it up where one feels most strongly and most immediately about it. Sometimes I feel more
immediately concerned with what’s happening to the elements, the sea, the animals, the
language, than I do with any particular society. I don’t make a distinction. The poisoning
of the soil, the imminence of nuclear disaster, are absolutely the same thing. You shut
your eyes and you open them and you’re staring at the same thing but the form of it looks
different. Here you are at a different movie but it’s all the same thing.
DB: Do you think you are influenced or have any sort of affinity for Robinson
Jeffers?
Merwin: It’s been a long time since I read him and I may be very unfair and I
love some of Robinson Jeffers. But there seemed to me to be a kind of relishing of his
misanthropy, a kind of hugging to himself of a bitterness which really, I thought, in the
long run, was egocentric, feeling very superior to the world around him, to the human
race, a real kind of hatred of it. I don’t feel close to that at all. I certainly feel it
with a sense of elation or relief, but one of great sadness, a feeling that if I stay
there it would be a kind of moral defeat. One really has to find a way to move out of
there. One doesn’t stay in nihilism, I think.
DB: In many ways, both of you seem to be dealing with the same thing or the same
perspective, but that you’re both attacking in completely different ways.
Merwin: The one thing I feel close to is his sense of our self-importance as a
species, which I think is one of the things which is strangling us, our own bloated
species-ego. The assumption that human beings are different in kind and in importance from
other species is something I’ve had great difficulty in accepting for 25 years or so. To
me, it’s a dangerously wrong way of seeing things. I think that our importance is not
separable from the importance of all the rest of life. If we make the distinction in a too
self-flattering way, if we say we are the only kind of life that’s of any importance, we
automatically destroy our own importance. Our importance is based on a feeling of
responsibility and awareness of all life, the fact that we are a part of the entire
universe and our importance is not different from the importance of the rest of the
universe. We’re not in that way the only valuable and interesting thing to have appeared
in the universe.
DB: Would you answer the criticism that’s been leveled about there not being any
people in your poems with the fact that this perspective on your work might arise out of
Anne Sexton-Sylvia Plath analysis-type poetry?
Merwin: I don’t know where it comes from. I can see where it comes from in some
of the poems, I suppose. It seems to me that people who make the criticisms have been
reading other critics rather than reading the poet, generally. Are there any people in
poems like "Western Wind" or "Ode to Melancholy"? Are there
people-less poems? A poem that is made of human language and human perception and refers
to human experience has people in it, I think. Whether it has drama in it, whether there
are people in the third person is another matter. I think the first and second person are
more common in my poems, probably, than the third person. This may be what whoever it was
who first said that had in mind. Do you think there are people in the poems?
DB: One of my favorite poems of yours is "A Letter From Gussie." That
has people in it. I think it’s a very clever and human poem. So I really don’t agree with
the criticism at all. But I’d like to switch over to talking about the genre confusion
that’s going on now in poetry and prose and what you have said about it. Recently I was
re-reading William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and I sensed that he was consciously
taking the narrative further away from poetry even though he used poetic diction. I was
wondering if you could say some more of things you did last night about how you’re trying
to separate the narrative from the poetry.
Merwin: I wasn’t suggesting that narrative is anti-poetic at all. I don’t even
think of prose as being anti-poetic. What I was suggesting is that I think that the more
imaginative intensity there is in poetry or in prose the more it calls in question the
difference between poetry and prose, so that if you get a great deal of intensity in
prose, rhythms begin to emerge, powerful rhythms, and various things happen in the texture
so that people begin to say it’s poetic, whatever they mean by that. If there’s great
intensity in poetry, sometimes it leads toward a rhetorical thickening of texture, but
sometimes it drives the poetry toward a greater and greater surface simplicity so that it
begins to seems almost like prose. The example that I was giving was Dante–an enormous
freight of meaning and experience and enormous intensity. As Eliot said somewhere, if you
imitate Shakespeare, you’re going to get inflated, but if you imitate Dante the worst
thing that’s going to happen is that it may sound a little flat. I’m trying to say that
from either side great intensity follows this shifting, this undefinable boundary in
question. What is the difference between poetry and prose? You can make a definition but
it’s not going to be applicable forever in all circumstances. This confusion arises out of
the fact that the old categories are getting in the way rather than helping to direct and
to provide energy. I don’t mean that I think there are never going to be categories but
we’re going to have to remake them, or else they’re going to form themselves again.
DB: I guess what I was trying to get at was the decisions you made back twenty
years or so when you evolved the absence of punctuation and you were doing things that
tried to make your work more poem-like.
Merwin: I was trying to do things that I suppose poets always try to do. I was
trying to write more directly, and in that sense more simply. One of the ironies of that
was there were critics who immediately and for a long time called poetry hopelessly
obscure. They thought it was simply willfully obscure and that I was trying to write
incomprehensible poetry. I was really trying to make it more direct but at the same time
more inclusive, to make it contain more experience and to transmit it more directly in
words and do it in a way that carried more of the cadences of pure language, of speech.
DB: Were there any poetics that you can think of behind why you started using
what I call the "gapped-line"?
Merwin: You mean just a few years ago? Yes, we were talking about that
yesterday. I realized that the predecessor, not even the predecessor (I think of it as the
subterranean tradition) of English prosody is the Middle English line that was over laid
at the time of Chaucer, by Chaucer, a great genius who brought this Romance meter into
English and did it so brilliantly and beautifully. It became the classical meter of
English. But is is an importation and I think Middle English line is absolutely native to
English and it’s been there all along. I think that it is even deeper and older than that.
I think it is a manifestation of a parallelism that is the basic structure of verse in
most languages that I know anything about. I was simply trying to pick that up and use it
in a way that would make it available to me and possibly suggest to others that this was
every bit as native to our language and consequently as legitimately useful to us as
iambic pentameter, which is rather a weary form when most people use it nowadays. It
carries a terrible freight of habit, of mere habit, although I think that students should
read an awful lot of it and write an awful lot of it to start, to be able to master it, to
be able to hear it, to be able to talk it if they have to. Otherwise these bits of the
tradition are liable to come as ghosts and use us rather than our using them. Stevenson
used to complain about that, that he couldn’t write prose without its being filled with
iambic pentameter.
(Transcribed by Don Boes)
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