Author of the week: W.S. Merwin

last updated 8 January 2015

It will be interesting to watch what W.S. Merwin does with his one-year tenure as the nation’s new poet laureate, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. A quiet man who cherishes solitude and lives on an Eden-like estate in Hawaii, the 82-year-old often seems “a soul too pure” to use his Library of Congress post to stir up controversy. But Merwin, who last year won a Pulitzer for The Shadow of Sirius, just might have some fight in him. He was once an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and he has always exhibited a deep ecological consciousness. With oil fouling the Gulf of Mexico and America fighting two wars overseas, this could be his moment.

Merwin so far seems more prepared to speak out about ecology than war, said Ed Lake in the Abu Dhabi National. While he “deeply deplores” any organized violence, he’s adamant that humankind’s greatest mistake is viewing the natural world as a resource to be exploited rather than as a gift larger than us all. In his poetry, Merwin strives for harmony of thought and expression. Yet he’s not used to being the object of public attention while working through his often complicated composition process. Every poem has an ideal shape, he says, but its shape only emerges through the process of creation. “When it sounds right, then it is right,” he says. “I tell students that poetry comes from listening, and they inevitably say, ‘Listening to what?’ And I say: ‘That’s what you have to find out.’”