One of the great privileges of my life — aside from being a husband and a father, of course — was meeting W.S. Merwin. He was eager to get home to Hawaii, to his wife, to his gardens, but we talked for about an hour while he was visiting Claremont McKenna College a few years ago. I had my connections to the college, and my identity as a rep for a large newspaper, and that created the kind of opportunity that only seems possible in a dream. But I was also forewarned that he was leery of interviews and suspicious of reporters because they routinely mangled the currency of his craft and took his comments out of context.
I was reminded of that warning after reading a comment included in a Huff Post article about a new film of the poet's life. Merwin sounds like a person whose life is characterized mainly by "I don't...":
"He said 'I'm not going to talk about Buddhism and I'm not going to talk about my writing process,' and on top of that, he's just a deeply private person," the filmmaker says in the article. Merwin "put some creative parameters on what the film is."
Initially, I felt the same parameters. Especially when he eyed the digital recorder in my shirt breast-pocket. He told me not to use it. What could I do? I tried so hard to keep up with the flow of his thoughts, but I couldn't scribble fast enough.
I knew his work pretty well, especially his Purgatorio translation and early poetry, and the lovely little book about his years in Provence. I asked him question after question. Maybe that made a difference.
I also started expressing my frustrations over the fate of a manuscript, and he didn't hide his irritation at the whole marketing process, either. It was a revelation. The whole thing bothered him--Him!--too. When he talked about visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, it felt like a flash-bomb had gone off in my face -- Pound, for God's sake, he knew Pound!
He was as generous to me, and as passionate about his work, as the young Princeton student who once talked poetry with John Berryman:
I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
And suddenly I heard those words that I'd never expected to hear. He pointed at my recorder and said, "ok, you can let it run a little."
RELATED: MERWIN AND ME
- Los Angeles Times: A Q & A with M.S. Merwin
- Call of the Siren: On poets and the poetry presses
- Los Angeles Times: Merwin in the South of France