March 18, 2019 In Memoriam Poem for Merwin By Matthew Zapruder Merwin’s Garden (Photo: Matthew Zapruder) There is no poet whose work has meant more to me than W. S. Merwin. Last December, I went to Hawaii for a series of conversations with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift. The trip was organized by the Merwin Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the ongoing preservation of the poet’s writing, ideals, and now legacy. They also work on maintaining and preserving the palm garden in Maui that he built, along with his late wife, Paula. When you go there, it feels more like a forest, filled with palms of so many different varieties, many of them rare. It’s an unexpected, completely singular place. I hope it will survive and continue to thrive now that he is gone. I got to see Merwin, and sit and talk with him and his editor, Michael Wiegers, and Lewis, on the lanai overlooking the garden. Toward the end of his life, Merwin lost his sight, though he was completely aware of what was going on around him. This is a note I wrote in my journal right after: At one point there was a bird in a tree and I knew if I described it carefully enough he’d be able to tell us what it was, so I looked for a while and then said, what is that bird with the grey feathers and orange beak and a little bit of red in its tail and a crown, and he said, that’s a female cardinal, and I think she is about to have babies, so if we put a blueberry on the railing of the lanai her mate, the red cardinal, will come and get it. Merwin put two blueberries on the railing and the red cardinal came. Long before the trip, I had begun a poem for him, but couldn’t seem to finish it. It was only after visiting the garden, and then sitting with him, that I was able to. Indeed, I finished it that same day, right after we sat together on the lanai. In the garden is Paula’s gravestone, where Merwin will also be buried. On it is the inscription “Here We Were Happy,” which, along with many other thoughts and things said during this trip, made its way into the poem. Poem for Merwin for a long time you planted one every day and now the garden is a clock on forest time Read More
March 15, 2019 In Memoriam W. S. Merwin, 1927–2019 By The Paris Review W. S. Merwin. We’re sad to report that W. S. Merwin, one of America’s finest poets, has died at age ninety-one. The recipient of nearly every literary award imaginable, Merwin was incredibly prolific over the course of his long career, and this shows in the amount of work he contributed to The Paris Review: thirty-six poems, a short story, an essay, selections from a travel journal, and an Art of Poetry interview. “The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about,” Merwin tells Edward Hirsch in his interview. “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.” Read More
March 15, 2019 In Memoriam Crashing W. S. Merwin’s Wedding By Edward Hirsch Photo: Jill Greenberg/Courtesy of Copper Canyon Press William Merwin had a deep knowledge of the world. He was an autodidact, a poet who prided himself on making his way outside of the academy. He had gone to Princeton, but didn’t think much of the university, though he revered his teachers, John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur, who encouraged him to go his own way. He took their advice. When he was young, he looked up to Ezra Pound and Robert Graves, who took an interest in him, and, like them, he decided to figure things out for himself. He wasn’t a teacher, at least in any formal sense. He had the crankiness of people who learn everything on their own. He was a poet, a prose writer, and a translator. He was completely sure about his vocation. He was the most international of American poets, and the most down to earth, literally: he knew more about the natural world than anyone else I’ve ever known. He had a kind of homespun wisdom, though he was so handsome that it sometimes seemed as if Orpheus had walked into the room. I loved being with him. Read More
February 12, 2019 In Memoriam Ricky Jay, the Magician with an Edge By Michael Chabon Ricky Jay, one of the world’s greatest sleight-of-hand artists, was also an accomplished author, actor, historian, and renowned bibliophile with a library to envy. He died on November 24, 2018. The essay below is adapted from a speech given at a recent memorial service in his honor. Still from the 2012 documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay The first time I saw Ricky Jay perform was sometime around 1976, on The Mike Douglas Show. Ricky was beheading roses and puncturing watermelons with one of the simple playing cards that, in his hands, became a deadly missile. He was wearing a three-piece suit but he had a long beard, and hair down to his waist, and my grandmother, watching with me, thought he looked like a degenerate. I thought he was the coolest human I had ever seen, and that impression only deepened when, many years later, I was lucky enough to get to know him. Ricky was an artist and scholar with a fearsome intellect and a biting wit. He was also a surprisingly sweet and gentle soul. The greatest trick I ever performed was fooling him, with my novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, into thinking that I really knew something about the magician’s art. The greatest of the many kindnesses he ever did me was to not hold it against me when he fairly quickly discovered that I was, in that regard at least, a charlatan. We met in 2001, when the late Sydney Goldstein asked me to interview Ricky for San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures, back when it was still at the Herbst Theatre. Ricky seemed a bit weary that night, and as we waited backstage to go on, I found myself thinking about all the hundreds of times that he must have stood there like that, in the darkness, listening to the murmur of the house, waiting for the curtain to open and the footlights to come up. Read More
January 22, 2019 In Memoriam When Mary Oliver Signed Books By Billy Collins I didn’t know Mary Oliver as well as I would have liked, though our poetry paths crossed a few times. We were introduced more than once, but it wasn’t until one evening in October 2012 that we were brought into close proximity. We were asked to read together at an immense performing arts center in Bethesda, Maryland. I was excited at the prospect of our two readerships convening in one place, but drama of a different kind was on the horizon. Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on coastal Maryland and due to strike later that night. Read More
January 18, 2019 In Memoriam Francine du Plessix Gray and Sorrel Soup By Vasily Rudich and Gabriella De Ferrari By her own account, writing wasn’t easy for Francine du Plessix Gray, who died last Sunday at the age of eighty-eight. As she told Regina Weinreich in her 1987 Art of Fiction interview, “I’ve always had a terrifically painful ambivalence of love and terror towards the act of writing.” But this doesn’t come through in her fearless books, such as the novel Lovers and Tyrants, a semiautobiographical account of her childhood, and Them, an unsparing look at her tyrannical parents. She was born in 1930 at the French embassy in Warsaw, but after her father died in 1940, Gray and her mother emigrated to America. Gray arrived in the country knowing not a lick of English; fourteen months later, she won the school spelling bee. Gray thrived in tense situations—she studied under the poet Charles Olson, whom she described as a “terrifying guru,” and before coming to fiction, she worked as the only woman on the night shift at United Press International, where she was forced to file stories “in a matter of minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds, since we were always trying to beat AP to the radio wire.” She went on to become a New Yorker staff writer and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she taught at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown. However, despite her success, when asked whether she’d like to be a writer in the next life, she replied: “Hell no. Have you ever met a writer who’d want the same karma a second time round? I doubt if one exists. We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others. The next time round I’d like to be a great athlete with a political mission, like Billie Jean King or Arthur Ashe, or perhaps a lieder singer.” Here, we bring you two short memories from those who knew her: Francine du Plessix Gray. Photo: Frances McLaughlin-Gill. Read More