W. S. Merwin.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

The new poet laureate of the United States is W. S. Merwin. When I called the Library of Congress in order to contact Merwin, a staffer expressed the desire for the interview to be about poetry, and not politics. Good luck with that one.

Merwin lives in a part of Maui's north coast named Haiku--not a bad name for a poet's home. Since the 1970s, he has cultivated his poetry and garden at Maui on what has grown to be nineteen acres. There he has planted more than 800 species of palms, plus other species endangered and damaged by development in Hawaii.

This ardent admirer of Henry David Thoreau has opposed the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghan wars, as well as nuclear weapons. He has done so in his poetry and through his activism. During Vietnam, he marched in the streets and donated to draft resisters the prize money he received for winning the Pulitzer in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders . In the lead-up to George W. Bush's Iraq War, Merwin joined Poets Against the War and issued a statement that said, "Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein."

Merwin is also dedicated to the cause of environmentalism, and his poems evince his profound awe, wonder, and love for nature.

Merwin's Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry, and he was awarded a second Pulitzer in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius . Along with writing his own poetry, Merwin is a multilingual translator who has rendered into English two of the twentieth century's greatest political poets, Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up at nearby Union City, New Jersey, until he moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1936. He attended a seminary in Wyoming, graduated from Princeton in 1948, and went on to live in Majorca, London, southwestern France, Mexico, Boston, and Greenwich Village.

Moving to Maui in the 1970s, Merwin married Paula Schwartz, a children's books editor, in a Buddhist ceremony there in 1983. I interviewed Merwin on the balcony of his solar-powered home overlooking his beautiful, densely forested place. I was stunned to learn that Merwin, later joined by Paula, had wrought this tropical Walden out of an almost treeless wasteland. During the interview, a cardinal flitting amongst the palm fronds provided flashes of scarlet. Merwin, who'd earlier been toiling in the fields, was dressed in a torn long sleeve shirt and army-style green pants, looking less gentleman and more farmer. He spoke at great length and ease with a cultivated voice most thespians would envy. The eighty-three-year-old's hair was whiter than when I'd first interviewed him for a Honolulu publication in the 1990s, back when I lived on Oahu. But, to paraphrase the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, "there was no gray hair in his soul," as Merwin held forth on war, peace, environmentalism, poetry, and pleasure.

Q: How did you react to being asked to become poet laureate?

W. S. Merwin: I dragged my feet quite a lot. I said, "I've never wanted to come to and live in Washington, and wear a suit day and night, and do all of the things I'd be expected to do." I don't think I'm particularly diplomatic. I certainly have no wish to be rude to people, but the political situation does not appeal to me at all. Besides, I don't like that kind of attention. One of the lovely things about living in Maui is that people don't know who I am, and that's fine with me. That's the way I like it. I'm just the guy who lives up the road and has some palm trees. I don't want that cover blown.

Q: What do you hope to do as poet laureate?

Merwin: I'd like to be able to bring poetry to people by doing readings. Very often people will...