—Anonymous Photos
—Poems by W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)
BREAD
for Wendell Berry
Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching
somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch
have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding
have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step
the heart of bread
to be sustained by its dark breath
and emerge
to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon
IN TIME
The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
and the loudspeakers telling us
about the vast fires on the backwater
consuming undisclosed remnants
and warning us over and over
to stay indoors and make no signals
you stood at the open window
the light of one candle back in the room
we put on high boots to be ready
for wherever we might have to go
and we got out the oysters and sat
at the small table feeding them
to each other first with the fork
then from our mouths to each other
until there were none and we stood up
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
all those years all those nights ago
BERRYMAN
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
___________________
Today’s LittleNip:
SEPARATION
—W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
__________________
Today in the Kitchen we pay tribute to poet/writer/translator/US Poet LaureateX2 W.S. Merwin, who passed away in March of this year at the age of 91. Merwin won most of the awards available to American poets, including the Bollingen Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, a Ford Foundation grant, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He has also been awarded fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and two-time U.S. poet laureate (1999-2000, 2010-2011).
Merwin was once asked what social role a poet plays—if any—in America. He commented: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? ... We keep expressing our anger and our love, and we hope, hopelessly perhaps, that it will have some effect. But I certainly have moved beyond the despair, or the searing, dumb vision that I felt after writing "The Lice"; one can’t live only in despair and anger without eventually destroying the thing one is angry in defense of. The world is still here, and there are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don’t pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.”
For more about Merwin, go to www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-s-merwin/ OR www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/w-s-merwin?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIvPiplfzn4QIVCarsCh2TEAtCEAAYASAAEgJLX_D_BwE/.
Today in area poetry, you have your choice of attending the book release/reading for Tough Enough from Cold River Press, w/"Tough Old Broads" Victoria Dalkey, Kathryn Hohlwein, Viola Weinberg Spencer, and Sue Menebroker McElligott (reading for her mother, Annie Menebroker). That’s at Harlow's, 2708 J St., Sac.
Or head up to Diamond Springs (southeast of Placerville) for Poetry of the Sierra Foothills, with readers from the book of California ecopoetry, Fire and Rain, plus open mic (stories and poems about the natural world). Caffe Santoro, 493 Pleasant Valley Rd., Diamond Springs.
Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.
—Medusa
W.S. Merwin
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