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INTERVIEWER
In the past thirty-four years, you have published twelve books of poetry, three books of prose, and at least fifteen books in translation. Yet you said recently that “writing is something I know little about.” How is that possible?
W. S. MERWIN
The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write every day? Ezra Pound once advised you to write seventy-five lines a day. Have you followed his advice?
MERWIN
I haven’t written seventy-five lines a day, but for years I’ve tried to stare at a piece of paper for a while every day. It tends to turn one into a kind of monster.
INTERVIEWER
How’s that?
MERWIN
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say something about the hymns you used to write for your father? Were those your first poems?
MERWIN
I suppose they were. I was about five years old when I wrote them. I wrote them on my own, and I was very disappointed that they weren’t used in church.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see a connection between poetry and prayer?
MERWIN
I guess the simple answer is yes, if only because I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it.
INTERVIEWER
How about the influence of Zen in your work?
MERWIN
When you talk about prayer in Judeo-Christian terms, prayer is usually construed as a kind of dualistic act. You’re praying to somebody else for something. Prayer in the Western sense is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with the recognizing of that connection, rather than trying to create something that isn’t there.
INTERVIEWER
In your memorial poem to John Berryman, you remember that “he suggested that I pray to the Muse / get down on my knees and pray / right there in the corner and he / said he meant it literally.” What do you think of the advice?
MERWIN
I think it’s excellent advice. Writing poetry is never a wholly deliberate act over which you have complete control. It’s important to recognize that writing is at the disposition of all sorts of forces, some of which you don’t know anything at all about. You can describe them as parts of your own psyche, if you like, they probably are, but there are lots of other ways of describing them that are as good, or better—the muses, or the collective unconscious. More suggestive and so, in a way, more accurate. Any means of invoking these forces is good, as far as I’m concerned.
INTERVIEWER
Your fifth and sixth books, The Moving Target and The Lice, are explosively different from the books that preceded them. On a technical level, they break with the formal tradition of the forties and fifties, breaking up lines and stanzas, loosening diction and syntax. And about two-thirds of the way through The Moving Target, you suddenly abandon using punctuation altogether. What happened?
MERWIN
In the late fifties, I had the feeling I had simply come to the end of a way of writing. I didn’t reject it, but it was no longer satisfying. So there was a period of close to two years when I wrote very little poetry. And then all of a sudden, the first poems of The Moving Target came out, I wrote almost half of the book in a few weeks—it was all coming from a different kind of impulse that I had not known was preparing itself. I was in Europe, knowing that if I came back to the States, I would have to get involved in an academic career, or something like that, which I didn’t want to do, and yet, not wanting to be in England any more, the tensions of wanting to change my life, and not yet knowing quite how to do it, this all built up, with the result of a release of a new kind of writing, and many of the images and poems of the first part of the The Moving Target. The second part of that book was written after I did get back to New York and was living on the Lower East Side. Probably the dropping of punctuation was partly the result of many years of reading Spanish and French poetry. Suddenly, they seemed to be a part of a tradition that was mine if I wanted it. Also, I came to believe that poetry has a much stronger relation to the spoken word than prose has. Punctuation basically has to do with prose and the printed word. I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word, one step toward that was to do away with punctuation, make the movement of the words do the punctuating for themselves, as they do in ordinary speech.
INTERVIEWER
James Wright went through a similar crisis in his work at about the same time. Do you see a connection between what happened to you and what happened to him?
MERWIN
Oh, yes. But neither of us knew what the other was doing. A number of people—like Louis Simpson and Robert Bly—were moving in that direction. The Beats were around also. We didn’t so much influence each other as feel the same things. It was perfectly clear that the things I had felt as a kind of straitjacket could be broken out of after all. The straitjacket really wasn’t there. We didn’t have to pay attention to it anymore. The other thing about that time—I don’t know that anyone has described it very thoroughly, and maybe nobody can—but all of us were about the same age, and we all went through that at pretty much the same time—throwing out the respectable way of going about things too. We were throwing out all of the apparatus of literary careers and everything, saying, Ah, that’s not important; what’s important is writing a different kind of poem. And that’s wonderful. In some ways I wish that poets younger than us had gone through that experience. I love the idea of dropping—even if it’s just for a few months—all of the assumptions about what makes poems and what makes literary careers and what makes any of these things, and living without that for a while.
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