Patt Morrison Asks: The poet, W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin, who just ended a year's term as the nation's poet laureate, talks about keeping his works green.


Now that you've passed the torch to the new poet laureate, does that make you the laureate laureate?

Yes, although they say once you are, you have it for good. But you don't have to be active. Both Kay [Ryan, U.S. poet laureate 2008-2010] and I viewed the whole thing with great skepticism. She didn't like the idea of all the publicity, and I didn't like it either.

Britain's poet laureate is a post that's been around for about 900 years. The pay includes "a butt of sack" -- a barrel of sherry. Did you get anything like that?

Oh, believe me, there's none of that!

What are the laureate's duties?

James Billington [the librarian of Congress, who appoints the poet laureate] said to me, "You can do it on your own terms." They wanted a couple of trips to Washington a year and a few readings. In the old days, you were expected to live in Washington. Robert Penn Warren did it. I said: "I don't want to transplant myself for months at a time. I don't like Washington. I don't want to wear suits."

It wasn't onerous. The thing that was onerous, saving your presence, was months of wall-to-wall interviews, and the huge variation between very good interviewers and people who really didn't know anything. There were a few unguessable things, like [an interview for] Oprah's magazine. Wasn't a bad one, either. Then they sent a crew of photographers; it was like Barnum & Bailey arriving with three or four huge trucks.

You told Bill Moyers, "When you hear a poem, you hear something that you always knew, but it's completely new."

One of the mysterious things about the arts is that they make a demand that you stop whatever you're doing and pay attention, whether it's a painting of persimmons or a few notes on a bass violin or a few lines of Shakespeare.

And you have a feeling of recognizing it although you never saw it or heard it before, this feeling that "I know this," even if it's totally strange.

The U.S. sometimes seems proud of being anti-intellectual, and yet even people who've never read a poem by choice will, under emotional stress -- a family death, or 9/11 -- sit down and try to write a poem. What is happening there?

We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain -- that's the beginning of language.

Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really [there] to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will.

[Interviewers asked, after 9/11,] what poems I was reading. I said I remembered that Dylan Thomas poem, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London." Oh it's a great poem. Shall I recite it to you? [He does, and lingers on the last line:] "After the first death, there is no other." He was 25 when he wrote that.

Listen to Merwin recite Thomas

You once wrote that you believe "too much in words." We humans want language to express things that existed in us before language did.

According to Aristotelian logic it doesn't work that way, but I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it.

Writers want the words to capture something perceived fleetingly, from the corner of your eye -- and then it's gone.

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