W.S. Merwin would like to convince you of the magic, joy and power of poetry. He is considered by many to be the Greatest American Poet Alive and, in my humble estimation, he is one of the greatest poets period. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. This should mean a great deal to anyone reading these words, for poets give anyone willing to sit for a moment some really glorious gifts: vision, compassion, contemplation, a moment’s—or a lifetime’s—singular version of the truth.
It’s Poetry Month. You may not know it, but April is a month devoted to poetry. It’s no accident both Shakespeare and the Buddha blossomed in April. April is a month of blossoming. T.S. Eliot labeled it the cruelest month, because, like a poem, it has the capacity to mix memory and desire in some curious, sometimes unsettling ways. I believe Merwin would like you, dear reader, to understand one thing before reading on: that poetry is something as essential as a seed—as ubiquitous and rare and generous.
What makes a man like Merwin alight, finally, on an island as isolated as ours? He’s an East Coaster, born in New York City, raised in New Jersey, educated at Princeton. He spent many years working in Europe and England as a tutor and translator for the BBC.
The pull of the foliage, the ephemeral wildness of this place, gripped him and he finally chose the country over the city.
“When I lived in the country, I missed the city some of the time,” he explained when we chatted early this week. “But when I lived in the city I missed the country all the time.”
Merwin travels a lot of the time, sometimes spending more time off-island than on, but he still prefers the city in “little doses.” When he first set eyes on the land he now calls home, he saw the opportunity to live “surrounded by trees,” he said. “I’ve always wanted that… to be embedded, invisible among palms.”
He also loved the idea of being able to garden all year ‘round. Since purchasing the property on the Haiku coast, Merwin has devoted much of his time to reforesting the area, planting hundreds upon hundreds of native plants and trees.
He describes the process, in luxuriously beautiful prose, in his essay “The Shape of Water”: