W.S. Merwin Interview (page: 6 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry	Print Interview

It's sometimes said of your work that you have a preoccupation with the subject of time.

W.S. Merwin: Doesn't everybody? I was talking to the physicist Lisa Randall last night, we were sitting next to each other at dinner -- what a wonderful woman -- and we were talking about these dimensions, this dimension of gravity, which I'm fascinated by, everything that she has to say about it. She was talking about space and time, just in passing, and I wanted to continue the conversation because I want to hear what she has to say about time.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think time is a fiction. It's a human fiction. There's a reality, and we don't know what the reality is. I mean, the watch and the time that we're going by is a fiction that we've agreed to, but we don't know that it's true, and what its relation is to time in the universe. And of course time to us -- throw away the watches and throw away the chronology of all kinds -- but time is really experience. I mean, when we're in love and wanting to see the person we're in love with, time goes very, very slowly, and the moment we're with them, it goes like lightning. The trouble about being happy is that everything goes so fast. Being in jail, it must creep along incredibly slowly. I don't know that this is true to the same degree for animals that it is for us. A great deal of that fiction must be a human fiction, I think. I don't know why I think that, but I don't think my dog feels time the same way that we do. I don't know.

She can't tell me.

She doesn't look at her watch?

W.S. Merwin: No, she doesn't do that. She probably would if I gave her a watch.

In thumbing through anthologies, it's undeniable that death has always been a popular topic for poets, from John Donne to Emily Dickinson. I guess it's the final mystery. One of your own best-known poems is "For the Anniversary of My Death."

W.S. Merwin: Sometimes when people write about it, they say, "Oh, that's terribly morose," or very dark and all of that. I think they're kidding themselves.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Death is part of every moment of our lives. It's always there with us. It doesn't mean that we have to be gloomy about it, but it's always there. I mean, yesterday is gone, isn't it? What we have and what we're blessed with is this very moment, with the whole of our past in it and the whole of the unknown future in it, but it's all here. And it's going as fast, faster than we can talk about it, although both of those are true at the same time. Are you going to sit and be gloomy about it? Some people are terrified of dying. I'm very lucky. My mother was never in the least frightened by the thought of death. It was there in front of her all of the time because she was an orphan. She lost both parents by the time she was six. Her grandmother took care of her until her grandmother died when she was 12. Then her brother quit his education to take a job so that he could support both of them and he died before he was 30. And when she married, she lost her first child 15 minutes after it was born and nobody knows why. I think the hospital made some mistake. So, her whole youth was one death after another. It's as though she had always known about it. It was always right there, and she wasn't afraid of it at all. I worried about my father on that subject, but his last words were, "I'm not afraid." He died. I think that's a great gift from parents. I don't know. It would be very rash to say how one feels about it. I certainly don't think of it with constant seizures of panic or anything of the kind. It seems to me the bus comes along and you get on, you know.

Would you be kind enough to read some of those poems for us?

W.S. Merwin: Sure. What would you like to hear?

We have "For the Anniversary of My Death."

W.S. Merwin: "For the Anniversary of My Death" was written almost 40 years ago, I think.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. "For the Anniversary of My Death" Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what.

Perhaps you would you read this one: "Just Now."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. "Just Now" In the morning as the storm begins to blow away the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe simpler than I have begun to find words for not patient not even waiting no more hidden than the air itself that became part of me for a while with every breath that remained with me unnoticed something that was here unnamed unknown in the days and the nights not separate from them not separate from them as they came and were gone it must have been here neither early nor late then by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

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