"Now all my teachers are dead except silence." William Stanley Merwin
by ballybeg
Today is the 89th birthday of poet W S Merwin. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a two-time Poet Laureate of the United States (1999 & 2010), he has won almost every important prize available to a poet. His work has been hailed by every national publication of repute, and every academy and foundation for poetry, for over 60 years. If you haven’t read anything by him, try this bittersweet poem from his latest book.
Merwin, who has lived and worked all over the world, now lives on the island of Maui, and continues his 40-year endeavor to restore the rainforest surrounding his home, which had been destroyed by years of logging and agriculture. A practicing Zen Buddhist, devoted environmentalist, and erudite observer of the human condition, here are the works AADL owns by this most prolific and wise poet, essayist, and translator.
He has said:
I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.
Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.
I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.
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