merwin’s awareness of the earth—this entity, Green with Beasts (1956) as the title of his second book might call it—is an awareness of poetry. There, in “Birds Waking,” he says
Let the great globe well up and dissolve like its last birds
With the bursting roar and uprush of song!
(2013a, 142)
7The element of this écriture that it is also an écriterre joins earth (“globe”) and voice (“song”), in “The Bones” from The Drunk in the Furnace (1960):
It takes a long time to hear what the sands
Seem to be saying, with the wind nudging them,
And then you cannot put it in words nor tell
Why these things should have a voice.
(2013a 163)
8Merwin’s “listen,” the verb his stepson John Burnham Schwartz hears as his central most ethos, discerns the spirit, breath or voice, in materiality, writing or text (Schaefer). The sands—all the former bones of once-alive manifestations—are to texts what poetry is to the memory of their animation. All is here in the tension of the modal verbs, “cannot” versus “should.” The “should have”—be it epistemic or radical—marks a limit to what “you” can or cannot verbalize or explain, that is countered by a vocation that things have. Merwin’s call for imagination, formulated in the Bill Moyers interview, may be here (Wutz and Crimmel 2015 200).
9As he put it himself in his “Preface” to The Second Four Books of Poems (1993), Merwin’s letting go of punctuation was a remembering of vocalization as being intrinsic to poetry.
By the end of the poems in The Moving Target I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in. (2013a 194)
10The voice in writing, and the writing in voice, is the relationship that Merwin’s work in general seeks to keep alive. One important strand of his output is the twill of the ends of the earth and of writing. This joining has stubbornly held onto what constantly is threatened with extinction.
11Merwin’s assessment of our situation, expressed in the 1993 “Preface” to The Second Four Books of Poems, holds together the direst of analyses with the most impassioned of adhesions:
[C]ruelty, polymorphous nihilism, and organized obliteration have accelerated, and with them the racing disintegration of the entire evolutionary structure in which we are privileged still to exist. I think it is essential to recognize the probable result of what we have done and are doing, but when we have seen that and its roots in human motives, the menaced world may seem more to be treasured than ever. Certainly the anguish and anger we feel at the threat to it and the sleepless despoiling of it can lose their tragic complexity and become mere bitterness when we forget that their origin is a passion for the momentary countenance of the unrepeatable world. (2013a 198)
12To stay with the trouble, to take up Donna Haraway’s phrase, is to remember the complexity with which we bear the each-time one-time coalescence of the passing world. Sleep in Merwin is tantamount to turning the lights—of capture, of rationality—off. Sleep, the night, the dark, respects the alternation between rest, restoration, and diurnal despoilation. Merwin dwells in the aftermath position that is left after the demise of both the “polymorphous nihilism” of the Great Acceleration and its impotent opposition, mere bitterness. The treasure is what is fundamentally poetic. We discern in this “more to be treasured than ever” an allusive echo to Merwin’s attachment to the troubadours that he acquired thanks to Ezra Pound. “Treasure” here derives from “troubadour,” Merwin’s most important lodestar or heritage: “trouvère, “any of a school of poets flourishing in northern France from the 11th to 14th centuries [...]. Compare troubadour. [French, from Old French trovere, from trover, to invent, find, compose poetry [...] to use tropes]” (American Heritage Dictionary 1981 1376).
Fig. 2. Just as Michael Wiegers in this issue recalls that the original manuscript of The Lice bore the inscription of the place where it was written, “Lacam,” so did Merwin inscribe his garden door with this design, in 1967, the year of its publication. Personal collection.
13The Lice (1967) famously teems with dire analyses.
We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
“The River of Bees” (2013a 286)
The extinct animals are still looking for home
Their eyes full of cotton
Now they will
Never arrive
“In Autumn” (2013a 291)
Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men
“December Night” (2013a 292)
14But even in The Lice Merwin tries to inhabit, to find, a language of the elements and of other than the destructive human:
If there is a place where this is language may
It be my country
“The Cold Before the Moonrise” (2013a 294)
or
What you do not have you find everywhere.
“Provision” (2013a 297)
15Such “tragic complexity” (2013a 198) is also that of writing posthumously, in the sense of after the human species. Being dead on our feet, not merely individually but collectively, what is the possibility of being read or resuscitated, which would seem to be structurally part of any gesture of address? Merwin’s six-word poem “Elegy,” in The Carrier of the Ladders (1970), expresses this structure, which does not instigate renunciation, on the contrary: “Who would I show it to” (2013a 400). Merwin’s uneasiness resides in his grasp of this temporal predicament of poetic dwelling.
16What can we write, what, or who, can we write to, if we are disappearing, or already disappeared? Three lines from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973) raise the question:
Years from now
someone will come upon a layer of birds
and not know what he is listening for.
“Early One Summer” (2013a 403)
The recollection will not resign itself to the hegemony of the species “we” that expresses itself here:
because we have lost whoever
[the clouds, the skies] are calling
we say that they are not calling us.
“The Clear Skies” (2013a 407)
Yet there is still something to listen to that will speak, if only the senses-proofing “we” be disenabled:
While we talk
thousands of languages are listening
saying nothing.
“At the Same Time” (2013a 420)
- 3 “Le noir—l’obscur, l’informe, le monde souterrain—est le lieu des possibles, de ce qui est en puiss (...)
This unspoken, like the unwritten, is in “the dark,” which for Merwin is the place of subjunctive puissance:3
Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
[...]
they’re hiding
they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
[...]
even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
“The Unwritten” (2013a 422)
17Being witness to what is unwritten, what sits in the dark, is a matter of reception and inheritance, an heir to an air, a their to a “they’re” to a “there.” This question of reception and bequeathal—witnessing and bearing witness—is at stake throughout Merwin’s oeuvre, as encapsulated here:
Your whole age sits between what you hear
and what you write
“Sibyl” (2013a 429)
18In The Compass Flower, this in-between position is also the temporal interval not so much between life and death as between the moment of dismissal and the moment of disappearance.
after what we have said good-bye to
and before what we will not be here to see
“November” (2013a 476)
- 4 “I go on the assumption, which I cannot avoid, that there is some link between a society’s threat t (...)
19Merwin understood the complexity of this time at least as early as the 1950s, in essays such as “On Ecology” (1958), as the time when the destruction of life by the human species equates the species status as the “echo of the future.”4 This “link between” (from 1958) is simultaneous to the temporality in the poem “November” from the The Compass Flower (1977) wherein the phenomenalization of disappearance is the modality of a being-here. Such hiatus could be called the Anthropocene, defined as the time after a Holocene in which the human was not (yet) a geological force and before total artificialization (Vernadsky):
The landscape
of a link disappearing between species and phyla and kingdoms
is here
“November” (2013a 476, our italics)
20Another altogether different mode of spatio-temporality characterizes “The Coin” (in The Compass Flower), a poem from the Lot, anticipatory of those of The Vixen (1996). The coin in this poem is secondarily a particular location—or, in French, coin. To wit, a marketplace that the poetic I visits and about which the I off-handedly remarks that it had been where the corpses of Resistance fighters had been “hung for days in full view / of the women who had been their wives.” Most of the poem, however, is devoted to snapshots of vendors selling their wares, and its punctum is a “coin in with their grain”: a coin on the grain-strewn floor of a cage of turtledoves. The conclusion, as in many Merwin poems, is a still: “all of it returns without a sound” (2013a 513). Yoking place, commerce and history, “The Coin” is a synecdoche of many of Merwin’s unique witnessings that attest the now-defunct. Disappearance or interruption, however, is the promise of reprise, of memory, the condition of possibility in fact for all of the distilled juxtaposed congruences.
21The book, Finding the Island (North Point Press, 1982) contains Feathers from the Hill (1978)—reprinted in the Library of America The Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin—but also Turning to You (1982) which is not included in the two volume set. Both the 1978 and 1982 poems are composed of three-line stanzas that capture, always in the present tense, a moment by means of the clusters of synesthesia. However, very rare in Feathers from the Hill, some stanzas reduce the poetic impressions to meta-reflection upon conditions of possibility:
When it says
good-bye
say thank you
“Sheep Clouds” (2013a 550)
Or:
Starts too near
ever to
arrive
“Sheep Clouds” (2013a 550)
- 5 One might translate the final verse as “the world is gone, I must carry you,” and the title of the (...)
22Gratitude is due to the farewell or adieu, because the latter transforms the unretainable present into the three-line stanzas. Never arriving, yet ever infinite, infinitive, the origin is promised to recollection, to repeated attempts. The bundle that is Turning to You, one hundred and sixty-seven three-line stanzas in twelve separate poems, is all love poems that repeat the desire of erotic union, during the seven-year relationship with Dana Naone. Published in 1982, the year Merwin re-met Paula Dunaway, whom he married in 1983, Turning to You (in Finding the Islands) is an incessant variation upon the triad of world, I, and you, reminiscent of Paul Celan’s line, in “Große, Glühende, Wölbung,” from Atemwende (1967), “Die Welt ist fort, ich muß Dich tragen” that unites them (93).5 I and you, merged in a highly recurrent “one” as “we” or “us,” as one child, are phantasmatically merged in these poems in which world, language, I, and you become monad:
Each of us
as a child
watched a mountain
“Living Together” (1982 48)
how can we forget
anything at which
we have both been present
“Winter Storm” (1982 69)
Meeting we stood on a small bridge
with the world
flowing under us
“Living Together” (1982 46)
Afterwards we came
to the same words
in the same voice
“Living Together” (1982 47)
23The sameness of words, of voice, conjures up and performs a we wherein any seeming posterity to the witnessed world would be eliminated: no delay, no oblivion. A bridge= the flow. The joining is the world, or the fusion of I and you eliminates any third (word, world). Although Turning to You consists of erotic, sensual love poems, it also transforms the rebelliousness of Merwin toward the destruction of nature into a rebellion against absence or separation.
24Opening the Hand (1983) operates a major shift in subject and form. Its almost sixty poems very often use a long line, and twenty-five of them, a split line or two half lines, reminiscent of modern renderings of Old English poetic form. The separation so sublimated in Feathers from the Hill and Turning to You here inversely dilates, and lines extend across the page.
When I come home in the city and see the young roaches
running on the bare cliffs they pause to see what I am
[…]
it is true that they do not know anything about me
nor where we are from we can have
little knowledge we look at each other and wait
whatever we may do afterward
“Standing Nowhere” (2013a 588)
25The blank interval exacerbates the hiatus which the earlier fusion exteriorized to beyond its right and left margins. Anticipatory in content of poems in Garden Time (2016) such as “The Scarab Questions” or “After the Dragonflies,” the nowhere-to-stand stages a world that is no longer. When the world is no more, abyssal is the stage. Such becomes the scene of roach-me, species-we encounter:
[…] the face in the White House
whose syllables wither species and places
into deaths going on before us
“Coming Back in Spring” (2013a 589)
26Opening the Hand was published one year after Unframed Originals (1982), his haunting recollection of his youth and family origins, uncles, aunts, grandparents who might be Merwin’s version of the “frail originals” (Adam and Eve) in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (38), a poem much of which Merwin had memorized. Parts of Opening the Hand poetically recall those family members; other parts, as above, his returns to his New York City haunts and encounters with modernity. Here also, laceration from modern destruction continues to insist.
How can anyone know that a whale
two hundred years ago could hear another
whale at the opposite end of the earth
[…]
with the sounds of hollow iron charging
clanging through the oceans and with the circuitries
gand the harpoons of humans
and the poisoning of the seas
a whale can hear no farther through the present
than a jet can fly in a few minutes
“The Shore” (2013a 596)
27In “The Night Surf,” for example, the hiatus however finds itself if not sutured, at least reduced in a return to congruence that recollects what Merwin will increasingly cling to:
Of tomorrow I have nothing to say
what I say is not tomorrow
tomorrow no animals
no trees growing at their will
no one in the White House
the words gone out
the end of our grasp and rage
and of our knowledge
what is between us and tomorrow
in the deep shade blue irises are open
we are barefoot in the airy house
after dark the surf roars on the cliffs
“The Night Surf” (2013a 597)
28While hewing to today, to now, to the present, despite and because of tomorrow, what is between is the ceaseless collection and recollection of what is to be affirmed (in the) now.
29Merwin’s present can be a present perfect and a continuous present. As such, it is a supplement between materiality and ideality, which is also the space between written words and breathy speech. In Rain in the Trees (1988), an ideal or imagined voice, materialized through a simile (the wind or the sea), is the representation, a supplement, an echo, of all speech ever, a silent yet nonetheless ongoing sound loop.
Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence.
“Utterance” (2013a 647)
30A “kind of whispered sighing” supplements the written “words,” yet this sort of sound is supplemented by the simile (“like a night wind”; “like the sea”), itself the supplement or echo of all speech that, in turn, is the in-between of matter and ideal, “earth and silence.” A poem like “At the Same Time” also insists on a present that is neither the past nor the future, “after all there are no others / for the dead do not listen to us / out of the past,” and “as for the future / what good would it do us / to be discovered / a hundred years on” (2013a 650). Yet it is essential to distinguish Merwin’s present—open to the geological scales of time compared to which human time is both infinitesimal and therefore all the more marvelous—from the metaphysics of presence wherein humans see themselves as origin and end. As “we” do here in “To the Insects” from The Rain in the Trees:
we have been here so short a time
and we pretend that we have invented memory
we have forgotten what it is like to be you
who do not remember us
“To the Insects” (2013 1 651)
- 6 Merwin and Dylan shared a poet friend, Allen Ginsberg, with whom both spent significant time. For D (...)
31With several iconic poems, such as “Place,” “To the Insects,” “After the Alphabets,” “Witness,” “Chord,” or “Losing a Language,” to name a few, Rain in the Trees—Merwin is now sixty years old—might be comparable to how Bob Dylan,6 when also around the same age, suddenly shifted gears. Merwin’s The Vixen (1993) and The Folding Cliffs (1996) lie soon ahead, to be followed by the major books that followed.
32Unlike almost all his poetic corpus, Travels (1993) shares with the two first books, The Mask of Janus (1952) and The Dancing Bears (1954), the use of regular, closed, form. Its poems are composed in strophes of regular length, and very often regular numbers of syllables or stresses. Travels certainly belongs to the regular formal constraints that characterize both The Vixen (1996) and the epic poem The Folding Cliffs (1998), no doubt Merwin’s masterpiece as Ted Hughes called it (Merwin 2004a bookcover). Travels begins with an uncanny, uneasy, address to a hypothetical reader, with its first line “Hypocrite reader my / variant.” The poetic voice imagines that readers, and poets, are so few now that it is only the words between them that incarnate the existence of a sender and a receiver. Yet persistent is Merwin’s hope of making palpable the wonder of our time, even despite, and no doubt because the world is burning:
[...] we are so
few now it seems as though
we knew each other as
the words between us keep
assuming that we do
I hope I make sense to
you in the shimmer of
our days while the world we
cling to in common is
[...]
burning
“Cover Note” (2013a 677)
33The poem imagines a future that Merwin anticipates in various interviews, when literature and imagination themselves could have disappeared, as well as anything of the natural world: the world departed, leaving only an I to carry a you according to a sliding axis where who is who is undecidable, such as the disappearance of:
[...] the last rustling of
[...]
paws of high grass the one
owl hunting along this
spared valley the tongues of
the free trees our uncaught
voices
“Cover Note” (2013a 678)
34Merwin’s position anticipates the late poems, where his crafted simplicity aspires to an accessibility such that the hiatus between writing and reading could as if disappear.
[...] these
words that I hoped might seem
as though they had occurred
to you and you would take
them with you as your own.
“Cover Note” (2013a 678)
35The last six poems of Travels start with the lines dated from roughly 1978 to his ex-second wife Dido’s death in 1990, “After twelve years and a death / returning in August to see the end of summer / French skies” (“On the Old Way,” Travels [2013a 780]). The book’s largely closed, or regular, forms announce The Vixen (1996) which returns to Lacam, the house in the Lot he had bought in 1954, the village and its surroundings that the latter book is obsessed with.
- 7 “Hotel” was originally entitled “House Abroad” in its first publication in the March 23, 1981 issue (...)
36The Vixen is the first book, of poetry to boot, to be translated into French (by Luc de Goustine, published in 2004 by Fanlac). It is in many respects as sustainedly uncannily-other as is the book that followed it, two years later, The Folding Cliffs (1998): if the former accomplishes the exploit of witnessing and bearing witness to a rural French world as off the map of French progress as it was for modern French writers, let alone for a U.S. citizen having grown up in an entirely urban, modern, capitalism, the latter undertakes the daunting challenge of representing, as a descendant of white settler colonists in the United States, the crucially decisive and tragic history of Hawaiian natives submitted to U.S. imperialism and capitalism and ideology. Probably more than any of Merwin’s other books, these two require being read together. As Michael Taylor, in his beautiful, finely researched, essay “William S. Merwin et le causse perdu,” points out, Merwin in his memoir essay “Hotel” from Unframed Originals (1982)7 gives, as brief digression, the template for many of the poems in The Vixen that represent his house there: most explicitly, “Gate,” “Threshold,” “The West Window,” “Garden,” “In the Doorway,” “Upland House,” “Old Sound.” With its publication in book form, The Lost Upland (1992), Merwin’s extraordinarily intimate, entirely chameleonic (in John Keats’ sense), recreation of disappearing French rural life in the Lot, and in the surroundings of where he lived, is the prose correlate of The Vixen. Two of its three essays, “Foie Gras” and “Shepherds” originally published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review in 1984 (19 March issue) and 1986 (no. 101), respectively, certainly prepare the terrain for The Vixen. Merwin’s prose memoirs and essays from The Ends of the Earth, Summer Doorways, The Mays of Ventadorn, to The Lost Upland take recollection to hallucinating, astonishing, virtual, total recall, all the more so that what they are recalling—the lives of his relatives and elders, those of becoming-obsolete life forms in the Lot, his own early adult years—was reducing not only to crumbles and fragments, but to what the obsolete sense of the title of his poem “Utterance” means to wit, utter destruction, oblivion. The power of restitution, recall, recollection, resurrection in these texts is starkest in Unframed Originals, as if his own family—and shallow U.S. culture—were the pale counterpart to Occitan, French, culture. The commitment to bearing witness to the lived is radically counteracting the “polymorphous nihilism” that his preface to The Second Four Books had flagged in 1994, again a date prior or simultaneous to The Vixen.
37The odd originality or original oddity of The Vixen cannot be exaggerated. How rare the person who can read it? The French cannot, nor the U.S. people. It requires a rare hybrid: an expatriate U.S. citizen, fluent in vernacular poetries of many early Romance languages, who is interested in lifestyles that with the Remembrement and Le Plan were consigned to oblivion, but is also able to write about them as no French person did or even tried to do; or, inversely, a French person from the peasantry who became educated in U.S. literature. Given that, it’s partly hard, partly easy, to understand why Merwin’s work has never been on the roughly seventy years of programmes of the French concours for disciplines of English or Comparative Literature.
38The poem “Passing” describes in the late 1950s or early 1960s two boys driving sheep across the land, the two boys being Jacques Delmas (now the current President of the association “Sur les pas de W.S. Merwin” devoted to celebrating Merwin’s literary heritage in the Lot) and Eric Louviot (who became the writer, actor, director, and former head of the Tanit theatre in Lisieux, France, and who has set numerous Merwin writings to musical interpretation). “Passing” recounts the poetic I (Merwin) as witness to a scene from which he refrains from intervening: what would have happened, what would happen, if he called out to the boys at work? Such would have interrupted them and disrupted it. The call of voice would have marked the intrusion of an outside presence. Witnessing and bearing witness observes this threshold. The limit is not different from that negotiated in The Folding Cliffs. Numerous poems in The Vixen attest ways of life, functions of life, that were becoming, have become, defunct.
39What Merwin, in The Vixen in particular, is recording is the loss of sensibility and sensuality that characterizes the transfer of the human from an animal (or humanimal) to an artificial creature. “[M]ost of the stories have to do with vanishing,” reads the last line of “White Morning” (2013b 12), and the title of “End of a Day” also refers to epochal end, many centuries of ways of life smashed and replaced by modern, increased, industrialized production:
as though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland
pastures and shepherd’s huts into piles of rubble
[...]
[...] has plans now to demolish
the ancient walls of the lane and level it wide
so that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs
with perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire
“End of Day” (2013b 17)
40Consider the question raised throughout The Vixen: is literature, the poems themselves, using an old Roman form, the equivalent of the unused, unuseable, defunct, non-functional tools which are all the old buggies, ox-pulled plows, scythes, the calèches and serpettes? Is Merwin’s very book one of the peasant’s tools? Or is it a meta-tool that attempts to not become inactive, unused, unwakeable: in The Vixen “unwakeable,” from the word “wake,” names the possibility to bring something from sleep or even from death or inertness back into alertness, consciousness, perception, communication, life, activity. When we read a text, which is only ink put into shapes on a piece of paper, we “wake” that “ink” into something living that expresses that which can only exist if you are alive: into ideas. There are no ideas except when you are thinking them, and to think them, you have to be alive. In the case of Merwin, these “ideas” are things generated by living, by sensing, by experiencing, by witnessing and bearing witness. The Vixen is written in the tension between being witness to becoming-defunct and the function of literature. To keep alive the human and to prevent the human from becoming a machine or artificial intelligence is the goal which The Vixen is trying to achieve, or, at least, the threat or process to which The Vixen is bearing witness.
41Merwin’s longest single work, 324 pages in the Alfred A. Knopf edition, consisting of seven chapters, each of forty parts, but with the fourth part in forty-one parts, The Folding Cliffs. A narrative of 19th-century Hawaii has recently received a magisterial reading from Thomas Festa. Recognizing “narrative” in the subtitle, he nonetheless places Merwin’s epic poem in the framework of debates on the epic versus the novel, and on the rise of the novel and fall of the epic. Decisively, his analysis of its status as epic operates via its integration of the Anthropocene, the human species as a geological force, and its contextualization of the United States as empire. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs is an epic that opposes the centripetal imperial impulse to totalization and links this narrative of opposition 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” (Festa 283). Even more significant than its representation of “the pernicious collusive effects of capitalism, imperialism, and ideology,” Merwin’s poem identifies the necro-teleo-logical threat to “the whole biosphere” (Festa 283). Hence Merwin’s prescience: “Merwin’s genealogy of climate change urges that we extend [H. L.] 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” (Festa 283).
42The River Sound (1999), The Pupil (2001), and Present Company (2005) are Merwin’s next three books of poetry, coinciding roughly with the publication of three of his prose books, The Mays of Ventadorn (2002), The Ends of the Earth (2005), and Summer Doorways (2005), and that of his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002). Perhaps most remarkable in The River Sound is “Testimony,” Merwin’s re-mix, as it were, of Le Testament Villon (ca. 1462 A.D.). Villon’s Testament—2023 verses in 187 huitains, the rest in ballades also of eight lines—is roughly the same length as Merwin’s “Testimony” (252 octets or 2016 verses). Merwin’s “Testimony,” written as he turned seventy, covers, recovers and uncovers, in poetic form, his family history back into the nineteenth century, but also throughout the twentieth, and reconstructs poetically what the memoirs Unframed Originals and also Summer Doorways and even The Mays of Ventadorn recollect, reassemble, in prose form. As in those prose books, “Testimony” revisits many of the vignettes of his life in the Lot distilled in The Vixen:
only what now is left to me
can I hope to guide as it goes
looking north over the valley
from this room where the oven is
that baked their bread in the old days
for this place I too left behind
often and in so many ways
and set the feather in the wind
in deadly half-earnest Villon
launching into a legacy
found before he had well begun
that the form allowed him every
kind of digression and delay
that would put off the bitter list
which I confess appeals to me
who would rather leave that for last
“Testimony” (2013b 357)
43“Testimony” is also a testament, a will, in which Merwin, in the wake of Whitman’s leaves, bestows all he can to scores of acquaintances. Here willing equates with the gesture of addressing, writing to the possibility of receivers, readers who, as receivers, ultimately are the senders:
and though whatever I may leave
is clear to me how can I say
what an heir will in fact receive
when even now the words I say
sometimes are heard another way
as nothing is dependable
while I still have the chance I may
as well bestow things as I will
“Testimony” (2013b 359)
44A densely rich collection, The Pupil (2001) seems to have been overshadowed by the books greater in scope, before and after its publication. The quantity of Merwin’s writing, also, as Harold Bloom intimated, meant that not all of it would “survive” (Schaefer). However, The Pupil would merit close study. One poem in it, “In the Open,” seems to recall London in 1950 or 1951, a scene of decimated ruined London, and night-time vigils spent in parks. Its depiction of light is a genesis for presence and absence, for
then as I lay looking up into all
that had been coming to pass and was still
coming to pass some of the stars by then
were nothing but the light that had left them
before there was life on earth and nothing
would be seen after them and the light from
one of them would have set out exactly
when the first stir of life recognized death
and began its delays that light had been
on its way from there all through what happened
afterward through the beginning of pain
the return of pain into the senses
into feelings without words and then words
traveling toward us even in our sleep
words for the feelings of those who are not
there now and words we say are for ourselves
“In the Open” (2013b 405)
45The disjointed time—light but an extinct source, death already there to greet the origin of life, delay as beginning, words like light presence of absence and vice versa—is that of supplementarity, again instancing Merwin’s obsession with the now as the only lived time, but only lived through repetition, memory, iteration.
46This alternation of presence and absence reaches a crescendo in Present Company (2005), in which each of the one hundred and one poems of address begin with the word “To”—for example, “To the Present Tense,” “To Prose,” “To the Margin,” To ______,” “To My Teeth,” “To Billy’s Car,” “To the Soul,” and so on. Six poems are rare oddities in the entire Merwin corpus: they are dated poems, September 10, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 2001. The poems, to the light of September, words, the grass of autumn, ashes, Zbigniew Herbert’s bicycle, coming winter, have no identifiable reference to September 11, 2001 in the United States. Merwin’s dating them is enigmatic. The address structure that is powerfully present in all his poetry meta-poetically closes the book, with “To the Book.” It begins:
Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours
all the time
“To the Book” (2013 2 539)
47The second poem in The Present Company, “To the Soul,” is exquisite (on the left here), and it has its counterpart in “The Little Soul” (on the right here), Merwin’s rendering in English of a poem attributed to Hadrian, in The Shadow of Sirius (2008).
Is anyone there if so are you real either way are you one or several if the latter are you all at once or do you take turns not answering
is your answer the question itself surviving the asking without end whose question is it how does it begin where does it come from how did it ever find out about you over the sound of itself with nothing but its own ignorance to go by “To the Soul” (2013b 455)
|
Little soul little stray little drifter now where will you stay all pale and all alone after the way you used to make fun of things “Little Soul, after Hadrian,” (2013b 570)
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48Note the perfect balance of this six-line, three-part (ll. 1-2; ll. 3-4; ll. 5-6) poem between “soul” and “stray,” with the repeated “little” in the four-word, six-syllable anapests. Its reduction to the two-word, four-syllable “little drifter” with its sound of [i], [t], and the barely heard [ĕ], in the second line, opens onto the polarized third line that places the blank unfathomable time and space words “now” and “where” against the future-haunting “will you stay” with its radical reduction from the errancy of “stray” to the arrested “stay.” The droning reiteration and assonance and balance of line 4, with the [l], the [p], the [n], and the caesura [d] in “and,” that subtly varying [a], finishes in the split between the from now on in line 5 and the hitherto imperfect past in line 6. This balance is the tension between the two ways of reading “after the way”: condemned because of its having made fun of “things,” it being no thing, it now seemingly has lost the body that, dying, addresses it; but, also, “after the way” might be its pursuit of that way, its having become a thing, a word, of ineffable meaning.
49The fact that The Shadow of Sirius won Merwin his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and that it contains several often-quoted poems such as “To Paula in Late Spring” or “Rain Light”—whose last line, “even though the whole world is burning” (2013 2 605), gave Stefan Schaefer the title to his 2015 film—has perhaps overshadowed his poetry books just before The Shadow of Sirius, or just after. In addition, The Moon Before Morning (2014) and Garden Time (2016) were published after the appearance of the Library of America edition in two volumes: The Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin (2013).
50Merwin never had a University Professorship, the steady affluent salary that such position, in some U.S. universities, would have paid him. As Robert Faggan and Michael Wiegers have pointed out (Schaefer, and in this issue, respectively), he lived extremely frugally for many decades, making money piecemeal, from translations, articles, essays, poems, books. He also over time received some gifts, fellowships, honorariums, and award money. He had little to no debt. As he says in various places, he lived like an artist in previous centuries, in the hope and on the basis of such a piecemeal approach that, over time, from the accretion of the congruent projects, and the recognition they received, enabled him not to have the obligations that a regular job would have brought. Basically, as artisan or artist, Merwin earned, and even made, his own bread.
51Although conceivably it could be any such structure in the environs of his French house, “Old Breadhouse” (The Moon Before Morning) likely revisits, once again, Merwin’s study in Lacam, the small stone building next to the house in which he wrote, looking north across the Dordogne valley, a view many times represented across the corpus. Since his and Paula’s deaths, visitors to his house do not generally have access to it, but during the October 2022 conference that finished in Lacam and Loubressac, scholars of Merwin were able to enter and see this small writing space. The poem “Old Breadhouse” describes it before he ever saw or used it, in the times back at the end of the 19th century. It is another reflection of how the poet continues, or does not, the functions of a world become defunct, maintains functionality without having tenure, nor being a civil servant nor a fonctionnaire.
Here they came when another week had gone
bearing their waving armloads of brambles
dried seasons of their own lives snapping
a last few sharp syllables as the arms
bundled them into the black sunrise
of the oven door to the sound of their own
words that were leaves of an ancient language
they would be the last to speak and they
set the brush ablaze in the brick vault
when the risen loaves were ready to be passed
into place one by one on the long paddles
each load as round as an embrace
or as a week or the sky that morning
“Old Breadhouse” (2014 67)
52The “br” and “bl” consonants link humans and plants. Humans “bear” the “brambles” that are the source of combustion. The arms that “bear” them also “bundle” them. This relation of “br” and “bl” is also that of fire and plant: the “black sunrise” or fire in the oven is where the “brush ablaze [is] in the brick vault.” The “brambles” are already that union of plant and fire, but also of human and bread, with “bearing” and “bundled” making the “brambles” produce the “embrace.” Plant (“brambles,” “brush”) are gathered (“bearing,” “bundled,” “brace”) in fire (“ablaze,” “brick,” “black”), whence bundles of branches or bread. In a connection between life-lobe-leaf that Merwin’s favorite American writer, Henry David Thoreau, dwelt upon in “Spring” from Walden (and for which Merwin wrote an introduction [Merwin, 1999 249]), the relation of “l” and “v,” ”l” and “f” and even “l” and “d”—in “lives,” “leaves,” “loaves,” “loaf,” and “load”—bring together the plant-like nature of words: “leaves” “that were” “words” “of an ancient language,” and the “loaves” that are the plant transformed into bread inversely are the “lives” of the plants or brambles that themselves speak, or “snap,” in “syllables.” The “loads” of the “armloads” already embraced by “the arms bundl[ing] them” become the “loaf as round as an embrace.” This place, old breadhouse, defunct, becomes Merwin’s house of writing, of what he does as a breadwinner. Merwin retools the old breadhouse into a writer’s studio—from one place of fabrication to another; from rural peasants to a writer.
53By all accounts, Merwin wrote every morning until around 1 p.m. He seems to have been always writing, always working, on several projects simultaneously or in alternation, and this activity may explain how poetry, translation, and prose were developing in parallel to each other, and in the case of prose and poetry, the content often is common. This should not come as a surprise when we recognize how repetition is a structural and genetic necessity to his conception of an event, something that happens only once. As we elaborated in our study of Garden Time, in Merwin, the one time—of an event, of a present—is always already duplicated (2022 164-168). The “one,” the “once,” the “only” are inseparable from repetition, iteration, reproduction. The one time is always already variation, reprised singularity. Merwin confounds and co-founds the singular, the present, the once of events—think of his first entrance into his house in France, for example in The Vixen—and iteration, both memory and anticipation—the multiple and infinite reprisals of that entrance across the corpus.
54Perhaps because of how he lived—the late 1940s as a tutor in New Jersey, the coastal peninsula of Nice, France, rural Portugal outside of Coimbra; the many years in the Lot; London frequenting T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas and many others in the pub The Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit; the decades building and planting in Maui, Hawaii, the long stays in Mexico and New York City—in ways that seem to have had a monkish discipline and routine, Merwin’s prose writing overwhelmingly returns to the past, that of his parents and their relatives, which he resuscitates with amazing patience, gradual recall, revelations of interconnections and subtleties. But The Lost Upland is quite different from Unframed Originals, or Summer Doorways, insofar as it relates not his family history or late teens and early twenties, but the richly layered, finely articulated, reconstructions of numerous stories, events, characters, in his adopted land of le causse. Yet another, The Ends of the Earth, with its personal memoirs of his friend and publisher of The Nation, George Kirstein, of his exploration of Mont Athos, and essays on European explorations of the South Pacific, the histories of snails in Hawaii, of butterflies in Mexico, of explorations of Hawaii and the Pacific islands after James Cook’s death by Albi, France native Jean-François Galaup de La Pérouse, testifies to his interest in the tension between exploration and preservation.
55The Mays of Ventadorn (2005) is another pass by Merwin on how a kid from New Jersey and Pennsylvania came to be enthralled by the Occitan world. It dwells longer than anywhere else in his corpus on his meetings with Ezra Pound, and explains how he worked his way through the poetry of the different troubadour poets. He recognizes his debt to the work of the German Carl Appel, who before World War One was the most advanced specialist of the troubadours. The two World Wars also figure in The Mays of Ventadorn, and Merwin details the history of the Resistance, and of the rifts between the French and the Germans in this part of France especially. Wearing his erudition lightly, but with precision, Merwin presents the poets, the poetry, the actors, the history, the royalty, of this time. In ways different from The Vixen, Unframed Originals, or The Lost Upland, but in accretion to them, Merwin powerfully evokes the “unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture—the growing of more or less everything” in the Lot, a “département” which in the view of “many journalists, economic theorists,” the ministry of agriculture, and go-ahead professionals in the towns,” was “hopelessly backward” (2005 57).
56Lying beyond this present context are the richness of these works and what they are doing as texts apart from demonstrating Merwin’s mania for recollection and his attachment to a kind of local history, to ways of life at the crossroad between the slow time of pre-modernity and the accelerating time that replaced it across the planet. Whether, as in Reflections on a Mountain (1975), it is on Mont Athos where modern technology manages its entrance, or, in “Shepherds” (1994), the causse of Quercy where the Roman presence and their “legacy of admired abstractions” are more distant than “far older hunters,” Merwin never forgets the “tragic complexity” of the crossroads between modern and ancient modes of dwelling:
Jeep-tracks in the mud. Mutilated swaths hacked across the slopes for telephone poles, and bright new wires humming above them. The new divine right. The road overruns bits of old footpath here and there, climbing. Made for wheels and the body can feel it. ([1975] 2004 77)
[The] presence [of the Romans] was more remote than that of the far older hunters from the days of the painted caverns under the causse, some of them still unlisted on any map or registry. There were a number of entrances to that dark dripping world with a mile or so of the garden. ([1994] 2016b 92)
57All these texts seem to indicate an indefatigable, temerarious gardener, trying to preserve seeds and life-forms, against all odds. So, too, do the radically different first two prose collections, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977) that explode so many of the conventions of what constitutes the realism and factuality of the later books in prose.
- 8 Folsom and Nelson’s Essays on the Poetry gives a full bibliography of all of Merwin’s published tra (...)
58At the origin of all of this is translation. Merwin repeatedly recognized the importance of Ezra Pound’s advice to start by translating, as the way to the origin, the origin of poetry and poetry as origin. The quantity, range, and quality of Merwin’s translations would impress anyone8: The Poem of the Cid (1960); The Satires of Persius (1961); Spanish Ballads (1961); The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1962); The Song of Roland (1963); The Selected Translations (from 1948-68 in 1968; from 1968-1978 in 1979; from 1948-2011 in 2013, and in which we find scores of European and non-European writers); Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1969); Products of the Perfected Civilization (Selected Writings of Chamfort) (1969); the 1943 Voices of Antonio Porchia (1969), also from 1943 Transparence of the World by Jean Follain (also in 1969) about which Merwin’s brief comments on the “present” would inform all of his writing; poems from Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, and Vietnamese from, for example, Rumi, Tu Fu, Li Po, and Musō Suseki, in Asian Figures (1973) reprised in East Window: The Asian Translations (1998) also including Sun at Midnight: Poems by Musō Suseki (1989) who, when Merwin translated him—as he points out in his Preface, all these translations were helped by the knowledge of others, for example Sōiko Shigematsu for Musō Suseki—had almost never been translated into English. As Merwin indicates in his fascinating introduction to Sun at Midnight, Suseki had some 13,145 students recorded to be working with him. We continue: Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown) (1974), Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (with George E. Domock Jr.) (1978); Robert the Devil; The Rival of His Master and Turcaret (Lesage); The False Confessions (Marivaux) in Four French Plays (1985); From the Spanish Morning (1985); the first English translation of Argentinian Roberto Juarroz’s Vertical Poetry (1988) that includes Merwin’s fine introduction with correspondence from Juarroz to Merwin, and from Cortazar to Juarroz; Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (1996) which, as Jesse Tangen-Mills superbly presents it, is Merwin’s personal selection from his contemporary Mexican poet’s corpus. Merwin returned to his beloved earlier periods of poetry with his translations of Dante’s Purgatorio (2000) and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002). It belongs to other places or times to study Merwin’s practice of poetic translation or translation of poetry. The preceding superficial overview merely intends to set beside the range of his own poetry and prose his production as translator. Ranging well over more than ten centuries, and several continents, the texts which Merwin translated make us wonder: what was his library like? when will an inventory of it be available? what funding might exist for that, and what were the different principles commanding his choices as translator? What sense did he acquire of “world literature” from such practice? Is he himself not the essence of Comparative Literature? How did these various writers, either from distant times and places or contemporary to his own writing, impact his own writing? How did his attachment to linguistic diversity jive with that of biological diversity? Those are questions for readers to come, whoever they are.
59It all started in the Fall of 2018 when we made a personal pilgrimage to try to find Merwin’s house. At that point, we only knew the hamlet name, but we knew no more than that. Merwin was in fact still alive at that point, but we did not know that Paula had died in 2017, and, in brief, from Stefan Schaefer’s film devoted to W.S. Merwin, Even Though the Whole World Is Burning (2015), we were in the delusion that Merwin was more robust than he was in 2018. We thought there was even time still to exchange with him. Only later did we learn that the house was not yet open to visitors, and that at about the same time, a grandchild of Merwin’s neighbors in Lacam, unforeknown by Merwin, visited Maui, turning up at Merwin’s “other house.” Merwin, then very frail, lifted restrictions on visitors and welcomed inside the young man who hailed from his hamlet: Merwin was uplifted and radiant from the link back to Lacam. Jacques Delmas knows this story. From our first visit to his French house, virtually simultaneous to that to the Maui house, came our motivation to contact John Burnham Schwartz, the literary executor for Merwin’s estate, and, with his approval, our idea for translating Garden Time came to fruition after exchanges with, and visits to, Fanlac editions in Aubas, in the Dordogne. With both our deep interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman, but also in the French and U.S. traditions, and in particular university, academic, or educational traditions of literature as support for teaching reading, writing and critical thinking, we were puzzled at two histories of reception, or even in the French case of virtual non-reception of such a major poet, writer and translator, if one may judge on the basis not only of quantity but also of certain forms of institutional and even media recognition.
- 9 Note, however, the article written by Laurette Veza (1976), the two articles written by Françoise P (...)
60This special issue of Transatlantica, the first transatlantic, transpacific, multi-scalar, multi-modal collection on W.S. Merwin’s oeuvre, has roots in a thought-provoking, yet strangely scarce, critical tradition. In the United States, W.S. Merwin’s work has obviously elicited interest. Folsom and Nelson’s collection of essays, W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry (1987) includes important information about the archives of Merwin’s manuscripts held at the University of Illinois; the special issue, Many Mountains Moving (2001) edited by Mark Irwin, the collection of essays, Until Everything is Continuous Again (Weinert and Prufert, 2012), or the recent Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century. American and European Perspectives (Colby Langdell 2022), reviewed in this issue of Transatlantica, attest the place of Merwin as a U.S. twentieth-century poet. However, despite some bursts of academic readings in the form of some articles and some monographs and some doctoral dissertations (such as Carl Clifton Toliver’s 1997 W.S. Merwin and the Postmodern Environment), his poetry has been marginalized, in part by Marjorie Perloff’s categorizations of it as Paris Review or The New Yorker poetry. Merwin’s own castigations of language poetry, and also his mainly dismissive or derogatory remarks about universities, surely did not solicit those working in Ph.D. programs or literature departments to follow him beyond where the very fine and important work done by Folsom and Nelson had brought scholarship on Merwin to. A division does exist among poets’ recollections of Merwin—enthusiastic recognition of a master and an elder grates against a smug, jaded or just eye-brow lifting, lip-pressing dis- or non-interest. For example, in the Weinert and Prufer collection, the Halliday / Theune consideration of A Shadow of Sirius—in which Merwin is either praised [Theune] or ridiculed [Halliday]; or, the dismissal of the late 1970s-early 1980s Merwin in the Byers, the Perloff, and the Altieri articles in Folsom and Nelson’s collection, which originated in Helen Vendler’s 1970 reactions (Folsom and Nelson, 1987a 14). All in all, it can be said that reception and transmission of Merwin comes mostly from poets, and not literary scholars. In France, as Luc de Goustine attests (in the video included in this issue), the prestigious publishers of literature and poetry rejected repeated proposals for publications of Merwin in French translation. It is people like de Goustine, Michael Taylor or Jacques Reda—poets and writers more than tenured academics or university professors—who were the mediators.9 Even if Merwin did translate his contemporary French poets (Bonnefoy, Jacottet), it is striking that he never made it into poet (and contemporary) Michel Deguy’s poetry journal Po&sie or made it into even the world of Comparative Literature in France, which with its strong multi-lingualism, especially in Romance and European languages, would have found in Merwin an ideal figure for its methodology that insists on comparative working across so-called national literatures and poetic traditions with which Merwin was so familiar.
61Merwin Recollected wishes to carry on the rich work of Folsom and Nelson, yet with a difference. Indeed, this issue aims to merge the previous critical traditions that are sometimes from critics, sometimes from poets, by including both academic literary scholars, and poets, writers, and performing artists outside it. The Wutz and Crimmel collection of interviews, Conversations with W.S. Merwin (2015), has been precious to us, and we also pay homage to the beautifully realized film Even Though Everything Is Burning (Shaefer), which can be put into resonance with the many videos mostly in the form of readings and interviews that are available at various internet sites.
62What is W.S. Merwin’s legacy today? What are the leavings of a poet who, enamored of Whitman’s leaves, of Whitman’s grass and compost, as Ed Folsom reminds us, composted the letters he received, once read, burying them at the feet of his palm trees to live, and leave, again? Contra a critical tradition that has long assumed Merwin’s distaste for Whitman, Ed Folsom’s essay, “W.S. Merwin’s Search for Walt Whitman, Whoever He Was” uncovers a little-known filiation between the two poets. Merwin gestures towards the paradoxical intimacy of strangers, among them poet and reader, when he ventriloquizes Whitman’s “whoever you are.” What Folsom reading Merwin reads in Merwin’s literary reclaiming, or recovering, is not the faith in the afterlife, however, but the awareness of the fragility of the poetic address. Who is, who will be, “that future ‘you’ that Merwin has no faith will be there a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years hence”? The American poetic tradition that Merwin revisits is a song to trees, to birds, to insects, but it is tainted with loss—immensely so. “It was always for the animals that I grieved most,” says the poet in “The Wild Geese”
with the animals always there was only
presence as long as it was present and then
only absence suddenly and no word for it
…
the old words all deepen the great absence
the vastness of all that has been lost
(2016 48)
63Merwin’s forests, Merwin’s fields are peopled with ghosts; only ghosts “go home” in the shadows before daybreak, and the wild geese “flying home” that “the poet in exile” can hear in the impossible present of the poem (he ‘looks up long ago’) may be but the shadows of birds long gone. Merwin’s poetry is a response to, and an echo of, a world on the verge of extinction. Peter Vernon’s “‘Neither knowing nor not knowing’: Existential Doubt, Ecological Certainty in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin” examines how loss and grief, for birds, wild animals, in particular, is the stuff Merwin’s poetry, in particular, The Vixen, is made of. What is the poetic trace of loss?
What I thought I had left I kept finding again
but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered
as anyone could have foretold it was not there. (2013b 3)
64For him who was aware, well before it became our age’s tragic truism, of “the coming extinction,” loss prevails—the loss of species, the loss of cultures and languages, be it the Occitan of the troubadours, which a young Merwin learned to love and speak and translate, or the indigenous tongues that suffuse The Folding Cliffs, his long epic poem about the history of Hawaii. The erasure that constitutes the trace also constitutes the poem: loss is what the poem holds in words in the poetic scaffolding of a hesitant memory. Memory—the collective loss of memory this time—is what Françoise Palleau-Papin investigates in “Merwin’s Prose Poetry: Collective Memory in Uncanny Short Fiction.” When Vernon underlines the negative—the not saying, not naming, not knowing nor not knowing—that the synaesthetic attempts to keep the world whole can hardly compensate, Palleau-Papin, who concentrates on two early collections of short fiction, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977), goes back to a younger Merwin who also uses the prefix “un-”, this time to reverse destruction (“Unchopping a Tree”), aware of the impossibility of the actual task, though betting on its symbolic force for future generations. Palleau-Papin uncovers a poet-miner, who sets out to explore “the murky collective past in depth, exposing what is usually kept underground” and denouncing an entire generation eager to erase, or obfuscate, the past. Through a disjunctive syntax, through delayed predicates, and botched mimesis, Merwin’s poetry shows what has been muted, and his prose grows political. “The more personal his images and reminiscences are, the more collective the evocation is,” Palleau-Papin notes, and readers are pushed to connect the dots across the gaps, not to despair, but to respond through action. Political Merwin is also what Hélène Aji returns to: “When the war is over […] we will all enlist again” (The Lice): W.S. Merwin P(r)o(ph)etic.” Carefully stepping through the political, personal and prophetic poems of the 1967 book The Lice, Aji shows how the future, and a programmed future of anthropogenic extinction, echoes in the present, reversing classic temporality. The elegiac mode thus informs Merwin’s conception of history; the poetic and the prophetic, brought together yet simultaneously unfuseable. Merwin of course not only wrote a poetry deeply informed by his own apprehension of both the global political and economic mutations and his local experience of places, things, people, customs; his prose similarly clung to, probed incessantly, and uncovered and resuscitated lives and ways of lives at crossroads with the ineluctable march of modernity. In an inverse process of plumbing not his experience or world, but that foreign to, or other than, his own, he also plunged constantly, as translator, into the reservoir of literature from across the planet. Merwin as translator, but also the translation of Merwin’s work into other languages, is the terrain that Helmbrecht Breinig invests in “Translating Merwin: Navigating Nature, Place, and the Apo Koinou.” Breinig ponders both the different translations of Merwin into German that he, and Susanne Opfermann, accomplished, but also Merwin’s translation, or adaptation, from Old English, of the “Leviathan” in his early collection Green with Beasts (1956) taken from The Old English Physiologus. In fascinating, concrete, detail, drawn from their translations of “For a Coming Extinction” but also from The Shadow of Sirius, Breinig unfolds the adjudications that he and they performed, and how they were anchored in the history of the understanding of translation, both recent and classic, of which Merwin himself was a real contributor and participant. Breinig’s precise explanations of the linguistic and cultural phenomena that their translations had to resolve, such as the figure of construction apo koinou or dangling sentence constructions from a blend of two clauses caused by a lexeme that has two syntactical functions, not only are interesting at the level of translation, of English and of German, but reveal the original poem in bold and vibrant ways.
65In addition to these academic contributions, Merwin Recollected also offers remembrances of the poet by poets who knew him and have agreed to write of, and to, him in the brittle now that is ours. Austin Smith, author of the collections Almanac (2013) and Flyover Country (2018),10 almost met with W.S. Merwin, as he recollects in “Finding W.S. Merwin,” his original prose piece for Transatlantica, while Naomi Shihab Nye knew Merwin well. A “wandering poet,” as she likes to describe herself, born to a Palestinian father and an American mother,11 she shares with us an original poem “for W.S. Merwin” and titled “Calling Back.” Michael Taylor,12 the author of the preface of L’Appel du Causse (Fanlac, 2013), also remembers his friend and fellow poet. His piece, “Remembering Merwin,” is presented here in English and translated into French by Taylor’s accomplice and fellow Merwinian, Luc de Goustine. We are also lucky to include the poem “W.S. Merwin” by poet Joseph Chaney,13 whose connections to Merwin’s poetry began at Beloit College, where Merwin gave readings.
- 14 Aaron M. Moe is also playwright and poet, author of the play Stillness, Deep Time & the Corpse: an (...)
- 15 In addition to having spent his summers as a kid growing up at his grandparents’ in the village of (...)
66W.S. Merwin was enamored of sounds—chirps, trills, lisps, rattles; the sound of “calling and shrieking and singing.” In a short section that borrows its title from Merwin’s poem “The Sound of it” from his last collection Garden Time (2016 9), Aaron M. Moe,14 the creator of the (sadly) short-lived Merwin Review and author of Zoepoetics. Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lexington Books 2016), with one chapter devoted to Merwin, reflects on “the mystery and power of sound” that stirred both Shelley and Merwin’s beings. “On Sound: Merwin, Shelley and the Alps” places them in “the same breath,” and surfs on the “folded cliffs and folded sounds” that bring them together. Breathing is essential to Merwin’s poetry, as is its interruption. Without punctuation, poems invite readers to linger or to stop, thereby unsettling meaning by deranging and rearranging syntactical fragments. Readers of Transatlantica are invited to become listeners of two of Merwin’s poems from Garden Time, translated into French, and twice told by Eric Louviot,15 founder and former Director of the theatrical company Théâtre-contemporain, in Lisieux, France. Changing where the breathing stops changes meaning, and lo, the poem is both the same and not the same, uncannily differant. “Ça s’appellerait quoi” and “Les ailes du jour” can be twice listened—unravelled and resown by Louviot’s performance.
- 16 Novelist and short-story writer, prolific essayist, translator of among others Shakespeare, Marlowe (...)
- 17 In addition to being a preeminent Walt Whitman scholar, and a great authority on nineteenth century (...)
67W.S. Merwin’s voice is also vividly present in the recollections shared by his friends when they were gathered once again in that place haunted with memories. Merwin Recollected has captured three fireside conversations. Luc de Goustine,16 first translator of W.S. Merwin, and poet and writer himself, remembers, with Michael Taylor, Merwin, the poet of the Quercy, bewitched by the causse and the calls of the troubadours. De Goustine had come that day with his pockets full of stories about the history of the reception of Merwin’s work in France, and of the resistance from the French establishment publishers to this complete unknown. Taylor’s witnessing is a beautiful still, an image captured of his encounter with Merwin, and its continuing radiance. Also inspired by the magic of the place, Ed Folsom17 shared with us his personal memories of Merwin, but also how Merwin’s poems were themselves “regions of memory.” In the video interview, which we titled “Regions of Memory, and Memory of Regions,” in homage to the collection of essays he published with Cary Nelson, Folsom adumbrates the importance of place, locality, region, indigeneity, in Merwin’s imaginary. The transatlantic conversation then goes on between two publishers who knew closely William Merwin over decades, in the United States, and in particular on its West Coast and westernmost State Hawaii, but also in France, in the southwestern regions of the Lot and the Dordogne, Michael Wiegers and Bernard Tardien, respectively of Copper Canyon Press and Fanlac Éditions, both movingly and lucidly present what publishing W.S. Merwin entailed in the different settings that are the United States and the French publishing scene. Their testimonies make it possible to overcome national boundaries and to inhabit a transatlantic reality, an in-betweeness, which Merwin lived on a yearly basis.
68Such in-betweeness is perhaps best, if paradoxically, embodied in Merwin’s two houses—the one in Lacam and the one in Maui—which his poetry incessantly cross-references. We were fortunate to have present in Lacam Sonnet K. Coggins, the Executive Director for the Merwin Conservancy in Hawaii, and probably the best connoisseur of the “other house,” Merwin’s house in Maui—unless it be, as in the eponymous poem from Garden Time (2016 34), the house in Lacam. Reading Merwin unsettles “here” and “home” in the most complex, and delightful, ways. Sonnet Coggins brought to us in Lacam and in Loubressac her knowledge of the Merwin’s house and its palm garden / forest. Stunning videos bring us in—like the plovers “just in from the sea / and the flight clear from Alaska” in Merwin’s poem “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning (2014 15)—to the Maui coast adjacent to the canopy of the forest Merwin put up over the house he built there. It was our dear wish that the two houses, the two cultures, could be joined, at this event on October 22, 2020. Sonnet realized this wish. “Merwin’s ‘Other House’: Haiku / Lacam” is its materialization.
69Merwin’s Lacam house, however, where most interviews were filmed, was not his writing place. The property has a study, a small barn-like edifice next door, where the poet retired to write. “View from W.S. Merwin’s Study” is a video interview with Michael Wiegers, who has been the President of the Merwin Conservancy, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Copper Canyon Press, not only one of the premier publishing houses of poetry in the United States, but crucially the publisher who went to Merwin, at the turn of the century, and brought back into print all of his books that had been left to seed, because for commercial publishers, a book in print is taxed. Copper Canyon Press, as a non-profit organization (exonerated therefore from such taxes), can keep books in print. This interview, conducted as the others with the technical assistance of Art’zimut, took place however outside between Merwin’s house and the bread house or bake house, which was Merwin’s writing studio. The interview had been intended to be conducted inside the study, that virtually had never been visited, but as serendipity decided, the keys to it could not be found that day, and thus Michael is interviewed and filmed with his back to the northern side of the Dordogne valley which is the view from the window of the studio that Merwin contemplated when he wrote at his desk there. The stunning blue skies made the vista like what Merwin’s poetry records, here and there. “View from W.S. Merwin’s Study” is also a view into Merwin’s writing process, into his writing spaces, at Lacam and at Haiku, with their layers of letters, papers, books, of all kinds.
70Merwin’s writing to the world from the seclusion of his Quercy study, or the silence of his Maui dojo, in the midst of the forest of palm trees that he had planted over years; Merwin’s writing for the present,as a gift addressed to those for whom the joy of the “now,” the laughter it elicits, can only be found in its radical ungraspability, appeals to all of us, but maybe in particular to those among us whose present is that of incarceration. Merwin teaches well in prison. This is what Michelle Kuo and Hannah Davis Taieb tell us in the last interview of this issue, “Teaching and Reading W.S. Merwin in Prison.” They recount their human and pedagogical experience in San Quentin State Prison, California, in la Santé, in Paris, and Taïwan, and the new resonances that Merwin’s poems can have, when recollection often means the yearning for togetherness, when the gathering of memories revives the tearing apart of imprisonment, when the “blind hope” of belonging echoes the longing for a home long gone.
- 18 Marc Guiochet and the Compagnie Étadam / Art’zimut (artzimut.fr/) are a veritable moving cultural i (...)
71Merwin, they tell us, teaches well and reads well. Merwin, we learned, also dances well. In October 2022, Marc Guiochet18 and the Compagnie Étadam / Art’zimut created “Dancing Merwin,” which premiered in the Salle des Fêtes at Loubressac, attended by scores of inhabitants, artists, visitors, academics, and local officials. “Dancing Merwin” articulates the vocalization of poems from Garden Time / Un temps au jardin with their musical and dance interpretations. Special thanks to filming chief Yann Vrytcheff, to choreographer Louise Guiochet, and the artistic team of dancers, actors, costume designers, technicians, farmers, who work horizontally to create a transversal research and creation. Connecting scholars and teachers from other parts of France, and of the world, with the Compagnie Étadam and Art’zimut was a dream come true.
72In play here is to gather in our present the legacy of the writer W.S. Merwin—how his writing is the terrain for new leaves of grass, a gesture toward a U.S. poetic tradition that, while being a song to the beauty of trees, birds, insects, is also a cry of resistance against what, in “America,” and since its beginning, is destruction, hideous war, and violence to and by humans; how W.S. Merwin work is a response and an echo to what of the world goes extinct, perhaps less a call to arms—at least in his later books—than an injunction to refuse ontological cutting and the machete’s cut, so as to embrace an unquiet continuity with what is not the other, but is always a little bit oneself. He who—this is one of his signatures—let go of punctuation in order to let the tongue and its language rustle, whisper, murmur thanks to multiple syntactic combinations—also questions the contours of the “I” and lets awareness disjoin itself, like time and space, and become at once what relates us and what separates us. Place of a disjunctive memory, writing is heritage of a past and leap in the to-come both of which it would be vain to want to grasp in the hoop net of the concept, or pin on a geopolitical map of the world always already bygone. To gather the legacy of W.S. Merwin is thus not to try to staple a heritage, or to capture an essence; it is to try to negotiate with what translation harbors of the impossible, the interval, a poetry for the present, a poetry that is present, in the two senses of the term: gift and moment of sharing now.
Fig. 3. The west window. Postcard designed by Marc Guiochet et Art’zimut.