No contemporary poet’s work has meant more to me than W. S. Merwin’s. We first met in 1979, when I was a twenty-four-year-old high school English teacher in Jefferson City, Missouri; we played pool at Dave’s Bar in Kansas City one night, and he told me I shouldn’t go do my PhD but stay out of academia and write. I had written my MA thesis about his work, and I have written about his work often. His poems are among the landmarks in all of American poetry; but more than this, the breadth and generosity of his translations, his transcendent prose, his hope and hands-in-the-dirt ecological stewardship, his soulful presence: there is no greater example of what a poet is, to me, than William Merwin. He first published in the Kenyon Review, as winner of the Kenyon Review fellowship, in 1954, the year I was born; he graciously accepted the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2010 and spoke with David Lynn and me for two hours without stopping: https://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/w-s-merwin/
And we were lucky for the chance to print many of his poems over the years:
“Canso” from Autumn 1953, Vol. 15, No. 4
Four Poems from KROnline, Fall 2010
“The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream” from KROnline, Fall 2010
As you knew, William, I did go do my PhD, but I have kept writing, too, like you said. I will read your poems for the rest of my life and people will read them long beyond that. I hear you breathing right now in the trees around me.
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Click on the links below to read poems in memory of W.S. Merwin:
David Baker: William’s Hand
Alison Hawthorne Deming: Two Poems in Memory of Merwin
John Kinsella: Villanelle of Watering the Trees
