Merwin has a lot of books. There are 25 poetry titles listed in the front matter of The Shadows of Sirius, not to mention his prose or translations. I’ve read his first eight books and smattering of the more recent stuff, mostly through jumping around in his new and selected collection Migration. Being familiar with about half of his output coming into this blog, I had come to associate Merwin with a strong environmentalist stance in his poems, which is something that we do not see much of at all in Sirius. I don’t want to imply that Merwin has given up on addressing these environmental issues or that he should be more political in his later poems. The Shadows of Sirius is simply a different project, one that concerns itself with memory and transience. But I think it’s worth spending some time thinking about Merwin the political poet.
Ecopoetry is term that I’m really interested in, in part because its exact definition still seems to be a work in progress. It is certainly concerned with critiquing traditional nature poetry and pastoral poetry, but a solid sense of its parameters and who its practitioners are seems to still be unfolding. In its broadest sense ecopoetry can be seen as any poem that addresses the political dimension of the natural world. In other words, if nature poetry is meant to praise the beauty of our world, ecopoetry points our attention to the factors that jeopardize that beauty (this is really general, but you get the idea; if you want to debate/inform me about the finer points of ecopoetry, do comment below!). It seems that the current ecopoetic project is mostly being carried out by poets who are aesthetically quite different from Merwin (such as Julianna Spahr, John Kinsella, and Lisa Robertson), but I think that it is safe to say that Merwin can be seem as a proto-ecopoet, as he has been writing about the destruction of the environment since the 1960s. Here is the first stanza of “The Last One” from his 1967 book The Lice:
Well they made up their minds to everywhere because why not.
Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
They with two leaves they whom the birds despise.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds.
They started to cut.
Merwin himself is on record as being distrustful of the term ecopoetry because it creates too much of a formulaic label with which to categorize poetry about nature, but these lines make it clear that much of his work can be seen as a precursor to current ecopoetry. Merwin practices what he preaches as well: he lives on 18 acres on Maui that he and his wife have filled with endangered species of palm trees. Like fellow proto-eco Gary Snyder, Merwin has chosen to wear his environmentalism on his sleeve in a public way. It will be interesting to see how this platform manifests itself in Merwin’s tenure as Poet Laureate, whether he makes it a prominent issue or if he chooses to focus on promoting poetry in general.
Let’s turn back to the book at hand. Sirius is not totally without environmentalist concerns. The poem “Escape Artist” (p.63) is about experiments carried out on captive foxes. The fox, long associated in folk stories as being a trickster figure endowed with magical properties, particularly the ability to disappear (read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World for a great study of the fox as folk hero), is shown in the poem to be helplessly ordinary: “When they arrange the cases / for experiments / they have long known / that there is no magic / in foxes at any time.” The poem culminates in a clever reversal on Merwin’s part: “this heir of conjurers / of disappearing acts / caged now in numbers / lost in plain sight.” The foxes have disappeared, but not of their own volition; rather they are simply not thought of.
I think this poem and others of his that share this project of pointing our attention to our encroachment upon nature have to do with the darkness that Caryl brought up last week and that Darcie expanded upon on Monday. Sometimes Merwin’s darkness is full of magic, making a space for unlooked for discovery. Sometimes his darkness is the manifestation of loss’ hunger doing its work in our own individual lives. And other times his darkness is more universal, a larger darkness that has to do with extinction. These are grand terms, but they seem apt for discussing Merwin the political poet, who has been talking for a long time about global darkness to those of us who still have our shadows.