W.S. Merwin

Early last Friday morning, I came out of a dream hysterically sobbing. I couldn’t stop. In the dream, we were in this scenario where you could bring your dog back to life, but you could only do it once. It was time to send Merwin away again, and I was sitting on the floor with him in my lap, hugging him tightly, desperate to hold on to him awhile longer. I can’t think about this dream without losing it again. It was so real, bringing the grief and sadness surging back.

As it turns out, one of my all-time favorite individuals, the poet W.S. Merwin, passed away in his sleep early that morning around the same time I woke from my dream.

The oddities of that juxtaposition aside, the devastation came flooding back when I learned of W.S. Merwin’s death. I am hard pressed to put into words what his work has meant for the world, for poetry, for me. Arguably, he is one of the most decorated contemporary poets, having gathered almost all the prominent accolades and awards during his long career.

But beyond the awards and acclaim, I think that he likely had an uncelebrated and possibly unknown profound impact on hundreds of thousands of individual little humans. Me, for one.

I purchased his book, The Rain in the Trees, because it was required reading for a writing workshop at Hamilton College. With the guidance of great professors, his was some of the first poetry I worked to comprehend in any depth. He was the launch pad for a life-long pursuit. I hated that feeling of not grasping exactly what was going on in his poems, but also luxuriated in that same ambiguity. I loved the idea that each word could be dissected, analyzed, listened to, and savored. Every word was enormously meaningful in a poem - they were all placed there for a specific reason or, more likely, hundreds of specific reasons.

As part of my Creative Writing major, I spent hours writing poetry, always with a pencil and always the evening before the poem had to be submitted for review by my classmates. The best part about the process was deliberating over the “right” word. Those moments poring through the thesaurus, writing down, crossing out, hemming, hawing and then finally feeling that tiny thrill when the word “stuck.” Those moments were truly some of my favorite memories of creating anything.

This isn’t a story of Merwin inspiring me to become a poet. It’s a story of him inspiring everything. Of him being this beautiful thread in my life, one that started in college, carried me through New York, accompanied me through love and loss, and stuck with me so profoundly that we gave his name to our dog, who was, as absolutely ridiculous as it sounds, one of the most significant loves of my life. I used Merwin’s work and my love for the dog Merwin to start this blog, a context for reestablishing the thrill of creating that I hadn’t realized I had missed so dreadfully. I have never read another poet’s work and had the same reactions, feelings, or utter awe and admiration for what he could do on a page. I have never met so many of one poet’s works that absolutely just sang to me.

I realized this past year, first with Paul Taylor’s passing then with Mary Oliver’s that I hadn’t yet truly acknowledged the impact my artistic icons have had on me. As silly as it may sound, I feel such a profound loss now that this trifecta has moved on. These people shaped my interest in dance, in poetry, in understanding people, in creating, and in savoring how words or movement can brilliantly illuminate nature or grief or injustice or death in ways that evoke such compelling feeling around what it means to see this world and to be in this world. How amazing they were to share this beauty with us and how utterly sad there will be no more of it from their great minds.

There is so much more to say about W.S. Merwin, likely so many more important things to thank him for and to relay around his life's work, but for now, it just feels like the Merwins' "absence has gone through me / like thread through a needle / everything I do is stitched with its color."