Meet our new poet laureate

[Jerry Peterson]

We have a new top poet in our country – W.S. Merwin, the appointment made two weeks ago.

Merwin looks the role – a mop of white hair, somewhat bushy eyebrows. It’s as if he had studied the portraits of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and said, “I can look like that.”

But more important than “the look”, Merwin’s a sterling poet who has gathered in a basketful of honors for his work, including two Pulitzer prizes – in 1971 for his poetry collection The Carrier of Ladders and last year for his collection The Shadow of Sirius – and a National Book Award. He got that one for his 2004 collection Migration: New and Selected Poems.

Merwin also served a previous hitch with the Library of Congress, in 1999 as a poetry consultant.

The poet’s muse touched Merwin early. At age 18, he contacted Ezra Pound and asked for advice on what he should do to become a poet. Pound came back with write 75 lines of poetry every day and, oh, by the way, you ought to translate poetry from other languages into English, to learn what a person can do with language. Merwin has done both.

In the 1960s, he became, with Allen Ginsberg and others on the New York scene, a hell raiser. He opposed the Vietnam war. He condemned it. It’s all there in his 1967 collection of poems, The Lice.

In that decade Merwin began writing poems without any punctuation, and then without capital letters, except for the first letter of each line. Said he, “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”

He also works toward that in the manner in which he writes. No computer. No typewriter. Too inhibiting, says Merwin. He writes with a pencil or pen in a small spiral notebook and on napkins. “It’s the nearest thing to not writing,” Merwin said. “The more self-conscious it [the act of writing] gets, the stiffer it gets.”

Merwin is more than a poet. He’s also a playwright, and he’s written a novel, Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, published in 1998. The novel is in verse, and it deals with Hawaii’s history and legend – Hawaii, where Merwin has lived for the past three decades.

You’re not likely to see much of Merwin, our 17th U.S. poet laureate. He’s a recluse. He has agreed to come to Washington, D.C., in October and give a reading at the opening of the Library of Congress’s annual literary series.

That may be it for his travels as poet laureate.

Tomorrow: New edition of Stephen King’s On Writing out

[Jon Loomis]

I've met Bill Merwin: he came as a visiting poet when I was in grad school in '93. Great, great poet. Interesting guy.

[Dana King]

"He’s a recluse. He has agreed to come to Washington, D.C., in October and give a reading at the opening of the Library of Congress’s annual literary series.

That may be it for his travels as poet laureate."


So he'll spend most of his term at an undisclosed location? Sounds like a job Dick Cheney was born for.