W.S. Merwin Interview (page: 4 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry	Print Interview

You were in your 20s when W.H. Auden singled you out for the Yale Younger Poets series that he was editing. How did that come about?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. W.S. Merwin: They would choose, out of a small number of manuscripts, the winner of that year's Yale Younger Poets series. That was a very big deal for a while. Now there are many other setups like that around the country, and it's a good thing, because they are publishing more books of poems. I don't know the reason, but Auden did and I was very happy. I was then living in Portugal and it was wonderful news. It got good reviews and that was very nice.

Was that an important vote of confidence? Did it make you take yourself more seriously?

W.S. Merwin: I was sort of pigheaded. I was going to do it anyway, but it was very encouraging, sure it was.

Did you have any contact with Auden after that?

W.S. Merwin: Very slight. A couple things. Quite happy, very slight things. Auden was gay, a lot of Auden's friends were. Auden had a sort of fixation on being gay, what he called "the Homintern." He didn't like his gay friends or himself associating too much with straight people. I thought it was kind of silly. But also, I had an awe of him, of Auden. He was a different generation, seemed much wider a gap then than it does now, but it was a considerable gap, that generation. We had mutual friends, and I called him up a few times in New York to ask him questions about things and he was always very friendly. But then we had an unhappy exchange not long before he died.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was supposed to go and read at the University of Buffalo, and I didn't know until fairly close to the time of the reading that I was supposed to -- this was at the time of the Vietnam War -- I was supposed to sign a loyalty oath, not only to the Constitution of the United States, but if you please, to the Constitution of the State of New York, and I refused to sign the loyalty. We went around and around and around about all of the different ways around it, but they involved putting down my name and then putting riders under it that made it empty and I said that I don't see why I should do that. I mean, I don't believe in doing this, I don't think this has anything to do with loyalty, I think it has to do with entrapment. And I won't play the game and I just won't do it. And at that time, it was $1,000 for the reading, and they said, "We won't pay you," and I said, "Well, we'll see about that." And finally I agreed to go because a friend -- it was Robert Haas who invited me, and he was very embarrassed by the situation. He hadn't known about it to begin with.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I went and gave this talk about being loyal, what loyalty really meant and why I wouldn't sign a loyalty oath and about the Vietnam War. And then I said -- and I published the talk afterwards in The New York Review of Books -- and passed the hat at the reading. I said, "This is a free reading," and passed the hat, not for me, I said, for the war resisters who have gone to Canada. When war resisters leave, this money will go to them. So, I raised several thousand dollars for the war resisters and the University of Buffalo was angry as could be. And Auden wrote and said that if he didn't know me -- he didn't know me very well -- he would have thought the whole thing was a publicity stunt. And I wrote -- I spent two days over the letter -- answering Auden with deep respect saying, you know, we completely disagree. This was a public situation which I didn't ask for, and I had a right to make a public statement at that time and to use it because I think we're involved in something that is so wrong and so really shameful and we've told so many lies about it that if one has a strong position, one should speak out about it.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I saw him once afterwards and we just -- it was at a public thing, and we just shook hands and there was nothing to say. He wouldn't back off anything, and I had apologized in print for offending him, but what could be said? And I was very sorry about that, because I really did admire him and had this dream about Auden, the day after he died. I arrived in Athens, and I went to see James Merrill and James knew Auden quite well. I mean they saw each other, saw a lot of each other. And I said, "I had this strange dream about Auden last night on the way here on the train. Fell asleep and I had this dream that Auden was lying in a cot, in a kind of place like a barracks and that he sat up in bed suddenly and he said something very important and I didn't hear what he said and then I woke up." And Jimmy said that he died last night.

Where do the subjects of your poems come from?

W.S. Merwin: Oh, I'm sure I don't know. Sometimes I know, but very seldom.

Do you have a ritual of writing every day or do you wait until you feel a poem coming on?

W.S. Merwin: No, I do think it's important to have a ritual. I try to be very bearish about the mornings and do nothing, not get involved in the telephone or mail, unless there is something that really is incredibly urgent. I won't deal with it until after lunch. I do all of that stuff later, so I have the morning to stare at paper and think about poems and things like that.

If you stare at the paper and nothing comes, do you force yourself to keep staring?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I don't know how it works, I really don't. It comes from hearing things rather than from having ideas. I've got notes that I have made over the years, and they are very precious to me, and I sometimes ponder over the notes and see what I thought I was doing writing that down, where it was going. The notes are usually things that I seem to have overheard rather than -- they are not ideas. There is a wonderful conversation that Zola -- no, it wasn't Zola, it was Degas. Degas and Mallarmé, the French poet Mallarmé, were good friends for a long time. And Degas had always wanted to be a poet and he said to Mallarmé, "I don't understand it, year after year I've written poems and they are terrible, I know they are terrible, I know they aren't any good at all." And he said, "I don't understand it, because I have such good ideas." And Mallarmé said, "Oh, but poetry is not made with ideas; it's made with words, you have to hear the words."

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

W.S. Merwin Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7