Meet Our New Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin

 W.S. Merwin has recently been named the country’s Poet Laureate, succeeding Kay Ryan. He’s 80-years-old and currently, lives in Hawaii. He attended Princeton University, where he studied with John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur, two high-profile poets in their own right. Later he and his wife became close friends with poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. During the course of his career, Merwin published over 20 books and has garnered numerous awards and critical acclaim.

In the poem below, “The Anniversary of My Death,” Merwin muses about the eventuality of death and then about what may occur in death itself. He passes his eventual death day every year. Then he describes the day of his death as the last day he will see earthly things or feel human emotions like being “Surprised at the earth/And the love of a woman/And the shamelessness of men.” He describes life and the things in it like being “in a strange garment.” It is as though, for the speaker, there is something always a bit foreign and perhaps uncomfortable in life— something always to become accustomed to.

Then after a long rain, a metaphor, perhaps, for the transition between life and death, he bows to the unknown that is death, and, I think the writing, in the poem and the poem itself is a bow or an act of homage to death.

Anyway those are my thoughts. Perhaps you have your own. If so, I’d love to hear them, or read them, as it were.


For the Anniversary of My Death



Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Shelley Puhak

Shelley Puhak and I studied together for a summer in Italy. She was working on her MFA from the University of New Orleans and I was working on my MA. Although, we've lost touch as the years have gone by, she kept me kind of sane while I was there, and I have a great respect for her talent. So, I was very pleased to see that she's gotten a book of poems published-- some of which we discussed in our creative writing workshop. Stalin in Aruba is being well-received and can be purchased through Black Lawrence Press or Shelley's website: http://www.shelleypuhak.com/. I have not received my own copy yet, but from what I gather and remember, many of these poems are dramatic monologues based (loosely?) on Russian history. I am including here a poem from the book which was first published in the Adirondack Review.

Support emerging poets, and buy the book!

WHAT THEY LEFT OUT OF MY OBITUARY

What They Left Out of My Obituary:
Father Pritikin, Dead at 85
You've heard of me: when I was seventeen
I threw the perfect pass, seventy yards,
breaking the school record. Those present said
the pigskin arched into the sun, but I
saw nothing, only that same sun spinning spots
while my breath's smoke pawed the cold.
You wouldn't have heard I spent my twenty-first
in a Guatemalan hut, shivering with heat,
brown-skinned women crowding me, muttering padre,
padre, and forcing me to drink hot tea.
Or that at seven, I found my mother's razor
in the bathtub nook and slipped my thumb across
the blade. As blood spilled forth I knew
nothing but dead leaves crisping underfoot.
When I was conceived, it was winter. That spring
the snow never melted, just crusted into ice.
My mother toe-heeled, toe-heeled as belly swelled,
or did she run, hoping to slip, to jar me loose?
At fourteen, I found freckles, light and flat,
across the clavicle of a girl on the field
hockey team, constellations spilling across bare
shoulders while the trees pulsed green.

Charles Jensen

I just discovered a poet named Charles Jensen and I am completely enamored of his writing. Insightful and rather dark, this guy is going places. I first read his work in The Collagist and then went in search of more. The poems in The Collagist are from an Jensen's book Nanopedia: The Smallest American Reference and I definitely encourage you to seek out the book or at least the excerpts included in The Collagist. The poem I have posted here, "Flowers," is from his book Living Things and first appeared in No Tell Motel. I hope you enjoy his work as much as I do!

Flowers
By Charles Jensen

Every room fills with buds
sprung open like snake heads.

The big, dumb eyes of the chrysanthemums
look jaundiced and sick.

The lilies
have nothing more to give and drop their petals
like small gloves.

Their sweet smell grows more fetid.
My head stays dizzy and numb.

Each day the house
takes on more death, more dying; more doomed flowers
go to pieces.

I want to know whose idea this was,
filling up death
with hundreds of smaller deaths.