The new American poet laureate

Some weeks ago, Nandana Weerasinghe, a talented Sinhala poet, asked me who my favourite American poet was, hinting perhaps that his was Mark Strand. I admire Strand's poetry enormously especially his ability to combine the outer and the inner, the public and the private, in a unifying vision as evidenced by passages such as the following, and his remarkable ability capture his counter-life in a longer poem like 'Dark Harbor.

I grow into death.

my life is small

and getting smaller.

The world is green,

nothing at all.

However, I told him that my favourite was W.S.Merwin. I did not know at that time that he was to be made the next poet laureate of America; that announcement came some days later.

W.S.Merwin has distinguished himself as a poet, a translator, dramatist and cultural commentator. He has published over twenty five volumes of poetry and has translated among others from Spanish, French and Sanskrit. He was born in New York City in 1927, and has lived a rather reclusive life in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation for the last three decades.

He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards including the fellowship of American poets, the Pulitzer prize, National Book award, the Bollingen prize for poetry, the Tanning Prize etc. Even his detractors would agree that he has an uncanny ability to key into impressions of sight and sound and that he represents a formidable talent.

The distinguished American poet Adrienne Rich once observed that Merwin 'has been working more privately, profoundly, and daringly than any other poet of my generation.' His dedication to bearing witness to the elusive truth of a larger world, I am sure, is a facet that captivated her interest as well as that of many others..

His books of poetry such as 'The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), Finding the Islands (1982), The Rain in the Trees (1988), The Folding Cliffs (1998) The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which are among my favorites contain facility with language and craftsmanship of the highest order.

I first met W.S.Merwin in the mid -1980s when the then Vice President of the East-West Center, Doug Murray, introduced him to me. We had a good discussion about his poetry, and in the process I mistook a poem by Marvin Bell that had just appeared in the 'New Yorker' for a poem by Merwin - I should have known better. However, he was unperturbed and took it all in stride with a smile. Since then, I have attended numerous poetry readings given by him; I have always found them to be deeply stimulating and memorable events.

There are a number of defining traits of Merwin's poetry - his penchant for compactness, the beauty of language, the desire to locate man in a wider context of apprehension, the aura of sacrality that surrounds his recreations of nature, the way he forces words to collide and collude producing better wisdoms. A poem like the following titled 'Utterance', to my mind, illustrates his undeniably strengths.

Sitting over words very late I have heard a kind of whispered singing not far like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark the echo of everything that has ever been spoken still spinning in one syllable between the earth and the silence.

The following poem titled 'Dusk in Winter', serves to dramatize his trademark compression of thought and elegance of language as well as the enigmatic simplicity that one normally associates with his poesis. His ability poetry, for Merwin, is always an occasion for resonant statement, and his statements constantly make the point that word outpaces the world.

His words jostle in ways that point to both the power of words and their powerlessness underlining the supreme attraction of silence. The poetic enigmas of word and silence pervade his writings.

Again the procession of the speechless

Bringing me their words

The future woke me with its silence.

I join the procession

An open doorway

Speaks for me

Again.

One aspect of Merwin's poetry that I find particularly attractive is his deep interest in myths and the mythological imagination. For those of us interested in Sinhala poetry, this is a literary strategy that is of great relevance. If we take the poetry of Gunadasa Amarasekera, we see that he has sought to universalize his personal experiences through the deft use of myths and culturally grounded narratives.

This move is clearly discernible in works such as 'Amal Biso', 'Guruluvata' and 'Asakada Kava.' Even in those poems that are not overtly mythological, one senses an undertone of mythological imaginings. As Merwin himself said, 'often I try to do something that is not mythological, but it turns out that in some way or other I find I am recreating the conditions of mythology.'

Merwin looked to mythology as a means of universalizing his poetic idiom, and exploring the timeless modes of feeling behind the contingent. Myths, according to Merwin's ways of thinking, enable poets to be less arrogant, to locate their human experiences in a far wider world of sentient life. By exploring archetypical historical patterns and seeking to make use of myths as a way of comprehending the flow of history, he underlines the importance of his notion of conditions of mythology. He sees modern man operating under the delusion of human invincibility. As he remarked, 'we exist in an era dedicated to the myth that the biology of the planet……can be forced to adapt infinitely to the appetite of one species, organized and deified under the name of economics.'

One of his volumes of poetry of that I particularly like is 'The Folding Cliffs.' It is a narrative of Hawaii presented with utmost sensitivity in which the themes of loss and beauty, individual and collectivity, possibility and fulfillment, brutality and compassion, faith and despair are re-enacted with power and elegance. The distinguished British poet Ted Hughes called 'a truly original masterpiece on a very big scale'. Michael Ondaatje characterized this work as 'a thrilling historical narrative - taut and skillful and full of lost values. Merwin creates a powerful poetic narrative with great intimacy and humanity. 'The very opening lines of the poem capture the sprit that pervades the entire work.

Climbing in the dark she felt the small stones turn

Along the spine of the path whose color kept rising in her mind.'

W.S.Merwin, as is the case with all poets, has his share of critics and detractors. Some accuse him of being unnecessarily elliptical and falling victim to a kind of pantheistic mysticism; some are disconcerted by his readiness to hide behind a palisade of allusion. Others fault him for his inadequate and tepid engagement with pressing social issues, as opposed to say a poet like Auden. Despite the fact that he was deeply involved in anti-war activities and environmental movements, some find him turning his back on history. Certain fellow poets like Robert Pinsky (himself a former poet laureate) and Alan Williamson have complained that Merwin's indubitable elegance represents a thinly disguised evasiveness, unwillingness to confront the real world with all its messiness. As one critic remarked, 'I know of no poems from which the apparatuses of industrial revolution have been more rigidly excluded.'

Merwin had a remarkable ability to make words swell with startling and deeply-felt personal observations. I believe Merwin was in search of a form of poetry that glows with a sense of immediacy and openness; hence his desire to do away with punctuation altogether in his later poetry, and reach out to a syntactic freedom of movement. But this prized intimacy; just like his much vaunted simplicity, in many ways, can be deceptive. In a poem like the following, titled 'Separation', the sensed simplicity belies a deeper impulse of complexity.

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle Everything I do is stitched with its color.