You have lived in two exceptionally beautiful places, Hawaii and the South of France. As a poet, do you find it necessary to surround yourself with nature, or is it the other way around, that the nature inspires the poetry? W.S. Merwin: I never thought of it as a program. I used to live in New York and I wrote. I think if you're a poet, or whatever kind of artist you are, you want to be able to write or compose or paint anywhere. But...
I remember one day talking to a bunch of friends crossing the campus in college, and listening to what they were thinking of doing with their lives, and I thought, "They don't care about where they're going to be living." And to me, it's terribly important where I am. The place is enormously important. I want to live in places. I don't want to live in situations all of the time, and they're talking about situations. I mean, I know how to make a living somehow, but that's not really what I care about. I wouldn't have known how to say it, but I knew that one thing that was terribly important was a place. So I don't know, I had a retired maiden aunt who left me $800, which was all she had when she died, and my mother put it in bonds and I had $1200 when I was in my early 20s, and I had it when I found that ruined farmhouse that had been not lived in for almost 50 years. And the lady who owned it sold it to me for $1200. I said, "How much would you sell it for?" after a long conversation when she wouldn't sell it, and her husband said, "You better sell it, because it's going to fall down." So after tears, she said she'd sell it, and then the price she named was $1200 and was translated into francs. I put out my hand just like that and I'm very glad I did. It looked straight down 400 feet to the Dordogne and it's the whole valley of the Dordogne.
What town is that in? W.S. Merwin: There isn't any town. It's a little tiny hamlet. It had about nine houses in it, they were all peasants at the time. Now they don't farm anymore. Do you know where Toulouse is? It's halfway between Toulouse and Limoges in the Southwest. Later you chose to move to Hawaii. When did that happen?
W.S. Merwin: I came out here in the '60s to do a reading over at the university and I fell in love with it. But it was kind of unreal to me, and then I came back again a few years later and I spent longer and I got to meet people and a teacher in particular that I really wanted to see more of. My marriage had broken up in France years before and my former wife wanted to live in my house over there, so I let her stay there, and I didn't have anywhere to live except a little tiny apartment in New York. I decided that I just wanted to spend more time out here, and little by little I got hooked. Quite fast, in fact.
That's understandable. W.S. Merwin: I'm still hooked. I love it more all of the time. We'd like to hear about your childhood too. You grew up in urban surroundings, didn't you?
W.S. Merwin: Across the river from New York, in a place called Union City, which is right up -- it used to be, before that, West Hoboken -- it is just up the hill from the Palisades, from Hoboken, and from my father's church I could look down on the harbor. I was fascinated as a small child to kneel up at a window there and just spend hours watching the traffic on the river, the river traffic, which was quite different then, there was a lot more of it. Very beautiful, I thought, and I still have wonderfully clear images of it still there. I mean I can still see the ferry barges taking -- I mean, not just the ferries, the passenger ferries, but these things that would take a whole train on a series of barges across the river, and ships going up and down in the afternoon light. It was very, very beautiful. Everything is gone. I mean the traffic is gone. The Hoboken harbor has changed completely. My father's church has long since, many years ago -- gone. And the house is still there, but unrecognizable. I've been back and seen it.
We've read that you started writing hymns for your father's church as a young boy. When did you start doing that? W.S. Merwin: When I could make letters with a pencil. I was fascinated by hymns. It was one of the things that most fascinated me about having to go to church every Sunday, which I took for granted, like putting on clean clothes on Sunday and all that. You had to do that.
So I had to listen to all of these morning services, and I was allowed to do drawings and things, and then do what I wanted with a little pad and pencil. And I was fascinated by two things. One of them was the language of the King James version of the Bible -- which was different from the language that we spoke -- the language of the psalms. There was a whole lot of the Bible that I got to know by heart without even thinking about it, and the language of the hymns: "the spacious firmament on high" and "the blue ethereal sky." I didn't know what half of the words meant, thought it was wonderful, you know. It's funny, the way it rhymed, and so I wanted to write that. And my mother read to us, which is very important. She read Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses and she read Tennyson, "The Brook," and a lot of poems like that. And that's wonderful when parents read -- not just stories -- but poems to their children, because the language of poetry is different from the language of prose, and children pick up that language. And if they can pick it up very early, it's really very, very important. They are likely to always love it if they do. I suspect that they really naturally do.
We've got an educational system that doesn't encourage it at all, any more than they encourage listening to Mozart. And you know, one of the strange things is that I don't think that's natural. I have a friend, the guy who wrote Equus and Amadeus, Peter Schaffer. Peter is a friend, and I heard Peter give a brilliant lecture on Shakespeare a few years ago and we had a long, wonderful conversation afterwards. Peter's gay and he had a boyfriend who was a young officer and who never read anything. He wasn't interested in reading.
Peter one evening said, "I'm going out and I'll be back quite late because I'm going to the theater." And his friend said, "Well, what are you going to go and see?" He said, "Well, it's nothing that would interest you at all. I'd take you, but I don't think you would be interested." He said, "What is it?" He said, "Well, it's a play by Shakespeare." He'd never heard of Shakespeare. He said, "It's a new production of Hamlet and I want to see it." "Well," he said, "I'd like to go and see it if it interests you that much." So he got him a ticket and he went along. And this guy who had never been to a play, never read anything like it, gets through the first scene of Hamlet on the battlements with the ghost, and the ghost gets into the banquet scene afterwards, and he turns and grabs Peter by the shoulders and says, "Does anyone know about this play?" he said. He thought it was the most exciting thing he had ever seen, that first scene, the battle scene. I've seen kids sit up in that Shakespeare in Love movie, which I didn't like very much, but Gwyneth Paltrow doing Juliet, and these kids put down their popcorn and sit up on the edge of their seats. They never heard anything like this. It's not so strange. They hear it. It's too bad that it's neglected, because it's a whole dimension to their life that they are not getting.
The arts are neglected in the school system these days, as if they're some kind of luxury. W.S. Merwin: Yes. I think they've always been essential to us.
When we talk about the extinction of species, I think the endangered species of the arts and of language and all these things are related. I don't think there is any doubt about that. I think poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it's got a subject and the subject comes first and it's dealing with the subject. But poetry is something else, and we don't know what it is (that) comes first. Prose is about something, but poetry is about what can't be said. Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can't say it. They can't say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can't be said. I think that's the big difference between poetry and prose. All the arts, in a way, are doing that, they are talking about, "Dove sono? (Where are they?)" What's that? She can't say it, can she? Where are they? Where are they? What has happened to those days?
What books did you like to read growing up? W.S. Merwin: Oh, some of them were pretty obvious.
I must have read Robinson Crusoe four or five times and Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island, all of Stevenson. A book called Ship's Monkey about a ship off to Borneo, and books about American Indians. I really taught myself to read because there was a book about Indians with pictures, a lot of pictures of Indians, and it was a children's book, but it had a text at the bottom of each page and I couldn't read the text. So I asked word by word what the words were until I could read the book about the Indians because I wanted to live in a place like the place they lived in, in the woods. So that taught -- it was two things, I mean learning to read, because of a fascination with people who didn't read and write, that's sort of interesting. And realizing that early that I really wanted to live not in a city, but in the forest.
What was your father's reaction to your original hymns? W.S. Merwin: Sort of a little pat on the head. He wasn't opposed to them, but he wasn't very interested. "Isn't that nice." I did illustrations for them, too. When did you start thinking about writing professionally?
Outside New York? W.S. Merwin: Yeah, in New Jersey, way over on the Delaware River, and then over to France. That's what took me to Europe. And then from there, I had two other tutoring jobs. I couldn't have done that if I had been following a career and got locked into it, wanting to do the academic track and everything. Nothing against teachers or teaching, it just wasn't what I wanted to do at that point in my life. I think some of these smart kids make crucial decisions too early and get locked into something that will be apparently very successful, but may not be what they really want to be doing. And that is dangerous, because that's where a lot of breakdowns and mid-life crisis and things like that come from. I have psychiatrist friends who have told me that this is the main body of their clientele, the people that come in. They have done all of the right things and why is their life so screwed up? You decided to study romance languages at Princeton. What led you to that? W.S. Merwin: Well, I went to a very strict and severe Methodist prep school where I got a scholarship to wait on tables and so forth to pay my way through. And I really hated the place because it was so kind of puritanical and severe. All boys? W.S. Merwin: No, but it was worse than that. It was boys and girls, but they were kept separate and they weren't allowed to speak to each other. So there they were getting nubile and very pretty and all of that and you got ten demerits for ever speaking to one and 20 demerits for doing it again and you got 30 and you were out for good. I had to be a good boy at home and now I'm supposed to be a good boy here and I really don't like being a good boy. But there was one professor there whom I really loved and he wasn't like that at all. He was the language professor, and he taught Spanish and French and German and he was a funny, funny, sweet, humane, highly cultivated man. What was his name?
W.S. Merwin: His name was Lawrence Sampson. He died soon afterwards of heart failure, but he started me paying a lot of attention to languages, in particular Spanish, and then I went on to do the same thing when I got to college. Had a very interesting Spanish teacher in college who was so homesick for Spain and he was Spanish himself. I mean, not Mexican, but Spanish. He wanted some help translating Lorca -- so the first modern poet I read was a Spanish poet, it was Lorca. Romancero gitano was the first book, and we translated that together. It was my first attempt at translation, too. And then I went on and met Ezra Pound in the crazy ward at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.
You met him in the crazy ward? W.S. Merwin: Yeah, he was in the crazy ward. He was legally insane. I didn't know anything about his politics, fortunately. I had to learn about it later. He made broadcasts for the Axis during the war. W.S. Merwin: Yes, for the Fascists in Italy, and his anti-Semitism, dreadful things. It would have been very troubling. It's always been very troubling once I did find out about it. But I loved some of his poems that I'd read, and his ear.
Every poet who has come after owes him something, that is part of the enigma about Pound, whatever they think about his character. We owe him something from the way he heard English. And so I went to see him, and he said that I had to go on translating. He took me seriously as a poet and he said, "You should write every day..." should do all these things, and gave me a lot of advice. He loved giving advice.
Did you see signs of madness? W.S. Merwin: No, he wasn't mad. He was no more mad than he had ever been. He was nuts, but not mad. He had gone on the air for Mussolini and he had said really quite stupid, but very, very ill-judged things, bad things, pro-Mussolini, in the middle of the war. And the prosecution wanted to shoot him for a traitor right there in Italy. And there was a movement to prevent that. His defense lawyer was a Quaker and the safest thing to do was to say that he was insane. He was eccentric enough.
Somebody asked T.S. Eliot -- he and Ezra, they had known each other forever. I don't know, Pound was so opinionated that you wondered how anybody could stand being around him very much, but he was brilliant, he was absolutely brilliant. Somebody asked Eliot -- he had a lot to do with the final text of The Waste Land, you know, Pound did. He was very, very, very skillful and smart. And asked Eliot if Ezra was really crazy and he said, "Well, you know Ezra."
What was the impact of working with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur at Princeton? They were both poets too. W.S. Merwin: Oh, they were very important to me, both of them were.
Berryman (was) hands-on about poetry and he was ruthless and merciless and he would destroy everything I wrote week by week. And you know, I learned a lot from him. Blackmur was one of the most brilliant literary intelligences I've ever been close to, and hearing him doing what he did, twice a week he had a sort of volunteer seminar, certain invited people could come and he would just sit at a table and talk about one chapter of Ulysses, for example, for three hours. No notes or anything. He was marvelous as a teacher. I mean, he seemed really not to be paying attention and then you realized he got everything about you. He was thinking about the right thing for you, too. I mean, he saved me from getting thrown out of college a number of times.
I never did all of the right things. I never read the things I was supposed to. I always read lots of other things and some of the teachers got very impatient, especially in graduate school.
There was a party -- I heard about this afterwards -- when Blackmur was there, and the dean of the graduate school was there, and he was one of the people who wanted to kick me out. And Blackmur said to him in the course of the evening, he said, "Did you ever hear about -- in your knowledge of the English academic system did you ever hear about don..." whatever his name was, don Seymour Smith, or something like that. And the dean said, "No, I never did." Blackmur said, "Well, you might not have because his only claim to historic recognition is that he's the guy that got Shelley thrown out of Oxford." The dean got the point. And they sort of put up with things that I'm sort of amazed by, that I got away with. Nowadays I don't think it would matter so much, but I would read, something would send me off on a tangent, and I would read a whole lot of stuff, but it wasn't what the assignment was about. It was related to the assignment, but it was on a whole different thing. And I did it over and over again. But I was reading endlessly, I couldn't stop reading. But very often I would not bother with the assignment and go on to something else.
It sounds like poets in particular need to find their own voices and their own paths. It seems almost contradictory for a poet to be a conformist who follows all of the rules. W.S. Merwin: I think that's true. I don't think there is any doubt about that. If they lose that, then they lose the whole thing. But you know, I think that's true of everybody and I think that everybody has their own path. But if they don't pay attention to it, or if they don't look for it, if they don't respect it, if they are not aware of it, they run into trouble. Their life becomes thinner and less satisfactory. Even distractions may be the thing that is helping you, if they are your distractions, if they are what you are really interested in. Could you tell us about tutoring the son of Robert Graves? W.S. Merwin: That was the third tutoring job. Why couldn't Robert Graves tutor his own son?
W.S. Merwin: He was doing a lot of writing. Robert wrote an enormous -- I mean, Robert was a great model of working. People handle interruptions and distractions differently I've noticed, and Robert was very good at it. He wrote every day, alone for hours and hours in his study. If he had to come out and deal with a meal or with a crying baby or with somebody coming to the door, he would come and do it and then he would go right back into where he was working and keep it going. James Merrill, who is a dear friend of mine, a wonderful poet of the same generation, Jimmy used to say, "Oh yes, the interruptions are all part of the whole process." It's all right, he didn't mind interruptions. I don't like interruptions. Very often, if I get interrupted, very often I'm not even paying any attention to them, because I won't leave what I'm doing. I think the people who deal with them better are wiser than I am, but I can't change that, or if I can, I'm scared of losing something, I guess.
Did you develop a relationship with Robert Graves? W.S. Merwin: Oh, yeah, sure. It began with a honeymoon and a wonderful friendship across the generations. He was 30-some years older than I was, and he had had that whole life in World War I, and written Good-Bye to All That, and he was quite well known by then. And his poetry, of which there is still some of it that I like very much, and I learned a lot from it and from him. A brilliant, brilliant man. What did you learn from him?
W.S. Merwin: I think the most valuable book is The White Goddess. It's very controversial, and Robert cooked the books sometimes. He made up the mythology rather than being absolutely accurate, which is why it's not altogether trustworthy, but it's a very daring book. It's called, "The Grammar of Poetic Myth," The White Goddess is. And he saw the whole world -- the whole value system -- on the basis of a goddess, a goddess figure, not a male god figure, but a female figure, and she's the goddess of lust and fear. I mean she's not altogether gentle and easygoing. I thought when I read the book, before I went to Europe that this was a great metaphor, like something in Joseph Campbell or something like that. But I realized to my amazement and some consternation, after a while with Robert that Robert took it all quite literally, you know. He was turning into kind of a fundamentalist of his own kind, and he eventually got jealous and fought with every younger poet. I mean, this thing would happen, and he would have a sort of honeymoon with another and a great enthusiasm, they would be great buddies, and then something would go wrong and Robert said they are not true sons of the goddess and all of this other stuff and drum them out. It was kind of difficult because when we had our falling out, there I was with the job there. But I spent that year with him and I loved the place on the north shore of Majorca. And I went back on my own for another winter there and wrote the translation of the poem of The Cid for the BBC, to earn some money.
One of the marvelous things that I think I feel so lucky about was that I went to see (T.S.) Eliot occasionally in London when I was there because of my relationship with Pound's son, Omar.
Omar introduced me to Eliot so then Eliot was very kind. He was very kind to Omar, he was very kind to me, and I smoked then, and he used to save me French cigarettes which people gave him and he didn't smoke. And he was homesick and we would talk about the Ohio River and the steamboats.
Were you aware at the time how lucky you were, having these experiences?
W.S. Merwin: I feel lucky about all of it, but that something I didn't realize was happening at the time. Everything from that deer park and the farms of the Stuyvesants through really the whole thing with that farmhouse on the Dordogne and the year in Portugal and all of that, I was stumbling on places and ways of life and assumptions, a permanence of something that was very ancient, that had been there for a very long time and was just on the verge of disappearing. And if you went back even five years later, it was gone, it would have been gone and it was gone.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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. 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.
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.
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.
"For the Anniversary of My Death"
Perhaps you would you read this one: "Just Now."
"Just Now" In one of your poems, you begin, "From the kindness of my parents, I suppose it was, that I held that belief about suffering, good people." It sounds like you had kind parents. W.S. Merwin: Yes, yes. That wasn't all they were, but they certainly were kind. Yes. My mother more so than my father. My father was frightened, and less kind than my mother. But yes, it's perfectly true and they both had a sense of decency about how you behave towards people. You didn't do nasty and cruel things. You just didn't do that. Would you read that poem for us?
"Good People" Perhaps you'd be kind enough to read another for us, "Yesterday."
"Yesterday" Thank you so much. What does writing poetry do for you? W.S. Merwin: I have to do it. It's central to my life. García Lorca said to a young poet that if you can live without writing poetry, don't do it, nobody needs it. But I can't live without it, I've always wanted to do it. It makes sense of things. What advice would you give to a young person wanting to write poetry?
W.S. Merwin: It's all about attention and listening. Pay attention and listen. Listen to everything, listen to absolutely everything. Listen to the sounds you don't want to hear, listen to the ones you do want to hear, listen to the people talking around you. I heard this wonderful thing this morning about taking the bus. Every so often, I was saying to Paula, the last time as we went through New York, I used to love riding on the subway, because I don't have to have something to read, I just am sort of fascinated by everybody around me, what they're saying and what they're doing. It's paying attention, but it's listening, listening. And all of a sudden you hear something, and it may be a phrase that you've heard over and over again, but suddenly it's got electricity in it, you know. And those are the notes you take out. What is that little charge in there and where does it want to go? You may not even know what it's about, but it's all about, if you tried to write something new all of the time -- as I have -- all your life, it seems to change. If you're telling the truth in the essential place where you don't know, it really is all you that is coming out and nobody else could write it, and that's what you want. That's what you want to make students see, listen. Chuang Tzu -- who was a great Taoist, as much as almost 3,000 years ago -- said, "When I say that someone is good at hearing, I do not mean that they are good at hearing anything else. I mean that they are good at hearing themselves." That's what the attention is about. And however smart you are, if you get distracted from that you're going to end up in an unhappy place, I think.
You've spoken to students about embracing their ignorance. W.S. Merwin: Ignorance is going to be with them, however smart they get and however much they know.
Our knowledge, the whole of human knowledge -- look at the night sky -- how big is our knowledge? We're tiny, you know. It's dust. It's tiny. The unknown that surrounds it, where it all came from, it's the great mystery, we don't know where it came from. How come we're here? It's every bit as interesting as where we're going. How come we're here at all? Isn't that amazing, really? Out of the whole of the universe, out of the whole of what we think of as time, here we are.
What did it mean to you to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders?
W.S. Merwin: It's very nice to win prizes. I don't think you should spend your life hungering and thirsting for them, but if they come your way, that's fine. I remember John Berryman, somebody said -- there was some question of him winning some big prize -- and there was a journalist interviewing him and he said, "Well, if you win that prize, it will be wonderful, won't it?" And John said, "Yeah, it will be wonderful. It won't be very wonderful, but it will be wonderful." I thought that's pretty good. There's a line of the Psalms that says, "If riches come, set not your heart upon them." You accept them and you say thank you, whatever it is, and it's very nice, but don't pin your life on these expectations. I've always felt that. If it comes by, that's nice.
Thank you so much. It was a great experience talking to you. W.S. Merwin: Thank you.
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