A Poet With Dirt Under His Nails : Merwin Wants ‘to Do Something for the Natural World’

While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests

while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through the forests

while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of their gardens dying far away on the mountain

while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives

while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to them

while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers

while he dreamed of wine the trees were falling from the trees

while he felt his heart they were hungry and their faith was sick

while the song broke over him they were in a secret place and they were cutting it forever

while he coughed they carried the trunks to the hole in the forest the size of a foreign ship

while he groaned on the voyage to Italy they fell on the trails and were broken

when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons

when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down

and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language

--From “Chord” by W. S. Merwin, from “The Rain in the Trees,” Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

William Stanley Merwin settled into his brother-in-law’s living room couch in Beverly Glen, tucking his bare feet up under himself and fixing amiable blue eyes on his visitor. Slight of build, with silvery hair, he seemed almost beatifically relaxed despite having just arrived from the airport and rushed through a shower.

Merwin was in Los Angeles recently only for an overnight stay, to give a reading at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. It was the last stop on a one-month reading tour spent mostly in New York to promote his new book of poems, “The Rain in the Trees,” just published by Alfred A. Knopf, and a “Selected Poems,” simultaneously issued through Atheneum.

Writing and Gardening

Now the 60-year-old Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, the author of 12 books of poetry, was ready to return to his Maui home, which he leaves “as infrequently as possible.” On Maui, Merwin said, “I try to write every day and read every day and work out of doors every day” in the large garden where he and his wife, Paula, grow fruits and vegetables and tend exotic plants from around the world. “We find we’re growing things that are already extinct in their native habitats,” Merwin said.

Keeping some specimens of these plants alive is part of Merwin’s ongoing battle to “do something for the natural world, which is under such menace and attack,” he said. He expresses his deep ecological concerns through political activism, through writing occasional essays for The Nation and through his poetry.

Merwin doesn’t feel much hope about humanity’s future. “Anywhere in the natural world where you see over-proliferation, which is what we’re indulging in now, you see that form of life preparing for something to replace it, whether it be UFOs, the AIDS virus, or whatever,” he said. “If you look around you, the human species exists at the expense of every other form of life. It’s not necessary.”

Merwin’s poetry, however, is subtle and light-fingered rather than dogmatic. Poet and critic X. J. Kennedy once wrote that Merwin’s best poems “do not attack (their) subject but graciously seduce it,” and in the journal Contemporary Literature the critic Anthony Libby has described Merwin’s work as “reaching beyond language” from a “discontent with language itself.”

His poetry has evolved from the rather formal, traditional style of his early books to an unpunctuated, sometimes surreal mode. He writes about many things, including family relationships, love and ecological and human injustices.

He stopped punctuating his lines, Merwin says, because he came to feel periods and commas “stapled” the language to the page. “I think punctuation is prose. We don’t punctuate our speech, and we don’t punctuate when we sing,” Merwin said. “Poetry always has to have one foot in song and in speech.

“What makes poetry is mysterious. Certainly we can’t do it as a deliberate or rational act.” Poems start, Merwin said, “by hearing something. If you listen, what you hear is your sound, what’s going to be a poem. What are we listening for--that’s what you (the poet) have to find out.

An Enlightened Way

Many of Merwin’s statements have a faintly mystical ring. His ideas have been influenced by Buddhism. “I feel very indebted to Mahayana Buddhism, let’s put it that way,” he said. “In Mahayana Buddhism, you don’t wait until you’re sort of saintly and enlightened to try and live in an enlightened way.”

His present life style and philosophy are a far cry from what he was taught as a Presbyterian minister’s son growing up in Union City, N.J., and Scranton, Pa. As a boy, Merwin “always wanted to have links with the natural world, but I didn’t think I could do anything about it,” he said. He recorded some of this yearning for nature in a 1982 book of memoirs, “Unframed Originals,” which tells of his youth in an emotionally repressed family as well as his attempts, as an adult, to maintain connections with that family while finding his own way through the world.

Merwin studied history, literature and modern languages at Princeton, and shortly after his 1947 graduation he went to Europe. He lived in Portugal and Mallorca, then moved to England, where he translated classical Spanish and French plays and verse for BBC radio programs. The work, done “on my own time, on my own terms” suited Merwin well, for it left him free to write poetry. His first book, “A Mask for Janus,” won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952.

During his European years, Merwin also earned his way by tutoring, by translating the work of contemporary European poets into English, and by winning fellowships, grants and prizes. New York City became his home for a while; he moved to Hawaii in 1975. His many awards have included the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1968 P.E.N. translation prize and the 1974 Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, as well as Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ford fellowships.

“If you average out the amount of money from the fellowships, they don’t equal very much, but they came along when I needed them,” Merwin said. “I’ve been lucky in not having a job” over the years. “It seems to me I needed far simpler things than many of my contemporaries.” Even now, he said, “I wouldn’t know what to do with an expensive car. Probably sell it.”

He prefers “being a bum” to teaching, Merwin said. “I didn’t want to get involved in an academic career, which I’d then get addicted to and dependent on, like so many of my contemporaries. It seemed important to me to live on a low income and be as independent as possible.” In the early 1980s, however, he did teach several literature courses at New York’s Cooper Union college, where “I had a very unorthodox kind of class with very good students,” he said. “My approach to poetry is extremely eclectic. I love all kinds of poetry.”

These days Merwin’s income comes chiefly from giving readings, the occasional sale of his original manuscripts and royalties on his poetry, his four prose collections and his 13 books of translations of other poets’ works.

Life in the Country

Merwin lives on Maui’s windy northeast cliffs, “in the country, not in among the resorts, thank God,” he said. He helped design and build his house “through years of financial struggle and running out of money, having to go out to earn money to put tiles on the roof, and running into debt, which I’d never done before,” Merwin said.

But the struggle was worth it. “I think I’ve been gravitating toward the tropics all my life,” Merwin said. “I find the Pacific fascinating, and I find Asia and everything to do with Asia fascinating.” Hawaii is “very beautiful. It’s deep country, and it’s got a culture of its own--the remains of a culture of its own.”

He shares the house with his wife of five years, Paula, a former New York children’s book editor. The two of them “find ourselves getting involved with politics, because things are on a human scale” in Hawaii, Merwin said. “In a place like New York, or on the West Coast, you feel individual voices are swallowed up. Hawaii is still small enough, you feel like a few voices can make a difference.”

A member of national organizations including the Nature Conservancy, the Wilderness Society and Greenpeace, Merwin has spoken out on local issues such as the threatened 1984 malathion spraying of Maui, through which health officials “couldn’t have begun to get rid of the fruit fly. But they would have gotten rid of a lot of other things,” he said. Public outcry prevented the pesticide spraying, Merwin added, and he wrote a long article about the controversy for The Nation.

“Hawaiian rights and land issues connected with that, and conservation” as well as “hotel building and land grabbing, trying to keep that under control and protecting what land is left” have also consumed a fair amount of Merwin’s attention. So has an unsuccessful but ongoing fight to stop the U.S. Navy and Air Force from bombing Kaho’olawe Island, a site sacred to the native Hawaiians.

In addition, since 1985 Merwin has been trying to translate native Hawaiian chants into English, although “I feel a little shy about it (because) I’m not Hawaiian, although people have been very welcoming,” he said. “All of the great poetry is oral poetry. The poetry is like songs. If you ever hear a Hawaiian chant, it’s unforgettable. It seems to come right out of the ground.” He speaks Hawaiian, but “very badly,” Merwin said, and so he relies on translating assistance from a few native speakers.

Currently Merwin is writing prose about “the current history of Hawaii, and what’s happened there from the 18th Century until now,” he said. “None of the haoles (Caucasians) have written about Hawaii as if it existed before they got there, and it did.” He’s also working on a new group of poems. “I write very slowly,” he said. “Opening the Hand,” his last poetry book before “The Rain in the Trees,” was published in 1983.

Haunted Feeling

“I have the feeling I keep trying to walk around something” by writing poetry, Merwin said. “I feel like I’ve been haunted most of my life . . . The world I wanted to write about is like Cezanne’s mountain, Mt. St. Victoire. I want to walk around it, do it in many different lights.”

Merwin says that in his private life he is quite happy, but when he looks at the world “on the large scale, I don’t feel very optimistic at all. It doesn’t look very hopeful to me.

“Today, children growing up in cities are as culturally deprived as if they were prevented from ever seeing paintings or hearing music,” Merwin said. “In the overdeveloped world, everybody grows up with their minds in the city . . . human life is only comprehensible to me as part of life itself, and we’re seeing it as separate.”

Some critics have termed the bleak world vision expressed in some Merwin poems, from his 1967 collection, “The Lice,” on as “anti-humanism.” In a way the description fits, Merwin said, because “there’s a basic assumption of humanism that I don’t make, and that’s that man is the center of the universe. That kind of speciocentric point of view is one I don’t share at all.”

He wrote “The Lice,” his sixth book of verse, around the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when “I wondered if writing made a difference any more. I really questioned the value of the arts,” Merwin said. “It seemed to me we were headed toward hopeless and enormous violence. The planet has been engaged in hopeless violence ever since then.”

Yet eventually the choice to go on writing, like the choice to go on being politically active, “was decided for me,” he said. “I couldn’t stop . . . . If your despair and anger come out of caring for something, then it’s the caring that matters. If you had a parent who’d smoked a lot and had lung cancer, and you knew they were going to die, you wouldn’t stop trying to take care of them.”

In the same way, he said, he and Paula “try to take care of our small piece of land and treat it the way we wish the rest of the world could be treated. You just use what you have. I don’t think you do it calculating the chances of success. I can’t imagine shrugging my shoulders and saying, ‘There’s no point in trying.’ I’d be very unhappy if I did that.”