#w. s. merwin

[sicknessinmotion]

YOU CAN NEVER GET ENOUGH LOVE, NOT EVEN WHEN YOU'RE BROKEN & SICK.

unknown // w. s. mervin // jane seville // denice frohman // florence + the machine // jennifer franklin // frank bidart.

[apocryphics]

[metamorphesque]

food as a love language

christopher citro, oleg tistol, maya angelou, spirited away (studio ghibli), @xue-mei, final poem in “The Essential W.S. Merwin,” published after paula merwin's death, my liberation notes ( @seawherethesunsets​ )

[lilllium]

—W. S. Merwin, from Separation

[dk-thrive]

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin, from "Separation" in "The Second Four Books of Poem (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

[majestativa]

Is there a carved throat more radiant than yours? [...] I am in the grace of your countenance which my darkness covers with joy.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by W. S. Merwin, (1992)

[thesefevereddays]

Trees

By W. S. Merwin

I am looking at trees

they may be one of the things I will miss

most from the earth

though many of the ones I have seen

already I cannot remember

and though I seldom embrace the ones I see

and have never been able to speak

with one

I listen to them tenderly

their names have never touched them

they have stood round my sleep

and when it was forbidden to climb them

they have carried me in their branches

[extollingtheeveryday]

W. S. Merwin // "To the New Year"

[firstfullmoon]

I remember a reading W. S. Merwin gave in a tiny chapel, with the audience sitting in the pews, and how after a while we were all lost in a suspension of time—I know I was—and after the reading there was a Q&A and someone asked a bizarre question, she asked what time it was, and Merwin looked at the clock (there was a clock on the wall) and every one of us could see it had stopped, it had stopped in the middle of his reading, literal proof of what we already felt to be true, this spectacular thing, the dream of all poetry, to cut a hole in time.

Mary Ruefle, from “I Remember, I Remember,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey

[elizabethanism]

W. S. Merwin

it’s from his poem “To Dana with the Gift of a Calendar” collected in his book Finding the Islands!

[ardent-reflections]

Your absence has gone through me. Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W. S. Merwin, from "Separation.'

[havingapoemwithyou]

summer doorway by W. S. Merwin

[apocryphics]

[poem-today]

A poem by W. S. Merwin

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

W. S. Merwin

[a-ramblinrose]

“Though we know little more about the Gawain poet than his century and his country, the poem is evidence that he once lived and breathed.”

W.S. Merwin, from the Foreword to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

[woodlandtrust]

Oak Time - W. S. Merwin

Storms in absence like the ages before I was anywhere and out in the shred of forest through the seasons a few oaks have fallen towering ancients elders the last of elders standing there while the wars drained away and slow-dancing with the ice when time had not discovered them in a scrap of what had been their seamless fabric these late ones are lying shrouded already in eglantine and brambles bird-cherry nettles and the tangled ivy that prophesies disappearance and had already crept into the shadows they made when they held up their lives and the nightingales sang here even in the daytime and cowbells echoed through the long twilight of summer the ivy knew the way oh the knowing ivy that was never wrong how few now the birds seem to be no animals are led out any longer from the barns after the milking to spend the night pastured here they are all gone from the village Edouard is gone who walked out before them to the end of his days keeping an eye on the walnuts still green along the road when the owl was safe in these oaks and in the night I could hear the fox that would bark here bark and be gone