Mourning William Merwin

Late one Saturday morning this past March I read in the New York Times that William Merwin had passed. I was standing in a short line at Cellar Door Coffee in Portland, Oregon, reading the obit on my Iphone. He had long been a treasured poet in my life. People who know me, had they been in that line at that moment, would have wondered what caused me to pull in a sharp breath, but would not have been surprised. As a young man I was drawn to Merwin’s yearning for solitude, a yearning rather like a small stream for the sea, carving out space season after season for ruminating, weeping, laughing or singing about this and that.  Merwin was, I am told, never having met him, quite convivial alongside his penchant for isolation. He was very frugal, it is said. Perhaps I would never have met him in a lineup where the price tag for 12 ounces of latte is four bucks.  

In my twenties Merwin showed those of us who fancied ourselves authors and artists in the making, how to go about it. Although he was not like Ezra Pound at all his biographers say, in dishing out advice, how he lived his life was of enduring interest. One classmate, Eugene, looked like a young Merwin and moved quietly about the campus well ahead of the rest of us in manifesting that eschewing temperament. Back a half century ago or so, we were trying to figure out the score on “elan vitale” (you know, that vital impetus in life which propels us forward). We had all read Bergson by then and eschewed the materialist understanding of the universe. I struggled in my early writing efforts (too soon abandoned for a career in sales and education) to fight off the habit of construing the world as a continuum of successive material things, juxtaposed most often in practical, safe constructions which could be relied upon to make meaning. One reads Merwin slowly, or there can be the peril of missing all that uncanny savvy he brought to neutralizing rational control, embracing instead a universe of contrary imperatives to get to simple, persisting truths.

When first I read The Shadow of Sirius as an undergraduate at Western University in Ontario, Earl Sanborn, my English professor said that Merwin was ahead of the North American pack of poets in avoiding the editing of conversations and actions. Dr. Sanborn drew in commentary from and about Freud’s free association notions to help us get to unconscious, more universal signs and motives, much less the repressed stuff screaming to get out. I was gradually letting my hair grow very long in the mid-sixties, eager to push aside the socially appropriate; eager too, to be less afraid of disapproval and rejection from the society around me.

I later learned that Merwin loved John Berryman’s work and intellect. Me too. And, I learned at a critical moment that Merwin’s autodidactic ways were working really well in his own career, but knew I had no such courage. In the late sixties and early seventies, it was humbling to discover what “Mr. Charlie” had already done to our minds and our souls even before our first chapbooks or public readings started to happen. I remember reading Theodore Rosak’s The Voice of the Earth and The Making of a Counterculture and reckoning that it was already too late for me to follow amazing intellects and spirits like Merwin confidently.

That day a few months ago, I paused in the middle of my busy stuff and pulled out when I got home later that evening The Shadow of Sirius and read the whole thing again. I reread the New York Times piece too, the title of which I forget … the focus of the obit, though, was about his delicious phrase, “life’s damnable evanescence”.  I knew that Merwin was stuck with something others have been yoked with too, but have not has as much courage as he to do something about; that is, the formidable yoke of the imperative of using language for more than utilitarian purposes.

I first encountered him largely because of his anti-war ruminations. I liked this mind from the start. His Mask for Janus was one of the books I had in my backpack when I first trekked to Europe in the early 1970s after graduate school. I had been dazzled by the work of Graves and medieval poetry and philosophy. Right in the middle of all those intersecting literatures was Merwin, a kindred spirit; someone to emulate, and someone from whom to draw inspiration in case I chickened out and hightailed it for hom. His whole enchilada was exactly up my alley: classical myth, biblical narrative, the romance songs from the Age of Chivalry, showing up as ballads, sestinas, odes, carols … rich, rich and rich ! And his style: wow. Epigrammatic cartridges everywhere. Enjambment. So large and disciplined; so not my tiny style, but so interesting.

I got to the Midi Pyrenees area between Toulouse and Bordeau by some odd confluence of randomness and a long ride on a Lorry head to Andorra. Whatever my pilgrimage might have been then, I had no idea Merwin went there too, much earlier of course. His place is up above the Dordogne River, a place I passed through, hitch hiking oddly in an area where North American young people with no money tended not to go. I went there because of my fascination for all things medieval … and got to ramble around among castle ruins, medieval town squares, stone age dolmens and grottoes, stone walls and cart paths.

I was drawn to the solitary edge to Merwin’s life rhythm but lacked the clarity and resolve which could have helped me shift gears and stay a course avoiding a business and academic life. It took until much later for me to be on to myself. Merwin knew early what his work was. He shaped a life of reading, writing and searching for good coffee, avoiding the stuff which pricks one’s taste buds with citrus.

For a time I thought Merwin was a kind of twentieth century Walt Whitman. But when I read The Lice (searing, thudding, dumbing down feeling one gets when s/he dives deeply into that amazing book)  I recognized the chasm out of which many of us early boomers have pulled ourselves more than once … you know, that apocalyptic temperament mindset. It’s such a bleak book (the Vietnam war was going on, and Merwin’s marriage was deconstructing). His writing is so fabular and odd sometimes.

The last book of his I read was The Shadow of Sirius. That book gobsmacked my soul for a little while immersed in it. It got the Pulitzer and I thought to myself, self, this guy is the brother of all of us who sensed what shaping a life of reflection and abundant creation. And I continue to feel that way, not only because he is recognized for his abstract aesthetic theory, but also for his utter engagement with human and planetary life. What an imagination that guy had. His anger, when it slithered through, though, strikes me as mostly bitter acrimony because he saw through to the quick of things.

Merwin’s lines are like a carved instant in my memory which speak to his genius and timelessness.

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

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

Unlike Merwin, though, I like punctuation a lot. Perhaps it’s the impact of so many dominant women in my experience, starting with marginally educated nuns with great hearts and hidden hair who scolded me into watching for syntax and form out of line with the classical grammarians, something up with which I was not to put, no matter what, if I ever planned to make a success of anything enduring.

There is another segment of Merwin’s poetry which I committed to memory way back when, which comes to mind:

what is it

they say can turn even this into wisdom

and what is wisdom if it is not

now

in the loss that has not left this place

oh if we knew

if we knew what we needed if we even knew

the stars would look to us to guide them

So, we need to stay busy reading seeds, not twigs (as Pound put it to Merwin once). The other day when I came across some files from my graduate school days in English Literature, I decided to explore again, as if for the first time, the troubadour poems of ‘langue d’oc” (an old Romance language; called “Occitan” I think, if memory serves me). Among the margin notes was something Roland McMaster, 19th Century Literature Scholar, had said in a lecture: Merwin went to the roots of whatever interested him; take Occitan for example. Led him to his farm in France eventually. Now that's following your truth, wouldn't you say?

?Whatever I get up to, I know that wherever I track down a space to keep reinventing myself it will be somewhere, in the end, in myself. William Merwin taught me that.  I want song birds too … in the mornings, with coffee at hand. The song birds will fly a few beats, Merwin said, “a few beats in the dark/ you would say it was dying it is immortal”.