Pulitzer prize-winning poet & essayist

W. S. Merwin

visits Goucher College as the Fall 2005 Writer-in-Residence.

At 8:00 PM on Tuesday October 11, 2005, W. S. Merwin will read from his work at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium.   Admission is free. For details and to reserve free tickets, call the Goucher College Box Office at 410 337 6333

~

In a career spanning five decades, W. S. Merwin, poet, essayist, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read — and imitated — poets in America.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval—influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating — to a more distinctly American voice, following his two years in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world.

His first book, MASK FOR JANUS, was published in 1952 in the Yale Younger Poets series — chosen by W.H. Auden. His book of poems The Carrier of Ladders was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. He is the author of many collections of poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and translation. His recent works include the collections of poems The River Sound and The Pupil, as well as a new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio and his critically-lauded translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

He has also published a book of prose entitled The Mays of Ventador, as part of the National Geographic Directions series. Recent reissues of his books include The First Four Books of Poems, and his translations of Jean Follain’s poems Transparence of the World, and Antonio Porchia’s Voices. In 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard released The Ends of the Earth, a gathering of essays expressing the breadth of W.S. Merwin’s fascination with the natural world and the explorers who have journeyed through it; this work is Merwin’s first new prose collection in more than a decade.

William Merwin’s selected poems collection is entitled Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 (Copper Canyon Press, spring 2005). He is also the author of the book of poems Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, fall 2005).

In 1999, W.S. Merwin was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for a jointly-held position along with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glück. Included in his numerous awards are the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In the fall of 2004, William Merwin received the prestigious 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2005, he was honored as laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia, receiving the international poetry award, the Golden Wreath Award.

On "For a Coming Extinction"

by Ian B. Gordon

In the remarkable poem, "For a Coming Extinction," addressed to a gray whale, Merwin speaks of the relationship between poetic utterance and history, notably the absence that they both share

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

Although the poem commences with a simple request for the beast to forgive those responsible for its destruction, the narrator quickly finds himself in deeper philosophical waters than those transversed by the animal. He asks forgiveness while simultaneously realizing that very notion of forgiveness is a human projection: "we who follow you invented forgiveness / And forgive nothing." The juxtaposition of "follow" and "forgiveness" is charged with significance. We can forgive only by recognizing a transgression that occurred in the past. To invent forgiveness is also to invent history, to invent the idea of one event following another by a reconstitution of the past. Succession, history, inheritance in short, the thematic concerns of the poem exist only as part of our need to invent a field for our collective grief. Man is doomed because he must seek history only in order that he might escape it more easily. Forgiveness has no real object; as part of historical association, it is a form of the engineering of recovery posing as charity. The poem itself moves from the natural world (the whale), to its departure

Leaving behind it the future         Dead
And ours

and thence finally, to a "black garden" and its court clearly a reference to some new home in a natural science museum. There it joins other extinct creatures, "the Great Auk the gorillas / The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless." The whale has entered the realm of words and hence of history symbolized by the museum replete with white labels showing forth lineage (and hence history) as the juxtaposition of genus and species: gray whale.

From "The Dwelling of Disappearance in W. S. Merwins The Lice." Modern Poetry Studies 3.3 (1972)
 

about | events | writers-in-residence | students | contact

goucher college creative writing program
goucher college home