HEARING MERWIN
HEARING MERWIN
by Scott King
"Our surprise is the satire of society, and our pleasure is a homage to nature." -Chamfort (translation by W. S. Merwin)
It was raining. A fire snapped in the wood stove in Dale Jacobson's cabin in northern Minnesota near La Porte. I stood leaning against a table, as Dale read aloud W. S. Merwin's poem 'The Last One.' Afterward, the cold summer day went on beyond memory into shadow and the fine sifting sound of rain. I was, at the time, falling away from a career as an environmental chemist into poetry-as though a compass needle had been freed to swing into alignment along a new line of force. That poem, at that instant, became an initiation. It was the first I had heard of W. S. Merwin.
* * *
Just as certain men carry jackknives and a child might carry a favorite stuffed animal, I carry books of poems at all times and nearly everyplace I go. Over the years, certain books have accompanied me more than others. If I'm not bent upon reading some new title, I'm likely to grab one of the following off the shelf before heading out the door: Ritsos' The Lady of the Vineyards (because it was thin and because I could read a word or two of the Greek printed enface), Thomas McGrath's The Movie at the End of the World, and W. S. Merwin's The Rain in the Trees (which I believe has the distinction of being the most often in hand). These books have been my guides, my return to them nothing more, perhaps, than a simple migratory act.
At some point I bought an audio cassette of Merwin reading his poems. I listened and listened until word and image grew familiar and comfortable like popular songs. Many lines lodged in my memory and became near to proverbs: "Men think they are better than grass", "Well they made up their minds to be everywhere because why not", "I take with me the emptiness of my hands / what you do not have you find everywhere", "He was old he will have fallen into his eyes" and on and on... Some people quote the Bible, I can quote Merwin.
Not long ago, my father brought a large piece of magnetite, or lodestone, that had once been my grandfather's. A metal plate and hook are fastened to the top of the stone so it can be suspended. I picture my grandfather camping on the high plateaus of the western Great Plains, hauling out this forty pound stone and hanging it from a branch to amuse others at the campsite with his one-of-a-kind compass. I'm delighted to have this odd treasure. If I hung it in my home, I suspect there's a chance the points and bulges of this crude needle will swing toward the shelf where Merwin's books sit, poem after poem in those pages, their glistening images, their magnetic seriousness.
Thomas McGrath's tribute poem for Merwin, 'Totems (III)' provides some useful insights or approaches to the sometimes mysterious and puzzling poems. It begins: "If you follow his tracks in the deep snow you can't believe it- / Sometimes a two-legged, sometimes a four-legged, sometimes a winged, sometimes / A boat-or a barn door-it's certainly Merwin." This was one of the things I most admired about Merwin's poems-the surprising perspectives and the riddles. I love finding myself suddenly on a mountain in the rain in the leaves or in some far distant time. And I enjoy the challenge of having to follow or find my way back (or farther afield), with only the language and voice to guide me. The sureness of voice, the moral stance, and the richness of image made it easy to persist in finding the gift of unfamiliar landscapes and experiences, to eventually put the poem on like a mask or a telescope.
'Hearing' (the penultimate poem from Opening the Hand) contains an apt depiction of what a reader may experience with Merwin's large body of work. Here we follow the poet as he climbs a cliff face to fill his tin cup with falling water:
"holding on I moved closer
left foot on a rock in the water
right foot on a rock in deeper water
at the edge of the fall
then from under the weight of my right foot
came a voice like a small bell singing
over and over one clear treble
syllable
I could feel it move
I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin
everywhere
in my ears in my hair
I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand
holding the cup
as long as I stood there it went on
without changing"
If the day comes when I have the opportunity to guide a younger poet (as I was once guided) I will say, "Here, read this. This is W. S. Merwin."