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'Few writers in the American literary canon are connected as closely to place as W.S. Merwin is to his garden of palms on the island of Maui. Much like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond or Rachel Carson at her Cottage at the Edge of the Sea, two-time Pulitzer prize winning poet W.S. Merwin is indelibly tied to the valley that spoke to him for over four decades.
It is with great sadness that we said goodbye to William on March 15th. He leaves us all inspired to make the world around us a better place through word and deed, and to honor and conserve the natural world.’-The Merwin Conservancy
Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin. Photo:thepoetrydepartment.com
Just Now
by W. S. Merwin
In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
His poem "Thanks" is another ode to the natural world:
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
Remembering William Stanley Merwin, 1927 – 2019
‘HONOLULU — W.S. Merwin, a prolific and versatile poetry master who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died Friday. He was 91.
A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books, from early works inspired by myths and legends to fiery protests against environmental destruction and the conflict in Vietnam to late meditations on age and time.
He wrote rhymes and blank verse, a brief report on the month of January and a book-length story in verse about colonialism and the birth of modern Hawaii. Like his hero, Henry David Thoreau, he was inspired equally by reverence for the planet and anger against injustice.
He died in his sleep at his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, according to publisher Copper Canyon Press and the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet founded.
“He is an artist with a very clear spiritual profile, and intellectual and moral consistency, which encompasses both his work and his life,” fellow poet Edward Hirsch once said of him.
Citing the Vietnam War, he declined a Pulitzer in 1971 for “The Carrier of Ladders,” saying that he was “too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel.”
He also rejected membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters), but changed his mind five years later, in 1977.
Among other awards he accepted: a National Book Award for “Migration” in 2005, a Pulitzer in 2009 for “The Shadow of Sirius,” and such lifetime achievement honors as the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize and a gold medal from the arts academy. He was chosen the country’s poet laureate in 2010 and served a single one-year term.
2010: Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin and President Barack Obama share a lighthearted moment in the Oval Office. Photo:achievement.org
The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was raised in the urban East during the Great Depression, spent years as a young man in France, Mexico, Spain and England and lived his final decades as a Buddhist in a solar-powered house he designed on an old pineapple plantation, surrounded by a rain forest, on the northeast coast of Maui.
“There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement,” he told the Paris Review in 1986. “I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there.”
William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. He soon moved to Union City, New Jersey, living for years on a street now called “W.S. Merwin Way,” then to Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a long, autobiographical poem, “Testimony,” he remembered his father as a weary, disappointed man, subsisting on “pinched salaries” and “traveling sick with some nameless illuminating ill.” His mother was orphaned early in life and grieved again when her baby, a boy she meant to name after her father, died “when he had scarcely wakened.”
In a household as grim as an abandoned parking lot, the way out was pointed by words, which seemed to float around Merwin like magic bubbles. He would try to memorize scripture he heard his father recite and fairy tales his mother told him. By age 13, he was already composing hymns.
He received a scholarship from Princeton University, becoming the first family member to attend college, and began meeting some of the great poets of the present and future. Galway Kinnell was a classmate at Princeton, and John Berryman a teacher.
After graduating, he lived in Spain and tutored the son of Robert Graves. In London, he became close with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and was torn by the collapse of their marriage. Merwin’s then-wife, Dido Merwin, would allege that Plath had a crush on him.
WATCH: W. S. Merwin reads ‘Rain Light’
WATCH: How poet W.S. Merwin found paradise by planting palm trees
In Washington, D.C., when he was 18, Merwin had a memorable encounter with Ezra Pound, whom he visited at a psychiatric hospital. Pound urged Merwin to write 75 lines a day (advice he did not follow), warned him he didn’t have enough experience to write great poetry and advised him to learn another language as a way of better mastering English. Merwin would translate more than 20 books by other poets, from languages ranging from Sanskrit to Swedish.
Merwin’s promise was obvious. His first collection, “A Mask for Janus,” was selected by W.H. Auden for the coveted Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and was published in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he wrote poems and plays, including a verse production of “Rumpelstiltskin.”
Times spent in Boston with Robert Lowell convinced him to concentrate on poetry, and by the end of the decade, he was regarded as a highly talented artist immersed in Old English literature, his verse likened by The New York Times to “a broad river flowing through peaceful land.”
Peace — the flow of the natural world — was a cause he actively defended. Near the end of World War II, he spent seven months under psychiatric care because he refused to undergo any duties that might lead to violence, which he had feared since the days his father would beat him.
2003: U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, right, gestures toward W.S. Merwin during a Capitol Hill news conference. Photo:apnews.com
By the early 1960s, he was marching against nuclear weapons and throwing off the rules of grammar as if they were a suit and tie, inspired by his “growing sense that punctuation alluded to an assumed allegiance to the rational protocol of written language.”
Meanwhile, Vietnam and urbanization darkened his vision. “I/can hear the blood crawling over the plains,” he wrote in “The Child.” In “The Crust,” the downfall of a tree is a metaphor for the severing of civilization:
and with the tree
went all the lives in it
that slept in it ate in it
met in it believed in it
Merwin examined his own mind in “Plane” and found it “infinitely divided and hopeless/like a stockyard seen from above.” His poem “Presidents” was a roll call of dishonor, for “the president of shame,” ”the president of lies” and the “president of loyalty,” who “recommends blindness to the blind.” In “Sunset After Rain,” he concluded that “The darkness is cold/because the stars do not believe in each other.”
In the 1970s, he settled permanently in Hawaii and studied under the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. Divorced years earlier from Dorothy Jeanne Ferry and from Dido Milroy, he married his third wife, Paula Schwartz, in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Paula died in 2017.
Merwin’s work became sparer, rooted in the Hawaiian landscape and his personal past — how it’s often forgotten, how it’s never understood at the moment it’s lived, how words themselves were imperfect bridges to lost time.': W.S. Merwin, prize-winning poet of nature, dies at 91
For the Anniversary of My Death
By W. S. Merwin
‘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’-Reprinted from Poetry Foundation
See also:
W.S. Merwin, Poet of Life’s Damnable Evanescence, Dies at 91
The Merwin Conservancy
W. S. Merwin: Poetry Foundation
Celebrating the beauty and wisdom of our wisest teacher, NATURE: A Selection from the GCGI Archives
'We are an integral part of Nature, which we cherish, revere and preserve in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. We strive to live in harmony with Nature locally and globally. We acknowledge the inherent value of all life, human and non-human, and treat all living beings with compassion and respect.'-Photo:bing.com
'In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred. Everything is for sale.' - Oren R. Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle clan
Desperately seeking Sophia: The Wisdom of Nature
Nature the Best Teacher: Re-Connecting the World’s Children with Nature
Celebrating International Mountain Day
A Sure Path to build a Better World: How nature helps us feel good and do good
The Rape of Nature: Now Is The Time To Know That All That You Do Is Sacred
In this troubled world let the beauty of nature and simple life be our greatest teachers
Nature is the model to teach business how to thrive
Biomimicry: Learning from Nature
Are you physically and emotionally drained? I know of a good and cost-free solution!
Eruption of Hope: Earth Day 2018
Water is Life and a Global Common Good
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Life can be tough at times. I know that life can knock you into the dirt. But, I also know that life can be joyous, worthwhile and rewarding if we knew how!
THE FOUNDATION FOR GREATNESS
'Greatness Is always built upon this foundation: The ability To appear, speak, and act As the most Common Man.'-
Give Me the Simple Life: Ordinary Wonders
To my mind, one sure path to happiness, joy, contentment and inner peace, is for us, the ordinary people, living our everyday ordinary, simple lives, making extraordinary differences to what life is really all about. Let me explain further by quoting a beautiful passage from one of my wise teachers, Lao Tzu, reminding us about what values and principles will ultimately make our lives truly extraordinary. It goes like this:
Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
The Beauty and Wonder of Ordinary Life
Photo:emilysquotes.com
‘More than ever, modern life forces us to confront our own mediocrity. Our computers and phones constantly bombard us with news of the achievements of exceptional people: actors winning awards; athletes performing incredible feats; royals being praised for their beauty and philanthropy. As we sit and scroll, we can’t help but feel distinctly ordinary - and inferior - by comparison.
Consolation for our plight can come from unexpected places. Michel de Montaigne is the patron philosopher of the ordinary life. In his masterwork, the Essais, he attacks the pretensions of the aristocrats and intellectuals of his day, daring to criticise their work and achievements and reminding us of their fundamental humanity (“Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies”). At the same time, he venerates the lives of average, unheralded people - “In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than Cicero.”
The next time we take stock of the success of others, we should keep Montaigne's perspective in mind and remember that wealth, fame, esteem or glory are no guide to the worth of a person, and that living a virtuous, ordinary life is achievement enough.’... The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
The Beauty and Wonder of Simple Life
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”-Henry David Thoreau
...And now let us stop and think for a moment about this pertinent question: ‘Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal’*
Photo:pinterest.com
'We’re surrounded by some powerful ideas about the sort of things that will make us happy. We think that really to deliver satisfaction, the pleasures we should aim for need to be:
Rare – we’ve inherited a Romantic suspicion of the ordinary (which is taken to be mediocre, dull and uninspiring) and work with a corresponding assumption that things that are unique, hard to find, exotic, or unfamiliar are naturally fitted to delight us more.
Expensive – we like economic endorsement. If something is cheap or free, it’s a little harder to appreciate; the pineapple (for instance) dropped off a lot of people’s wish list of fruit when its price fell from exorbitant (they used to cost the equivalent of hundreds of pounds) to unremarkable. Caviar continues to sound somehow more interesting than chicken eggs.
Famous – in a fascinating experiment a celebrated violinist once donned scruffy clothes and busked at a street corner and was largely ignored, though people would flock to the world’s great concert halls to hear him play the same pieces.
Large Scale – we are mostly focused on big schemes, that we hope will deliver enjoyment: marriage, career, travel, getting a new house.
These approaches aren’t entirely wrong, but unwittingly they collectively exhibit a vicious and unhelpful bias against the cheap, the-easily available, the ordinary the familiar and the small-scale.
As a result: if someone says they’ve been on a trip to Belize by private jet we automatically assume they had a better time that someone went to the local park by bike; we imagine that visiting the Uffizi gallery in Florence is always going to be nicer than reading a paperback novel in the back garden. A restaurant dinner at which Lobster Thermidor is served sounds a good deal more impressive than a supper of a cheese sandwich at home; it feels more normal that the highlight of a weekend should be a hang-gliding lesson, rather than a few minutes spent looking at the cloudy sky; it feels odd to suggest that a modest vase of lily of the valley (the cheapest bloom at many florists) might yield more satisfaction than a Van Gogh original.
And yet the paradoxical and cheering aspect of pleasure is how weird and promiscuous it proves to be. It doesn’t neatly collect in the most expensive boutiques. It can refuse to stick with us on fancy holidays. It is remarkably vulnerable to emotional trouble, sulks and casual bad moods. A fight that began with a small disagreement about how to pronounce a word can end up destroying every benefit of a five star resort.
A pleasure may look very minor – eating a fig, having a bath, whispering in bed in the dark, talking to a grandparent, or scanning through old photos of when you were a child – and yet be anything but: if properly grasped and elaborated upon, these sort of activities may be among the most moving and satisfying we can have.
Appreciating what is to hand isn’t a slacker’s solution. It isn’t an attack on ambition. But there is no point in chasing the future until and unless we are better at being more attuned to the modest moments and things that are presently available to us.
More fundamentally, the smallness of small pleasures isn’t really an assessment of how much they have to offer us: it is a reflection of how many good things the world unfairly neglects. A small pleasure is a great pleasure in-waiting; it is a great pleasure which has not yet received the collective acknowledgment it is due.
Appreciating small pleasures means trusting our own responses a little more. We can’t wait for everything that is lovely and charming to be approved by others before we allow ourselves to be enchanted. We need to follow the muted signals of our own brains and allow that we are onto something important, even though others may not yet be in agreement.
We are dominated by striving: for better relationships, work and personal lives. Restless, we think, is synonymous with success. Nothing should be good enough for long. But, in so concerning ourselves with unattainable levels of excellence, we overlook more modest pleasures, closer to home.’
*This article was first published in The Book of Life.
Photo:bing.com
Read and reflect more:
Make 2019 the year of simplicity, so that all may live better
Desperately seeking Sophia: The Wisdom of Nature
Are you physically and emotionally drained? I know of a good and cost-free solution!
A must read book
Small Pleasures
So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But we need some encouragement to focus our gaze.
This is a book to guide us to the best of life's small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child's hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone, to the joy of the evening sky; an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.
Chapters include:
- Being Up Late at Night
- A Book That Understands You
- Pleasant Exhaustion After a Productive Day
- Whispering in Bed in the Dark
- Midnight Walks
- Flirtation
- Finding Your Feet Abroad
- The Ideology of Small Pleasures
The School of Life: Small Pleasures - what makes life truly valuable Paperback
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Photo:Medium
It is only a couple of weeks to go, before, what, some of our most ‘distinguished’ and ‘honourable’ leaders, such as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Jacob Rees-Mogg- to name but a few- have called ‘The Independence Day’, when Britain will free itself from the shackles and chains of European imperialism and colonisation, and becomes great again.
The Heroes of Brexit!
Photo:gloucestershirelive.co.uk
I wanted to do something. I wanted to say and write something, healing myself, from the terrible thoughts going on in my mind, that how is it that a civilised, cultured, engaged, tolerant people, allowed themselves to be fooled by so much lies, propaganda, heightened xenophobia and rubbish promises?
And Lest We Forget
Nigel Farage: one of the leading proponents to leave the EU, standing infront of his immigrant poster which many people believe depicts "echoes" of the 1930s literature.
Photo: bbc.co.uk
'The EU’s goals and ambitions are the same as Hitler’s': Boris Johnson
Photo: express.co.uk
Long List of Brexit Lies:
- We send £350m a week to Brussels
- We can’t stop Turkey joining
- We can’t stop a European army
- We are still liable to pay eurozone bailouts
- The UK rebate can be changed against our will
- Our VAT exemptions will be ended
- Cameron’s deal was not legally binding
- EU law is adopted by unelected bureaucrats
- We can’t control our borders in the EU
- Criminals arriving in Germany can get EU passports and come over here
- Health tourism costs us billions
- EU needs UK trade more than vice versa
- Past referendum results have been ignored
- Auditors still refuse to sign off the accounts
- CAP adds £400 to British food bills
- British steel suffers because of the EU
- Irish border will be unaffected by Brexit
- UK can’t deport EU criminals
- UK is always outvoted
- 60-70% of laws come from EU
- Renationalisation of industries is impossible
- We get no veto on future treaty change or integration
- The budget ceiling can increase without our consent
- We thought we were only joining a free trade zone
- (Compiled by Richard Corbett MEP, Leader of the Labour Members of the European Parliament)
- For more lies and corruption see: Britain Has Become a Sinking Ship of Systemic Corruption, Cronyism and Chumocracy
Brexit has become a mental health issue
As I began to write, my 'Quartz Daily Brief' email arrived. I began to read, it was mainly about the disastrous Brexit. I thought, I cannot better that!
So, here you have it. I very much wish to share it with you. Moreover, in the last two years and more, I have written extensively on this matter. I will share a small sample with you again.
Britain is my home, my chosen country. I do love this green and pleasant land. In my own way, I am praying that all goes well for the UK and Europe. We must live together in peace and harmony, regardless. And hopefully, one day soon, in the not too distant future, we will again have leaders who are honest, truthful and will take us back into the heart of Europe again, where we belong. Carpe Diem!
Brexit: What is it??
Photo:theblogmire.com
‘In just three weeks, the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, to which it has belonged for the past 46 years. At this late hour, no one knows what exactly will happen.
A series of votes in Parliament next week could provide clarity or, as has been the case since the 2016 Brexit referendum, convolution. The votes on the terms and timing of Britain’s exit could still lead to a number of scenarios. Among them: a softer version of Brexit with closer ties to the EU, a second referendum, a general election, and the dreaded “no-deal Brexit” in which the UK crashes out of the bloc with no transitional arrangements in place. The first vote on Tuesday is for prime minister Theresa May’s deal, which has already been rejected once. If it is rejected again, “no one knows what will happen,” May said Friday.
EU Referendum: An Open Letter to British people - One man's view of Britain and the British
Whatever does happen, damage has already been done. Many companies have decided they can’t live with so much uncertainty, and have quit the UK to varying degrees. Bank of America is spending $400 million to transfer its European headquarters to Dublin. EasyJet, the UK’s largest airline, has had to transfer its ownership to non-British Europeans. Smaller companies without deep pockets for legal advice—and staff devoted to Brexit contingency planning—are more or less stuck. They are either running their businesses as usual and hoping for the best, or devoting time and money to stockpiling and other actions with the worst-case scenario in mind. Regardless, the vote’s impact on the economy hurts everyone. Even amid a global slowdown, the UK economy stands out for its sluggishness. Investment has plummeted since the referendum, and many European migrants who are key workers for low-wage sectors have already stopped coming.
Eurosceptics should visit Coventry Cathedral: The EU's Higher Purpose
Even if Brexit is softened, delayed, or canceled, the reputational damage the UK has inflicted upon itself won’t be easily repaired. Businesses won’t completely reverse their decisions to open offices abroad, uproot staff, or redirect investments away from Britain. The UK will be poorer for deciding to leave the EU, no matter how, when, or even whether it eventually quits the bloc.’ —Eshe Nelson, Quartz Daily Brief, 9 March 2019
Coventry’s Message of Hope to the World on the Armistice centenary and Remembrance Sunday
At this time of nationalism and bombast, the Coventry message of hope reminds us of our shared humanity across backgrounds, faiths, civilisation and cultures. And at a time when our country is divided, pitting itself against our European neighbours, we’d do well to remember the hopeful and enduring story of Coventry.
- The Beauty and Wisdom of being Ordinary
- Selling off our Motherland: The Biggest Crime of the Broken Economic Model
- Are you physically and emotionally drained? I know of a good solution!
- US is urged to regain its humanity
- Saving the Web of Life: The Time is now to Tune into Peace, Love and Wisdom with a Spiritual Revolution