This Moment That Has Come Along With Me

In the astonishingly intimate new documentary on the life and work of poet W.S. Merwin, Even Though the Whole World is Burning, poet Naomi Shihab Nye remembers writing in her journal when she was eighteen, on the day she first read Merwin’s work. "This is a voice that can save us," she wrote.

It is not often that we speak of authors this way. But Merwin is no usual writer. In a time of self-promotion, Merwin's a poet of deep relation, committed to putting life back into a world hell-bent on destruction.

Pollution, war, the extinction of language and species, the cruelty of mankind, the confusion of desire with natural or divine right—all have been exposed in the light of Merwin's poetry and prose.

In 1975, four years after channeling the money from his first Pulitzer Prize to those whose consciences would not allow themselves to kill other human beings in Vietnam, Merwin traveled to Maui, where he came upon a plantation that had been ruined by short-sighted industrial interest. The land had been classified as waste; it was irredeemable. He's lived there ever since, where, for the past forty-one years, he and his wife, Paula, have revived a rainforest. Eight hundred species of wild palm have flourished by his hand, including some—carefully carried from Brazil, Borneo, and Madagascar—that had been given to extinction.

"On the last day of the world," Merwin wrote nearly thirty years ago, "I would want to plant a tree."

 His new book, published in September, is called Garden Time. Blind now, reciting his poems to his beloved wife, gardening in the dark by touch and smell and taste and ear and by intuition born of careful attention, the eighty-nine-year-old Merwin continues to live in deep relation with the world. His poems are not "hopeful," for they concern themselves only with the present moment (which, like soil, is made wholly of what's come before). But because they are so made, because they enact an awareness of how the past informs our sense of presence, because they live according to moral commitments, and because they are so fully alive, reading Merwin is to become one with the conditions we hope for:

Ripe Seeds Falling

At home in late summer after the long

spring journeys and their echoing good-byes

at home as the year's seeds begin to fall

each one alone each in its own moment

coming in its blind hope to touch the earth

its recognition even in the dark

knowing at once the place that it has touched

the place where it belongs and came to stay

this is the place that I wanted to hear

to listen to the daylight and the dark

in this moment that has come along with me

The Provinces of Poetry

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In 1983, W.S. Merwin wrote a poem called “Late Wonders.” It's a poem I return to, especially when given to wonder myself, about why poetry matters.

Though the work's over three decades old, its import—in terms of what pollutes our air and discourse, the ways in which the realm of critical and compassionate imagination has been annexed by the overweening need to be entertained—remains potent.

In Los Angeles the cars are flowing
through the white air
and the news of bombings

at Universal Studios
you can ride through an avalanche
if you have never
ridden through an avalanche

with your ticket
you can ride on a trolley
before which the Red
Sea parts
just the way it did
for Moses

you can see Los Angeles
destroyed hourly
you can watch the avenue named for somewhere else
the one on which you know you are
crumple and vanish incandescent
with a terrible cry all around you
rising from the houses and families
of everyone you have seen all day
driving shopping talking eating

it's only a movie
it's only a beam of light

The poem is a dark appraisal of what happens when destruction is treated as an occasion for consumption, when what's considered real is only that which operates under our control, when our neighbors become figures in a spectacle we've worked to pay for, and when we are automated to pass, untroubled, through waves of air bearing knowledge that would move a mind to horror. When we lose compassion and awe, the very provinces of poetry, we lose what makes us human.

The indictment could not be more complete. And yet when I read it, I feel something more akin to invigoration than defeat. I want to read it again and again, and to teach it to whomever will listen, beginning with me.

I think I feel this way because the poem itself is an act of resolution. A living, present man set it down on paper. He wrote it, and then, by God, he rewrote it. He crafted of his outrage a poem, summoned on its behalf all of his meaning-deepening and connection-finding energies. And then he mailed it across an ocean from his home in Hawaii, asking that it be published, first in a periodical, and then in a collection he called Opening the Hand, and then in his latest volume of selected poems, Migration. He worked a poem awake and sent it into our lives because in poetry, there are no lost causes. Within the integrity of poetic vision, nothing is forgotten, nothing can be cast away. Even us. For our limitations are rendered in the means of our rehabilitation: paradox and metaphor and imagery, complex ironies and rich ambiguities—the means of acts of life-sustaining attention.

Merwin's poem shows us that to exist without poetic consciousness is to be a tourist in a given world; it is to believe that all was fashioned to bring pleasure, that people exist to facilitate the satisfaction of desire, and that what happens, even when it happens right before our eyes—especially then—is not real, because nowhere feels like home. And it is to pay no mind to the condition in which we leave it.

Outside the room in which I teach is a postcard holding this quote by Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry Magazine:

Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

These are words I believe Merwin would affirm, for his work embodies them. They recall to me why poetry matters, why teaching poetry matters, and why writing and reading poems—even those that, in their subject matter, dispraise—is an act of urgency and hope.