W.+S.+Merwin,+2010-2011

= W. S. Merwin, 2010-2011 =



See article in the //New York Times// announcing Merwin's appointment and his reaction (July 1, 2010):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/books/01poet.html?_r=1&hp

Born in New York City, William Stanley Merwin spent most of his childhood in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was preoccupied with poetry and the magic of words from an early age. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Merwin began writing hymns for his father's church at age five. A sympathetic high school Spanish teacher encouraged his verse-making, and urged him to try his hand at translating the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Although his parents lacked the means to send him to college, he won an academic scholarship to Princeton University, where he waited on tables at one of the school's elite dining clubs to help pay his expenses. Merwin acquired a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of poetry and began to seriously consider a career in literature. After graduation, he stayed at Princeton for another year to continue his study of Romance languages, preparing for his future work as a translator of French, Spanish, Latin and Italian literature.

Out of school, Merwin found work as a private tutor to the children of rich families. In a fateful development, he was hired to tutor the son of the British author Robert Graves, who had won renown with his memoir of combat in the First World War, //Goodbye To All That//. He was also well-known for his novels of ancient Rome, such as //I, Claudius//, and for his study of mythology. Through Graves and his friends, Merwin met many of the great names in the English literary world, including the most influential poet of the era, the American-born T.S. Eliot. Merwin later moved to London, where he made translations for the BBC, including the Spanish verse epic //El Cid//.

In 1952, when Merwin was only 24, a volume of his verse, //The Mask of Janus//, was accepted for publication by the Yale Younger Poets series. The series was edited by the poet W.H. Auden, second only to Eliot in the English-speaking world. Auden's praise brought Merwin to the attention of the poetry-reading public. Merwin's early verse showed the strong influence of Graves and of Eliot's old friend Ezra Pound, with its use of traditional forms, and its wide-ranging allusions to classical literature and mythology. Merwin's sensitive observation of nature and animals was distinctly his own and would come to the fore in his next collections, //The Dancing Bears// and //Green With Beasts//. For many years, Merwin and his English wife, Dido Milroy, lived in a farmhouse in Southwest France, a setting he would describe in his 1992 book, //The Lost Uplands//. At the time, Merwin was immersed in medieval literature and consumed with the idea of creating modern verse drama. He returned to the United States in 1956 to serve as playwright-in-residence at the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he made the acquaintance of other young poets -- Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Donald Hall -- who were all trying to find a contemporary voice for American poetry. In this setting, Merwin eventually lost interest in verse drama. His turn away from classical models, to contemporary diction and concerns, was marked with the 1960 publication of his book //The Drunk in the Furnace//. On returning to London, he befriended the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, who were also moving poetry away from the formality of Eliot's generation to a more colloquial style and more personal subject matter. The success of Merwin's new direction was affirmed when his 1963 volume, //The Moving Target//, received the National Book Award. In the same year, Merwin published his translation of the medieval French epic //The Song of Roland//.
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Separated from his wife, Merwin spent more of his time in New York City, and served as poetry editor of the liberal weekly //The Nation//. When he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1970 book, //The Carrier of Ladders//, he took the occasion to publicize his opposition to the Vietnam War, prompting a public split with W.H. Auden. In addition to the 1973 collection //Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment//, Merwin's activities in the 1970s included collaborations with other scholars, producing English translations of works from Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Russian.

His 1978 volume, //Feathers From the Hill//, received the Bollingen Prize, completing a trifecta of the most coveted awards in American poetry. At the same time, he had become increasingly interested in Buddhism and the philosophy of deep ecology. After a number of visits to Hawaii, he settled on the island of Maui, a setting reflected in his books of the 1980s: //Finding the Islands//, //Opening the Hand// and //The Rain in the Trees//. His 1998 book //The Folding Cliffs// is a verse narrative of Hawaiian history and legend. More recent books include the poetry collections //The River Sound// and //The Pupil// as well as translations of Dante's //Purgatorio// and the medieval romance //Sir Gawain and the Green Knight//.

In 1994, he became the first recipient of the Tanning Prize, a $100,000 award presented by the Academy of American Poets. Fifty years of Merwin's poetry were collected in //Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001//, a volume honored with the National Book Award. Merwin's anti-war convictions have not diminished with the years. In 2003, he returned to Washington with a delegation of "Poets Against the War" to protest the planned American invasion of Iraq. Two years later, Merwin published a brilliantly lucid memoir, //Summer Doorways//.
 * [[image:http://www.achievement.org/achievers/mer0/photos/mer0-006a.gif width="300" height="300" align="right" caption="W.S. Merwin Biography Photo" link="http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/photocredit/achievers/mer0-006"]] ||

In 2009, W.S. Merwin was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for his collection of new poems, //The Shadow of Sirius//. Today, he continues to live on Maui with his wife Paula. He maintains a disciplined writing schedule, while devoting the rest of his energy to the preservation of Hawaii's environment and the restoration of the rain forest around his home. He was named United States Poet Laureate in July, 2010.


 * __BEFORE THE FLOOD__**

Why did he promise me that we would build ourselves an ark all by ourselves out in back of the house on New York Avenue in Union City New Jersey to the singing of the streetcars after the story of Noah whom nobody believed about the waters that would rise over everything when I told my father I wanted us to build an ark of our own there in the back yard under the kitchen could we do that he told me that we could I want to I said and will we he promised me that we would why did he promise that I wanted us to start then nobody will believe us I said that we are building an ark because the rains are coming and that was true nobody ever believed we would build an ark there nobody would believe that the waters were coming