W.S. Merwin named new U.S. poet laureate

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner W.S. Merwin will be the 2010-11 U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday. The 82-year-old Merwin, who is also a National Book Award recipient, succeeds Kay Ryan.

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York; he grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton, where he studied with poet John Berryman. He is quoted by the Poetry Foundation as admitting that "it was not until I had received a scholarship and gone away to the university that I began to read poetry steadily and try incessantly, and with abiding desperation, to write it.”

Merwin, who undertook translation early in his career, has been a writer for more than 60 years. Among his most acclaimed works are "The Lice" (1967), "The Carrier of Ladders" (1970) and "Migration: New and Selected Poems" (2005), for which he won his most recent Pulitzer.

W.S. Merwin moved to Hawaii in 1976. In a 1999 interview at his home there, he told the New York Times, "Everything's got to do with listening." Then he continued, "Poetry is physical. As Pound said, poetry has one pole in reason and one pole in music. It's like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing." 

A selection from "Migration" by W.S. Merwin, the poem "Provision":

All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
Of rain
From memory
And in the wall
The dead increase their invisible honey
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

Photo: Matt Valentine / Associated Press

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Comments

[Noah]

W.S. Merwin? REALLY?
...apparently we're not done worshipping albino dinosaurs..

I'm getting sleepy just hearing his name...

[Joe]

Noah, are we a racist?

[LA Native]

I am pleased to hear this. I know people in general don't care about poetry. But I do. Merwin has been one of my favorite poets for 30 years.

If you can find it in a library (if you can find one open), read Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field, and relate it to LA and our orange industry.

[STEVEN SMITH]

A brilliant choice, long overdue. Mr. Merwin is a cultured, humane gentleman and a very great poet. I had the pleasure some years ago of spending some time with him after a speaking engagement and he was a delight, unfailingly polite and thoughtful. One of America's treasures.

[Matt]

There is an error in this article. Migration: New and Selected Poems won the national book award, not the pulitzer. It was for The Shadow of Sirius that he won his most recent pulitzer.

[A. Leahy]

A choice both bold (what, no punctuation!) and overdue. Congratulations to W.S. Merwin, a poet who opposes war, respects the Earth, and trusts language.

[Cieobt2]

Yes: "Everything's got to do with listening." and "Poetry is physical...."

Merwin said of Pound that poetry has one pole in reason and one pole in music and in my recent discovery of Karajan I find he shared this with Merwin, Pound and others who generously also share so much richness of experience with us, who also "invent forgiveness but do not forgive":

"All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound...."

I want to learn from this guy to see what he, too, has learned from life. What an incredible journey this is--for all of us?

[James Ph. Kotsybar]

CROWN OF BRANCHES

To lure the Wren from his island hole
the Capitol imports its laurels to pay for
the “rusty mutterings” of the drab old bird
who perches with tail cocked straight up
to distinguish himself from the sparrows

“Promote poetry! Like Pinsky!”
some vaguely assert
not knowing themselves
how it’s done

"I can't keep popping
back and forth between here and Washington,"
declares the octogenarian
who can’t even be bothered with punctuation

Chirping and bowing he'll poop from his perch
fly home to walk his dog and write
about this metaphysical journey
proud to have fulfilled his mandate
settling back into Paradise indeed
content to count the calendar days
leaving the sparrows to their worms and seed