W.S. Merwin Interview (page: 5 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry	Print Interview

We were interested in what you were saying earlier today about the interconnectedness of the arts.

W.S. Merwin: Well, I don't think any of these things are separate. I've spoken to some incredibly smart kids and they're at a point where they're beginning to think that smart is the whole thing, and smart isn't the whole thing. One of the troubles with smart is that it makes divisions, it chops things up: "Mozart doesn't have anything to do with business." It depends on you. You are what Mozart and business have to do with each other. Look at where the connection is. It's not just a relief from stress or anything like that, it's something feeding some other part of yourselves that you need.

When we spoke to the late Carol Shields, the novelist, she suggested that fiction can explore a deeper reality than non-fiction can because it can get into the mind of a character. Perhaps poetry goes even farther than fiction in distilling what we are, how our minds work.

W.S. Merwin: Yeah. There was a great essay years ago by Francis Fergusson on Hamlet. He starts by saying it is now 300 years that Hamlet is making fools of his critics. Because Hamlet is one of the supreme things in Shakespeare, in a forum that is both more primitive and more profound than philosophy, which is what's happening all through that play. Shakespeare keeps changing the way it happens. It's looking at the planet Earth, the whole thing is changing all of the time. Shakespeare is changing it all of the time, that's the great genius. There is no point that you can grab it, that you can grab hold of that thing and say, "Yeah, that's the whole thing." Polonius's boring speech to Laertes with all of the good advice? It's very good advice, and Laertes is bored to death. It's very hard to pick up that one. You can see the boredom and you can see also the wisdom.

Only this morning on public radio there was a discussion of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. Someone made the point that there are no extant letters from him and that if he was such an incredibly prolific writer he would have written notes to friends or something.

W.S. Merwin: I don't know why. None of the other playwrights did. We don't have anything from Dekker or Marlowe or Ben Johnson. You know, Ben Johnson was far better educated than Shakespeare and there must have been a correspondence, but nothing was saved. Of course, his house burned down and a lot of stuff was lost.

You have no doubt that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.

W.S. Merwin: Oh no, I have no doubt about that at all. Furthermore, I think there are a whole bunch of things that Shakespeare wrote that we don't even ascribe to Shakespeare. I think that the "Mad Tom" poem, that great long poem, wonderful poem, probably was Shakespeare. A lot of other people think so too.

Even in the prose passages in his plays, Shakespeare is always a poet.

W.S. Merwin: Oh yes, there is no question. All the way from the beginning until the end. And he was also a great actor. I think he played Prospero in The Tempest. This is one of the great geniuses that has ever been. By the way, I love that quote from Michaelangelo someone mentioned this morning. Someone asked how he had done what he had done, and he said, "I just kept getting rid of all of the things that weren't me." But he also said that it's an easy thing to be universal. Everybody is universal, and he recognized it. The great, great spirits like that do recognize that they are universal, but that everybody is universal. Everybody is complete, you are complete. Pay attention to it.

You said earlier that poets don't want to write what anyone else has written. Could you tell us more about that?

W.S. Merwin: I think that it's something that you're born knowing. If you're interested in writing something, then you want to write something that is really yours, that you're saying something that you are saying. And obviously, not just want to do something that is an imitation, although you are learning all of the time. Everything that you know is of value to you. I didn't mean to dismiss that. But if you rely on it and think that it's all about knowing, it's going to be very dull and boring and it's not going to speak for anybody or to anybody. When you listen to Mozart or when you listen to Shakespeare, you don't know what part of yourself is responding to it, and you don't know what part of them it's coming from. Somewhere in between is this poetry, this music. It's that girl pouring milk from the pitcher.

Like in the Vermeer painting?

W.S. Merwin: Yeah. That's the mystery, where does it exist? It's not in us and it's not there and it's not in the experience of the other, but it's all about experience, it's all about attention. And yet I can't touch the milk in the pitcher, I can't hold onto those notes of Mozart. I don't know the mystery of any single one line of Shakespeare, what makes it unforgettable. The more you hear it, the more you think it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I think that one thing is getting lost, like endangered species. I really think it's all an extension of the same thing. It used to be that there were two things that I could always count on. Kids liked the arts to start with, and I don't mean they liked Mozart. They liked to sing and dance and they liked to make up little plays on words and do all of those things. It was quite natural. And they always liked animals. Now I think that if you hand them a computer, they would much rather pay attention to that than either of those things, and I think that's disturbing. However miraculous it is, it's sort of terribly ingrown. It's virtual reality instead of reality. I use a computer like everybody else, but I'm not in love with it and I'm happy when I don't use it. To be hooked on it to that degree -- I watch people, they get up in the morning and they go to the computer, and whatever else they've been doing, they go right back to the computer. I think that's a fixation.

Like an addiction?

W.S. Merwin: It's an addiction. People very close to me have got it and I'm just troubled to see it. I see kids being brought up that way, no contact with animals, no contact with growing and living things, very little social life and this thing substituting for all of them, and I find that very troubling. I expect that sounds limited and old-fashioned or something of the kind. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have computers, but I think that that fixation is a little troubling.

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