Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1311; W.S. Merwin

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, this year, we're going to be doing a lot of this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Portrait, WS Merwin. Nobody finds words for grief, nobody finds words for love, nobody finds words for lust. I think poetry is about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said, out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Gut Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues, the

Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Marilyn and Bob Clements and the Clements Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petzer Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Orphala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement plan products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the journal. To persuade a poet to depart from paradise, even if only briefly, requires a special kind of enticement. The acclaimed poet, W. S. Merrin, spent part of his childhood just across the Hudson River from our studios here in New York. But he lives now on the Hawaiian island at Maui, where

every prospect pleases. I love the city, but I also love the country and I realize that when I'm in the city, I miss the country all the time. When I'm in the country, I miss the city some of the time. So what I do now is live in the country and go to the city some of the time. Port Norton back east this time was an extraordinary honor. The Pulitzer Prize for Portrait. It's the second he's won. For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, W. S. Merrin, for the Shadow of Serious, a collection of luminous, often dander poems that focus on the profound power of memory. Congratulations, W. S. Merrin. I first heard Merrin read his work at the Geraldine Ardodge Portrait Festival in New Jersey over a decade ago when we were filming a TV series called Fooling with Words. My friend says I was not a good son. You understand. I say yes, I understand. He says I did not go to see

my parents very often, you know. And I say yes, I know. Merrin's literary life began at an early age. By the time he was five, he was writing out hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister in Union City, New Jersey. He escaped from his strict and pious upbringing into books and by the time he entered Princeton University, was a fledgling poet. The idea of writing to me from the beginning was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves. And that's the beginning of the feeling about poetry. At the age of 18, Merrin received advice from the poet as repound. And he said if you want to be a poet, you have to take it seriously. You have to work on it the way you would work on

anything else and you have to do it every day. He said you should write about 75 lines a day. You know, a pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything. And he said and he said and you don't have anything to write 75 lines about a day. And he said you don't have you don't really have anything to write about. He said at the age of 18 you think you do but you don't. And he said the way to do it is to learn a language and translate. And he said that way you can practice and you can you can find out what you can do with your language, with your language. He said you can learn a foreign language but the translation is your way of learning your own language. W.S. Merrin's first book of verse, A Mask for Janus, was chosen for the Yale Younger Ports Prize by none other than W.H. Auden. It reflects Merrin's early work as poet and translator, focusing on the myths and legends of ancient civilizations. Over the past half century, in addition to over 25 volumes of poetry, Merrin has earned distinction with nearly two dozen books of translations,

eight works of prose, several verse plays, and this memoir, Summer Doeways. On the printed page, each of his poems appears without punctuation. In the freewheeling spirit of an imagination that creates a long hand on whatever scrap of paper comes to hand. I can't imagine ever writing anything on any kind of machine. I never wrote a poem. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance. If I put a nice new sheet of white paper down in front of myself and took up a nice new, nicely sharpened anything, it would be instant inhibition, I think. So now what, you know, and I would sit there, so now what, for quite a long time. But if it's something that happens and I need somewhere to write it down, it'll be the back of an envelope or something like that. But it's okay, you know, because it's just to keep it there until I can find out where it goes from there. Merrin's later verse shares with Walt Whitman's, a

deeply felt connection to the natural world that makes all the more poignant his despair over our salt on the earth through war and pollution. In the late 1970s, Merrin traveled to Maui to studies in Buddhism. He stayed, married Polish warts there, and together they built a solar powered home on an abandoned pineapple farm and worked to restore the surrounding palm tree rainforest. Riding poetry has to me always had something to do with how you want to live. And I guess I've done something that a lot of my contemporaries didn't do. Many of them went into universities and had academic careers, and I have nothing against that, but I didn't think I was made for it. I begin after about a week in a university. I begin to feel the oxygen is going out of the air very fast, and you know, I have to go somewhere else. He does leave his island reverie from time to time to read his work at universities and libraries, and to

pick up his Pulitzer Prize. Here's the book that won the Shadow of Sirius. Its author is with me now, W. S. Merrin. Welcome to the journal. You titled this new book, the one that just won the Pulitzer Prize in the Shadow of Sirius. Now Sirius is the dog star, the most luminous star in the sky, 25 times more luminous than the sun. And yet you write about its shadow, something that no one has ever seen, something that's invisible to us. That we'd understand that. That's the point. The Shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination, but we live in it all the time. We are the Shadow of Sirius. The other side of, as we talk to each other, we see the light and we see these faces, but we know that behind that there is the other side which we never know. And that's, it's the dark, the unknown side that is, that guides us and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us too. And

it's, it gives the, it gives the depth and dimension to, to the rest of it. Well, this is the first poem in the book. Would you read this for us? That must be the nomad flute. You that sang to me once, sing to me now. Let me hear your long lifted note. Survive with me. The star is fading. I can think farther than that, but I forget. Do you hear me? Do you still hear me? Do your air remember you? Oh, breath of morning, night song, morning song. I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it. But I know better now than to ask you where you learned that music, where any of it came from. Once there were lions in China, I will listen until the flute stops and the light is old again. I have

with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it. Maybe what, how do you carry with you? What you do not know? We always do that. I, I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives and in fact the next sentence and your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know. But what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something that we don't know and they arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand. And that's true of poetry. That's true of poetry. I think poetry always comes out of what you don't know. And with students, I'd say knowledge is very important. Learn languages, read history, read, listen, above all listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear, every sound in the street, every

bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But you need, no, all of your knowledge is important. But your knowledge will never make anything. The, it will help you to form things. But what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you is who you are. Who are you, Bill? I would have to write a poem to try to get at that. It would not be a very good point. But this line, the star is fading. What about a make of that? Whatever you want to. I mean, whatever the star is, your star or the star that is, that is lighted your life. And it's also the morning, you know, the star fades in the morning. And you watch the star fade. And finally, you don't see it. I say, you know, I can think farther than that. I can think farther than the star. But I forget. Also, you lose, you know, you think, you can think farther. But finally, your thought comes to an end.

And it's lost in what we don't know in the vast emptiness and unknown of the universe. What intrigues me about Sirius is that while it appears to be a single star, it is in fact a binary system. It's more formal complicated than a single star. So that in the universe, as here on Earth, there's always more than meets the eye, right? Yes, of course. And Portray helps us to see what we don't see, right? Portray rises out of the shadow of Sirius, out of the, out of that unknown and speaks to what we do know. Oh, Shakespeare does it all the time. He's doing that all the time. Russell Banks had a wonderful device that he used in teaching, writing and reading for some years. He told me that he would give

people a text, check off short story or conrad or something. And then he would ask them when they'd read it, where does the language leave the surface and see who got it and what they knew about it? And of course, you can't do that with Shakespeare. Shakespeare's never on the surface. Shakespeare's always below the surface and above the surface. So, well, look at the beginning of Hamlin. The characters on this bitter cold night up there and there's a sound and the person who's coming on stage challenges says who's there and it's all wrong. Everything's wrong. The, it's the centuries supposed to challenge the other person, but the other person challenges the century. And the whole plate gets it wrong. The original Shakespeare, the original Hamlin, apparently lasted five hours and people still didn't listen to that. Many of them couldn't read

and write and they were just absolutely hypnotized by that language. Shakespeare has a kind of mantric quality. You know, where the, there's something from below the surface that's happening all the time and even if you don't get every word, if you don't rationally understand every word that's going on, and we don't. We still don't, you know, studying and studying and studying. We still don't. Something gets through and the groundlings as they were called or we, we know what is happening and the poetry gets through. The power of those long soliloquies in Hamlin or the lear on the lear on the heath or prosperous speech about where such stuff his dreams are made on. I don't think you need a great education. I mean, I've seen, I've seen practically a literature at high school children watching a film in which there are a few lines of Shakespeare and they put down the pop quarter and sit up. They've never

heard anything like this. He's got it. I mean, he's got some magic. Well, I don't understand all of your poetry, but I get it. That's the important thing. So what makes a poem work? I don't know. I don't know. I'll never know. It makes a poem. But you once said that if a poem works, it is its own form. It doesn't matter what the form is. That's right. If it reaches you, touches you. One of the things about poetry and this is different from prose. When a poem, when a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say another word you mean. No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean this. This is it. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But if it does work, that's that's the way it is. I find poetry more physical than prose. Is there a reason for that? I think there is. I think the poetry begins with hearing.

Prose, you don't have to hear. I mean, you can read the front page at the time. So I'm not here to think. But you can't read a son in a Shakespeare without hearing it. Because if you do, you miss the whole thing. You think, you know, and then you, then you hear, shall I compare it to a summer's day, you think, oh, that's it. That's different. Poetry is really about what can't be said. And you address it when you can't find words for something. And the idea is that the poet probably finds words for things. But if you ask the poet, the poet will tell you, you can't find words for, nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust. Nobody finds words for real anger. These are, these are things that always escape words. A lot of go gave up asking poets. What do you mean by that? Because they don't know, right? The meaning is, the meaning is in Mike's response to it. Isn't that part of it? But there, there, there are many, there are many shades of that meaning. And you certainly must have your own meaning, your

own response to it. If you don't, you're not getting anything. Your, your, your take on the poem is essentially what it's for. I mean, it is your poem when you really get a poem. Don't you have a feeling that you're remembering it? Oh. That you've discovered it yourself, that you, in fact, you might have written it yourself. And well, there's a message. You know, it's not true. No, no, you're own to something important. There, there is a metaphysical quality to your point. I mean, they make me feel very vulnerable. And at the same time, they are profoundly exhilarating. As if here at this very late age, I'm connecting to something primordial. I mean, like the mist rising over an ancient lake, I once slept beside in East Africa. And thought of that lake are those myths in a long time. But as I read poem after poem in your book, I was

reconnected. I'm so happy to hear that. But how do you explain it? Do you know? Oh, I don't explain it. Does the poem unlock some meme? It does, it does in me. And that's something that I felt ever since I was a child. I was very lucky. I think it's very important for parents, those children who have parents. And you know, there's just a dwindling number. It's very important if their parents can read to them. And not just read prose, but read poetry. Because listening to poetry is not the same as listening to prose. And those children who've grown up hearing a parent reading poems to them are changed by that forever. They have it forever. They always have that voice. They always hear it. I was able to hear it. My father was a minister and I didn't remain a Christian. But why? I found the

apostles' creed. That wasn't for me. I didn't believe it. But I didn't listen to a sermon so much. But as a child, I had to go to church several times a week. But I listened to him reading the Psalms and reading the Bible from the pulpit. And I was fascinated by the language. I was fascinated by hearing the Psalms. I still know many of the Psalms by heart. And what's your favorite? Oh, have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness. That certainly would be one of them. Of course, the Shepherd's Psalm, you know, the Lord is my shepherd. Is it true you wrote hymns for your father? Well, sure, sure. And I even said, I've lost them. At age five. At age five. I could write with a little pencil. I was writing these little hymns and

illustrating them. And I thought they should be sung in church, but they never were. But do you think that's where your first intrigue with language began? That was part of it. And my mother read children's poetry, read Stevenson's child's garden of verses. But there are poems of Stevenson's that I still remember, you know? Robert Lewiston. Yeah. Dark brown is the river gold and is the sand. It flows along forever with trees on either head. Green leaves of floating castles of the foam. Boats of mine are boating. Where will all come home? It's a beautiful part. I still love it. I mean, I think Stevenson was a wonderful part. And his last poem that he wrote from Samoa, about blows the wind today. That poem is a wonderful poem of homesickness, a poem of great homesickness. When we confirm this meeting, you suggested that I read a poem in here called Rainlight. Why did you suggest that one? I don't know. That

seems to be a very close poem to me. And here it is. All day the stars watch from long ago. My mother said, I am going now. When you are alone, you will be all right. Whether or not you know, you will know. Look at the old house in the dawn rain. All the flowers are forms of water. The sun reminds them through a white cloud. Touches the patchwork spread on the hill. The washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born. See how they wake without a question, even though the whole world is burning. Yes, it is. It is burning and we are part of the burning. We are part of the suffering. We are part of the watching.

It helps us on the ignorance. And we know it is happening. And it is just us. It is our lives. We are burning. We are not the person we were yesterday. We are not the person we were 20 years ago. You remind me of your poem, the title of which is youth. And it seems you are addressing youth, right? Yes. Tell me about that. When I was young, I didn't recognize you because I was youth. You are talking, you are addressing youth as our youth, right? Our youth. That period of life. Yes. And I say, I was looking for you all the time. And of course, I couldn't find you because you were right there. I can't find my own face, you know? I mean, because I can't see my own face. And it was only when I began to lose you that I began to recognize you. There's a line from another poem of yours where I'll paraphrase it. Where you talk about, we know more are aware of aging than a bird is aware of the

air through which it flies, right? Yes. And that's true of youth as well. Yes. Of course. Youth is something that we don't we don't understand as long as we have it. It's only when we get, but there are many things in life that are like that. I think that there are many things that we hear or we say we understand whatever that means. But we hear or see or get some perspective on because because we've moved away from them. And we begin and we begin to see them and and of course we can't touch them anymore. They're out of reach. Youth, through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you. I think I did not even know I was looking. How would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did make it, offering yourself entirely at that moment. And you let me breathe you, touch you, taste you, knowing no more than I did.

And only when I began to think of losing you did I recognize you when you were already part memory, part distance, remaining mine in the ways that I learned to miss you. From what we cannot hold the stars are made. From what we cannot hold the stars have made me. What can you tell me about that line? Where were you when you wrote that? What was in your head? Stars are what we can't touch. They're guidance. They in a sense are part of us. But we can't hold them. We can't possess them. I remember at the 1964 Democratic Convention a few months after John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. His brother Robert spoke to the convention and quoted from Romeo and Juliet. When I think of President Kennedy I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet that when he shall die take him and cut him out into the stars.

And he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world would be in love with night and pay no worship to the garrison. Still wonderful. The stars seem to be provided with a glance of immortality, right? Well, there's so many myths where the hero or hero of the God or God is who is the central figure at the end is simply translated and becomes a constellation and is always there and is guiding lights from from from from they're on forever in this guy. A serious the star for whom you named your book was so closely associated with the Egyptian goddess ISIS. Yes. I mean this this goes back a long time. Yes. One of the great themes that runs through poetry, all poetry. And I think he's one of the reasons for poetry.

One of the sources of poetry, one of the sources of language is the feeling of loss, the feeling of losing things. Not being able to hold keeps things. That's what grief. I mean grief is the feeling of life lost, of having something being out of reach gone on inaccessible. And I think that I think that's a theme that runs through much of all poetry. But I think the language itself and poetry are born the same way. As I said before you know that I think poetry is about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said out of this desperate desire to utter something to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe maybe something else. You know you see you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman who is whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by

an explosion. And you know that if you could hear you would be hearing one long vowel of grief, just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that's the beginning of language right there. In an inexpressible sound. And it's anti-social, it's destructive, it's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. I think that's how language emerges. From perhaps the first woman in a cave who wakes up in the morning and puts her hand on her husband's cold body and something is gone. There comes this need you say to express it in a whale and then a word. Well you've helped me understand why there does seem to be this

lament through so many of your poems, even though you are a affirming person, this lament, this grief that's in your book. For example the poem we filmed you reading at the Dodge Portrait Festival some years ago, the poem you call yesterday, after we played that, young men said to me they went home and called their father. So let me play that for our audience again and let's talk about it a moment. My friend says I was not a good son, you understand. I say yes I understand. He says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know. Even when I was living in the same city he says maybe I would go there once a month or maybe even less. I say oh yes. He says the last time I went to see my father I say the last time I saw my father he says the last time I saw my father he was asking me about

my life how I was making out and he went into the next room to get something to give me. Oh I say feeling again the cold of my father's hand the last time. He says and my father turned in the doorway and saw me look at my wristwatch and he said you know I would like you to stay and talk with me. Oh yes I say but if you are busy he said I don't want you to feel that you have to just because I'm here. I say nothing. He says my father said maybe you have important work you are doing or maybe you should be seeing somebody I don't want to keep you. I look out the window my friend is older than I am. He says and I told my father it was so and I got up and left him then you know there was nowhere I had to go and nothing I had to do.

I have missed my father often since his death in the 1990s but I never missed him more so than when I heard you read that. It's wonderful to feel that upon that I written connects with somebody else's experience and that it becomes their experience that's the way I think it should be. Your poetry has become more personal in these later years. What's happened to bring that about? Oh I think just getting older I wanted each book to be distinct from the others and when I look back at other books I think I couldn't write that now and each book was necessary to write the next one. I think they are different. I've always wanted

through all of them to write more directly and in a sense more simply and at one time in the early 60s there were critics who said oh Merwin is so impossible to understand that clearly he doesn't want to be understood and at the same time school teachers would come up to me and say I've been giving your poems to the children and I said what did they make of them and she said oh they they get along fine with them I thought fine if the children get them and I said what year do you teach you since second year they say I mean most of the young children I thought you know if the young children get them that's all that matters I mean that's that's it's happening it doesn't and it'll and a friend of mine said oh it'll be 15 years and then people think you're you're extremely simple to read and and I hope that's what's happened. To what extent do you think the

very personal nature of so many of your later poems has been influenced by your embrace of Buddhism the inward turning that seems to mark. I don't know the answer to that I don't because I don't know the alternative. You know did the aspirin cure your headache or would you have got to go over it anyway I don't know. But you do manage to see light even in darkness. How do you explain that to yourself? I think we don't that's just ultimate despair and there's nothing to be said. All of these things have been true always I mean we have been we have been cruel and dishonest we've been helplessly angry and greedy always all of our faults have always been there and all of our failings have been there and we haven't worked our way out of them there's nobody I just don't I don't believe in the saints in that sense

that these are people who suddenly of their past all human failings I think we're ever past human failings and that's all right we and I think that we should forgive ourselves and forgive each other if we possibly can it's very difficult sometimes. So what about this poem in your new book still morning. It appears now that there's only one age and it knows nothing of age as the flying birds know nothing of the air they're flying through or of the day that bears them up through themselves and I am a child before there are words arms are holding me up in a shadow voices murmur in a shadow as I watch one patch of sunlight moving across the green carpet in a building gone long ago and all the voices silent and each word they said in that time silent now while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight. That patch of sunlight

where was it actually it was it was in the church in Union City New Jersey which has been torn down many many years ago. You followed this church and I was being held up it may even have been when I was baptized very very early I remember and I can remember and I remember the the man in the brown suit who was holding me and I said this to once the my mother and she said you can't possibly remember something back that far and I said who was the man in the brown suit who was holding me I never saw him again and she said oh yes that was Reverend so and so and he came for a visit and he said he would hold you for the ceremony so I never saw him again but I remember being held up and watching the green carpet and that patch of sunlight. You did grow up right across the river in in Metro New York New Jersey looking out on the skyline of New York. Angel

silent silent. New York was silent that was extraordinary and it's still to be as haunting you know to be able to think of that skyline that I saw as a child and you can hear sounds from the river there were there was a river traffic then which which has gone most of which has gone now the fairies back and forth all the time and varying of whole trains went across on on on fairies you know on barges and I would spend as much time as I could in in the back of the church looking down on the Hoboken Harbour and on the river and on the on the city over there and the city was absolutely silent then of course you took the ferry over there all of the noise of New York was there and I found that very exciting. Well here's one of my favorite poems from your new book The Song of the Trollies remember that one? I do who's a trolley car I went right past our house in the Union City. The Song of the Trollies it was one of the

carols of summer and I knew that even when all the leaves were falling through it as it passed and when frost crusted the tracks as soon as they had stopped ringing. Summer stayed on in that song going again the whole way out of sight to the river under the hill and hissing when it had to stop the humming to itself while it waited until the could start again out of an echo warning once more with a clang of its bell I could hear it coming from far summers that I had never known long before I could see it swinging its head to its own tune on its way and hardly arrived before it was going and it's singing receding with its growing smaller until it was going into sounds that resounded only when they have come to silence the voices of morning stars and the notes that once rose out of the

throats of women from cold mountain villages at the fringe of the forest calling over the melting snow to the spirits asleep in the green heart of the woods wake now get his time again. That actually is a strange sound that I heard in Macedonia some young women come and remake that sound but there was a wonderful living musicologist who was going through old the oldest manuscripts and notations of music he could find and he found these notations that someone had made in these mountain villages of this singing without words that women did until fairly recently in these mountain villages in the very early spring before they went out to pick herbs and things that

were coming through the snow and the women would go out and it was like something between a coyote and a yodel these these strange guttural but very lyrical notes that the women and you've got these three women stand up and start making these sounds and it just makes your flesh crawl it's so beautiful it's so beautiful it's like no music you've ever heard and it's their calling to the spirits say wake up wake up spring is here now let us let us let us come freely into the forest you seem to have the world in your ear I believe that poems begin with hearing then one and with listening one listens until one hears something sometimes and then if you say people begins with listening they say what are you listening to or what are you listening for and I say that's what you have to find out

you have to have to learn how to listen first I had a portrait of our meeting the other day we took our two small grandchildren to the central park zoo and entering the preserve they have there of the rainforest every visitor looks up and sees a quote from WS Murray did you know that no yeah it says on the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree why would you want to plant a tree it's a relation to the to the world it's not it's nothing to do with thinking that the world is going to be there forever but that's that's a relation with the world that I want is to be putting life back into the world rather than taking life out of it all the time and we do a lot of that you know but I I I've lived on Maui for 35 years and I feel very very lucky why do you live there why did you go there a mixture of things the ancient culture what the remnants of that fascinated me

and what I loved about the climate is that I could live in the garden could be surrounded by a garden all year round and from before day break I love to get up well before day break before the birds are awake and we live in a in a silent valley and a whole remains of a small very small valley leading down to the sea and it's so beautiful in the morning and these the sounds you know the sound that that people can pick up with mics now the sound of a room with nothing in it or the sound I can think often sometimes late at night I just stop everything before I go to bed or as I go to bed and just listen to the valley and you say now there's no sound in the valley but there is there's the sound of the valley there is an urgency to some of these poems that I I didn't detect in some of the earlier volumes you think you think you feel

things more urgently now that time is diminished whether that's it or not I don't know I certainly feel that you mean personal time but I think time for all of us is diminished I think that I don't I mean the idea of writing for posterity I don't know what posterity is posterity is right now posterity is Bill Moir's if our posterity is the people who responded to yesterday by going home and calling their fathers that's that's what I I love is to make that connection of experience to experience so that my experience becomes their experience and vice versa you know what's the experience in here this is one of my favorite small ones in your book the long and short of it as long as we can believe anything we believe in measure we do it with the first breath we take and the first sound we make it is in each word we learn and at each of them it means

what will come again and when it is there in meal and in moon and in meaning it is the meaning it is the firmament and the furrow turning at the end of the field and the verse turning with its breath it is the memory that keeps telling us some of the old story about us what's the experience there I think we know the experience every time we draw breath it was this unreasonable repetition of something which doesn't ever quite repeat itself goes on evolving which is mysterious the basis of our lives it's there in the beat of our hearts and in our breaths and then waking up in the morning it's the rhythm of our days and we we think we can measure it but we know

perfectly well with the other side of our minds that we can't measure it at all has it ever occurred to you that this moon you look up to so often and relish was the same moon seen by Hadrian and over yes and Shelley and Keats and Barron and Neruda and I often think that this constancy through the centuries of of our geese there's a great form of Chinese poet of the lead down dynasty who talks about he said asking the moon in the mountains and he says oh this is the same moon that I saw in Changan Changan was there was a moment of rebellion where everybody was getting killed and he said this is the moon they've guided me through the streets as I escaped and that I that led me to find my way out into the mountains and here it is he said I think I ask what can I believe everywhere I believe the moon everywhere you know this is the moon what's he saying that

is the constant the constant yes there's there's there's this constant thing that the light that is always there I finished your book very conflicted about this time in our lives I mean I realize that I haven't done enough to try to make a different world more likely and that runs through some of your poems and I find myself tossing and turning at the prospect of the chaos we're leaving behind for our grandchildren in particular are you ever visited by that kind of a wish oh yes I always feel about that that I oh you know I should have I'm a very private kind of person and I like a very quiet and private life but I also love coming back and being part of of something much more public and talking too much and and loving listening to other people and and I always thought of the feeling oh there are so many other things I I could have been doing and maybe I could have been accomplishing more that way

but I know it's not true I know that being a poet was what I always had to do that's what I always wanted to do since I was gay tall and it was what I had to do can you remember a catalytic moment yes there are a number of them but it's just that the and there's a deep association bill between that feeling for words feeling about the mystery of words what made a word what made a word a word what made a word express something and what made a blade of grass come up between the stones at the sidewalk and my when my mother explained that the earth was under the sidewalk I I had a feeling of radiate great great reassurance and so that's maybe why you want to plan a tree right that's right and

but it's also there's a connection there I don't see any distinction between that and the feeling about words and the the background of words which is the the not not the threatening dark but the but the nourishing dark the nourishing darkness that is that we all that we all take with us the dark that dark and that light are always with us do you think all from the death yes don't doesn't everybody everybody I think one thing is to think so death all the time I think it's part of one's life that doesn't mean that one's uh one thinks of it was panic my mother was never frightened of death and that's a great gift to be given by a parent that not that not fearing of those things what was it she said to you when you go into that dark do not be afraid of what you do not know I think that's a paraphrase of one even even when you do not know you will know she said that's in the pond I don't she never really said that that's that's that's in my mind that she

said that well she has now because that's in the pond how long have you and Paula been married oh 20 let's see 20 uh 27 years I think I was never sure that monogamy would overtake me but it did when I met Paula but here's a poem you wrote to her in late spring while late spring well we were in in the old farmhouse in France in the garden over there I was sitting in the little garden house that I built there years ago 20 some oh more than that uh 40 years ago looking out at the garden and Paula was working in the garden I thought this is it and never gets better than this you know to Paula in late spring let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring we will be no older than we ever were

the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which the morning slowly it comes to itself and the ancient defenses against the dead will be done with and left to the dead at last the light will be as it is now in the garden that we have made here these years together of our long evenings and astonishment and finally a poem that touched me very much in this book going and cautious about Pawns that seemed to be on the verge of abstraction and I'm very very careful about them so I hope this one looks abstract and isn't only humans believe there is a word for good by we have one in every language one of the first words we learn

he's made out of greeting but they're going away the raised hand waving the face the person the place the animal the day leaving the word behind and what it was meant to say W.S. Merwin thank you very much for being with me the book that won the Pulitzer Prize is the Shadow of Serious thank you Bill great pleasure here at the journal we continually hold up to the light the multitude of

beliefs and ideas that inform our democracy we often explore the hopes and aspirations that sustain us as a people what we and the rest of the world call the American Dream you can go to our website at pbs.org and tell us what you think the American Dream should be you can also find many of the men and women who have appeared on the journal and hear their vision for the American Dream there's no one dream but if I had to think of what I would hope for is respect dignity fairness justice those are words that need to be fleshed in and filled in but those to me are so much part of what this country could be about it's not just about political reform and financial reform and dealing with global warming and dealing with the oversized military and etc etc it's about Americans kind of reconsidering what they would really want in this society and what really matters

my vision for this beautiful dream is that the military and the policies of your military would truly reflect freedom and justice for all and not impose themselves on countries that quote-unquote are not their friends I think that we've arrived at a moment in American life when there's a willingness to talk about the past to talk about how to extend opportunity to everybody and I think that we're on the verge of a very different kind of pursuit of the American Dream and in a way that hopefully some of these terrible vestiges of the past finally fall away it's always about collective action it's not an end place to which we arrive it's a process it is the process of being together in our democracy so for me the big question of the American Dream has to do with whether or not we can together improvise and create something great the conversation continues at pbs.org where you also can read more about

ws merwin's life in work and view some of the journals other interviews with American writers just log on to pbs.org and click on Bill Warriors journal next week three theologians talk about the American crisis sin greed and prosperity I love sin it is not out of date this financial crisis should show us that it is in fashion this is a society that that has stoked and celebrated greed virtually to the point of self-destruction you can't have a prosperity gospel anymore the prosperity's gone and the market is no longer model at all so where do we go serene Jones Gary Dorian and Cornel West next week that's it for the journal I'm Bill Warriors and I'll see you next time from haiku to sonnets online poetry resources log on at pbs.org this episode of bill moyers journal is available on dvd or vhs for $29.95

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