Prompt: On the Anniversary of My Death

W.S. Merwin died on March 15, 2019. He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world.

On the first anniversary of his death, I posted here a poem by Merwin titled "For the Anniversary of My Death" (from his collection The Second Four Books of Poems  

The poem begins: 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me...

I found the idea in Merwin's poem of writing a poem that imagines what you would have to say on the anniversary of your death unique. It sounds like a depressing idea but there is the wonderful optimism in the poem of having passed that day every year without knowing it. 

Today might be the anniversary of my death, and considering that possibility, perhaps I should also be "bowing not knowing to what."

I have this quote on a card over my writing desk.

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

– W.S. Merwin

This month's writing prompt is to write a poem for the anniversary of your death. It could be the first anniversary or any year after. Who is the intended audience?  I think the prompt is more open to possibilities than the title might suggest at first. It could even be humorous.

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Prompt: Thanks

Image via Pixabay

It's the end of a terrible year. In America, we celebrated Thanksgiving last month, though celebrating was very different than in past years. Many families could not get together due to pandemic restrictions and fear of hurting those they love. Still, I felt like people were still looking for things to give thanks for despite all the bad news in 2020.

Our model poem this month is "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin from his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

 

A reading of Merwin's poem. Part of a longer series of readings.

I can identify with many things in the poem in the context of 2020 though it was written years ago. Of course, that is what is true about all great literature - that it continues to be relevant long after it is written.

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

That makes me think not only of Thanksgiving dinner but of the several meteor showers that appear in the final months of the year.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

Hospitals and funerals (though very different when they do occur)  and the news is full every night about the number of cases of COVID19 and the number of deaths globally.

over telephones we are saying thank you

Over phones is very likely how you have stayed in touch and talked with friends and loved ones.

And we may be frustrated with
the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change" 

but 

we go on saying thank you thank you

There is a kind of optimism in the idea that

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. Over the course of his long career, Merwin published over twenty books of poetry and almost as many books of translation. Merwin served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress and as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010 to 2011. He died on March 15, 2019.

Some might call this a praise poem which is one of tribute, of gratitude, of honoring something or someone. I think it is different than that, but you can read some praise poems online and decide for yourself.

It is interesting that in Merwin's list of things to be thankful for are probably some things for which you would not be thankful. Perhaps, his final lines -  “we are saying thank you and waving / dark though it is” explain their inclusion.

An additional poem to consider is one by Joy Harjo that was included on a list of "Thanksgiving poems for kids." I'm not sure how old a "kid" would need to be to understand that poem, but I like the image of the kitchen table which is both a real kitchen table and the table of the world. 

I also like how the rather pessimistic title - "Perhaps the World Ends Here" - leads rights into its opposite - "The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live" so that when we arrive again at that title line it continues with "while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite." 

For this year-ending prompt that concludes a very difficult 2020, we ask you to consider thanks in all forms. From a list of many things to be thankful for, to a dismissive, sarcastic thanks, there are many things on that table of thanks - some we love, some we cannot love.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: December 31, 2020      We wish you a healthy new year!

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For the Anniversary of My Death by W.S. Merwin

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.” ― W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin in 2010

W.S. Merwin died at home on March 15, 2019, at age 91.

I am probably not the only person who is thinking about him and reading him today and also remembering his poem, "For the Anniversary of My Death," which begins:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

The idea that the day of your death is a day you have lived through over and over, like an anniversary, like a birthday, is another one of those things that W.S. Merwin has written about that has stayed with me.

I heard him read several times and I spoke very briefly to him about environmental issues in my home state of New Jersey. William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister and as a 5-year-old in New Jersey, he wrote hymns for the Presbyterian church where his father served. He earned a scholarship to Princeton, where he also worked in the campus dining halls.

Later, he went on to Europe, where he became a translator and a poet.

If you are new to his work, an entry point might be The Essential W.S. Merwin.

In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing was influenced by Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he was a prolific poet and also was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

“On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree”

― W. S. Merwin

1972 - Photograph by Douglas Kent Hall / ZUMA Press

“Send me out into another life

lord because this one is growing faint

I do not think it goes all the way”

― W.S. Merwin

Photo of Merwin on his farm in Maui by Jill Greenberg/Copper Canyon Press

No Time in the Garden

I have written before about poet Stanely Kunitz's garden in Provincetown. With the start of early gardening here in the Northeast and the recent passing of poet W.S. Merwin, my thoughts again turn to poets, poetry and gardens.


W.S. (William Stanley) Merwin was the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States. He authored over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translations. He earned every major literary prize, most recently the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Shadow of Sirius.

He lived in Hawaii where he was an avid gardener, guardian of nature and raised endangered palm trees.

W. S. Merwin’s collection of poems, Garden Time, concluded his 70 years of writing poetry when it was published in 2016.

He had at the end of his life macular degeneration and so had great difficulty seeing and was no longer traveling or giving readings.

In an article in the American Scholar, John Kaag wrote about a brief conversation he had wit Merwin about how that book had meant a lot to him in connection with John's mother. His mother "gardened with a passion I often mistook for rage."

In their conversation, Merwin said “You have to understand, John: The time of wisdom cannot be measured, and, for me, wisdom is the garden. There is no time in the garden. There is no time in the garden. There is …” He halted, coughed, and let it out, “… no time in the garden.”

I am a gardener and I think I know the timelessness there that Merwin felt.

Kaag thought it could mean several things including how it predates and outlasts us, pays no little heed to the human timeline, flourishes and declines in the “now,” and is a reminder that nothing lasts forever.

Garden Time is dedicated to Merwin’s wife, Paula who was dying as he composed the poems. From the article, I learned that she had become his eyes, reading to him, helping with poems and guiding him through the garden.

I heard Merwin read several times and once, at a Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, I got to speak briefly with him. He had attended nearby Princeton University and I asked him what he remembered about the place. he said, "Walking the campus and the beautiful old trees passing through the seasons."

I told him that I had two lines from his poem,"Place," in a small frame over my writing desk.

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

I said that I considered it the most optimistic message. This seemed to please him.

His poem, "Garden," reprinted on the Merwin Conservancy website, comes from an earlier collection, The Vixen, but is part of the throughline of the garden and nature that runs through his poetry.

GARDEN

When I still had to reach up for the doorknob
          I was wondering why the Lord God whoever that was
who had made everything in heaven and the earth
          and knew it was good and that nobody could hurt it
had decided to plant a garden apart
          from everything and put some things inside it
leaving all the rest outside where we were
          so the garden would be somewhere we would never see
and we would know of it only that it could not be known
          a bulb waiting in pebbles in a glass of water
in sunlight at a window You will not be wanting
          the garden too the husband said as an afterthought
but I said yes I would which was all I knew of it
          even the word sounding strange to me for the seedy
tatter trailing out of its gray ravelled walls
          on the ridge where the plateau dropped away to the valley
old trees shaded the side toward the village
          lichens silvered the tangled plum branches hiding
the far end of the scrape of the heavy door as it dragged
          across the stone sill had deepened its indelible
groove before I knew it and a patch of wilting
          stalks out in the heat shimmer stood above potatoes
someone had cultivated there among the stately nettles
          it was not time yet for me to glimpse the clay
itself dark in rain rusting in summer shallow
          over fissured limestone here and there almost
at the surface I had yet to be shown how the cold
          softened it what the moles made of it where the snake
smiled on it from the foot of the wall what the redstart
          watched in it what would prosper in it what it would become
I had yet to know how it would appear to me

What is a Garden? - a photo book featuring
Merwin’s essays and poems about his palm forest

Merwin died at home on March 15, 2019. I have made a calendar note for next year to reread his poem "For the Anniversary of My Death," which begins:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

The idea that the day of your death is a day you have lived through over and over, like an anniversary, like a birthday, is another one of those things that merwin has written that stays with me.

           

W. S. Merwin on Poetry

Listen to The Leonard Lopate Show with W. S. Merwin on Poetry (WNYC)

Poet W. S. Merwin talks about his collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. The poems focus on subjects from childhood and memory to age and, of course, dogs.

W.S. Merwin Appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate

Merwin photograph © Matt Valentine
via http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-157.html

July 1, 2010

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced the appointment of W.S. Merwin as the Library’s 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2010-2011.

Merwin will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary series on Oct. 25 with a reading of his work.

"William Merwin’s poems are often profound and, at the same time, accessible to a vast audience," Billington said. "He leads us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life to half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself. In his poem ‘Heartland,’ Merwin seems to suggest that a land of the heart within us might help map the heartland beyond—and that this ‘map’ might be rediscovered in something like a library, where ‘it survived beyond/ what could be known at the time/ in its archaic/ untaught language/ that brings the bees to the rosemary.’"

William Stanley Merwin succeeds Kay Ryan as Poet Laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove and Richard Wilbur.

During a 60-year writing career, Merwin has received nearly every major literary award. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, just recently in 2009 for "The Shadow of Sirius" and in 1971 for "The Carrier of Ladders." In 2006, he won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress for "Present Company." His retrospective collection "Migration: New and Selected Poems" won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry.

Born in 1927, Merwin showed an early interest in language and music, writing hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied poetry at Princeton and, in 1952, his first book, "A Mask for Janus," was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

The author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, Merwin’s influence on American poetry is profound. Often noted by critics is his decision, in the 1960s, to relinquish the use of punctuation. "I had come to feel that punctuation stapled the poems to the page," Merwin wrote in his introduction to "The Second Four Books of Poems." "Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in."

Merwin also has been long dedicated to translating poetry and plays from a wide array of languages, including Spanish and French. "I started translating partly as a discipline, hoping that the process might help me to learn to write."

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii, where he and his wife Paula have fashioned a quiet life in beautiful, natural surroundings. An avid gardener, he has raised endangered palm trees on land that used to be a pineapple plantation.

"Although his poems often deal with simple everyday things, there is a nourishing quality about them that makes readers want more, "said Patricia Gray, head of the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center. "Like William Wordsworth, he is passionately interested in the natural world."

From 1999 to 2000, while Robert Pinsky served as Poet Laureate, Merwin along with Rita Dove and Louise Glück were named as Special Bicentennial Consultants in Poetry to help celebrate the Library’s bicentennial.

Merwin’s many honors also include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Tanning Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii. He has received a Ford Foundation grant and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Merwin is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

The Shadow of Sirius
Migration: New & Selected Poems
The First Four Books of Poems
The Rain in the Trees
The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target / The Lice / The Carrier of Ladders / Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment

            

Merwin and Neruda

Merwin reads his poem "Yesterday" in this excerpt of video from the Bill Moyers programs on poetry recorded at the Dodge Poetry Festivals. (You should watch it all - but Merwin appears at the 5:30 point in the video.) The poem is the model for our October writing prompt at Poets Online. 

But, lest you think Merwin to be a cold poet based on this one poem, I would also recommend his translations of Pablo Neruda's poetry. It's a collection that Neruda published at the age of 19 (in 1924) and that was considered scandalous then and, in this translation, the sexuality and sensuality is there.

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire.
My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
in you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.

One of his love sonnets: 

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me,
all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

W.S. Merwin - I Have Lost None Of It

I had read poems by W.S. Merwin before I actually heard him read in person, but seeing and hearing him at one of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals is what really got me to get his books and read the poems.

Merwin did an interview on the Bill Moyers Journal and talked about that Dodge appearance which Moyers recorded and turned into several books and videos, including Fooling With Words. 

Merwin’s book, The Shadow of Sirius, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and it is one of my favorites of his books. Maybe that's because much of it is the poetry of later life - loss, memory, time - and the backward and forward of what we see, feel, and remember. This childhood memory at the intersection of past and present is part of the poem “Still Morning."

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves

and I am a child before
there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

This book, which is named after the Dog Star, has a good number of poems about Merwin’s own dogs. His poem, “Dream of Koa Returning,” has Merwin walking with a dog and looking at the river and trees.

...and all at once you

were just behind me

lying watching me

as you did years ago 

and not stirring at all 

when I reached back 

slowly hoping to touch 

your long amber fur

and there we stayed without moving

 
In that interview, Moyers wondered: "Now, Sirius is the dog star, the most luminous star in the sky, twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that." 

Merwin relplied, "That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time. We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it."

 
In the poem "The Nomad Flute":

do you still hear me
does your air remember you 

or breath of morning 

night song morning song 

I have with me all 

that I do not know

I have lost none of it

 
Moyers asked, "What — how do you carry with you what you do not know?"

 
Merwin replies, "We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something we don't know. They arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand.

Excerpt for "The Pinnacle"

Both of us understood

what a privilege it was

to be out for a walk

with each other

...she was beautiful

in her camel hair coat

that seemed like the autumn leaves

our walk was her idea

we liked listening to each other

her voice was soft and sure

and we went our favorite way

the first time just in case

it was the only time

even though it might be too far

we went all the way

up the Palisades to the place

we called the pinnacle

with its park at the cliff's edge

overlooking the river

it was already a secret

the pinnacle

as we were walking back

when the time was later

than we had realized

and in fact no one

seemed to know where we had been

even when she told them

no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

from The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press)   

W.S. Merwin Wins Pulitzer Prize

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists were announced yesterday at Columbia University.

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin won for Poetry.

William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin (born September 30 1927 ) made a name for himself as an anti-war poet during the 1960s. Later, he would evolve toward mythological themes and develop a unique prosody characterized by indirect narration and the absence of punctuation. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology also influenced his writing. He continues to write prolifically, though he also dedicates significant time to the restoration of rainforests in Hawaii, where he currently resides. more info




Pulitzer Prize winners in the Letters categories also include:

Olive Kitteridge: Fiction by Elizabeth Strout for Fiction

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham for Biography

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon for General Nonfiction

Ruined by Lynn Nottage for Drama