W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwinis an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands' rainforests...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 September 1927
CountryUnited States of America
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work.
The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.
part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
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
I offer you what I have my Poverty
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way
To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
My cradle was a shoe.