InterviewAhead of his first Irish reading this week, US poet W.S. Merwin talks to Belinda McKeon about gardening, Irish poets and George Bush
Every day, as they work in their garden, W.S. Merwin and his wife Paula edge a little bit closer to their dream of bringing a section of forest on the Hawaiian island of Maui back to its natural state. When Merwin moved to Hawaii in 1977, the land on which he has made his home was a ruined tropical forest, over-farmed and then abandoned by pineapple-growers. He bought three acres then, with an inheritance, and was later given a further 15 acres by two elderly, equally ecology-conscious neighbours. Now it is a refuge for rare palm species, many of them endangered, several of them classified as extinct in the wild. Tending to nature, as he does to his art, Merwin is assiduous, devoted - and astonishingly prolific. Recently, he mentions, he planted his 823rd species.
"They haven't all taken, but I'm up to the 700s," he says. "So we have a lot of palms."
He has, too, a lot of poems. Though not as well-known to readers on this side of the Atlantic as some of his contemporaries - such as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and Charles Wright, all of whom, like him, were born in 1927 - Merwin is a major figure in American poetry. His work spans five decades, and serves as a link from the modernists, through the confessionals, the political poets and the postmodernists, up to the buzzing diversity of the contemporary scene. To date he has published 16 collections, the latest being The Pupil in 2001, five prose works and more than 20 translations, including Dante's Purgatorio, the poems of Osip Mandelstam and, most recently, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
From the start, he established himself as the poets' poet - John Berryman was a mentor at Princeton in the 1940s, and W.H. Auden selected Merwin's first collection, A Mask for Janus, for the 1952 Yale Younger Poets' Prize. But while his early work was formalistic and, as he says himself, "needlessly obscure; the language was more complex than what it was saying", recent collections have been characterised by a new clarity, a lightness of touch - qualities towards which Merwin has always striven. His aim now, he says, is "to convey more, but with fewer words. Now I would like the work to appear very simple, whereas what it is saying is actually very complex".
Irish audiences will get a chance to hear the results for themselves next Friday, when Merwin reads as part of the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire. Merwin has travelled widely all his life - he has a farmhouse in south-west France, while in the 1950s he worked as a tutor to Robert Graves's son in Majorca, and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were London neighbours for a time. (Hughes and Merwin were very close, but after the suicides of Plath and Assia Wevill, their letters to one another frequently went missing in the post, and correspondence became difficult, with Merwin now living in the US. Hughes's death, in 1998, is still a source of immense sadness.)
But this will be Merwin's first visit to Ireland. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and John Montague are his preferred Irish poets, and what he is most looking forward to about next week, he says, is meeting some of the younger Irish poets. But it is Yeats who remains his poetic idol.
"I've loved Yeats ever since I was an adolescent," he says. "And I'm still hearing new things in his poems."
A favourite Yeats poem, he says, is 'Easter 1916'; what he loves is its ambiguity, its inability to settle on a definite position. "
"That 'terrible beauty' - he didn't know how he felt about it,' says Merwin. "While he deplored a lot about 1916, he was exhilarated by something of it, too, and that's what makes that poem wonderful."
Though always passionately political - a vocal opponent of the Vietnam war, he donated his 1971 Pultizer Prize money to anti-war causes - Merwin is wary about the place of politics in poetry.
"You start from the wrong place with political poetry, because you start by knowing too much, and so what you're likely to write is propaganda," he says.
He feels similarly about the over-use of autobiographical detail in poems - a stance which set him apart from 1960s confessional poets such as Plath and Berryman - although sometimes, he says, he reads such poetry "with a certain amount of envy".
Why? "I think it would be marvellous to be able to write about what you want to, not about what you can," he says.
Later, when I ask him what he looks for in a poem, he answers even before I have finished the question.
"Surprise," he says. And surprise, it seems, is just as important a part of the writing of a poem for Merwin.
Which is probably why the explicit presence of political material - of predictable, manageable routes to verse - is so rare in his work. Sometimes, however, a stark reaction pushes through. It's there in the 1967 poem 'The Asians Dying', with its image of "rain into the open eyes of the dead". And recently, he admits, the feelings aroused by the activities of the "crooked", "illegitimate" Bush administration have surfaced in a poem. He remembers a night, almost a year ago, when he sat down to write, surrounded by his rescued trees.
"I was writing a poem, just a poem about night in a place like this," he says. "And then suddenly, the poem became about remembering what was being done in my name. Because that night, the bombers were on their way to Iraq. Sometimes something seems so urgent, you can't stop and theorise about it."
And these days that urgency keeps returning. As we talk, unknown to us both, savage bombs are detonating in Madrid's crowded trains. Later, as the death-toll climbs, it's hard not to think of the words of Merwin's first endorser, as he eulogised Merwin's first poetic hero: "Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote Auden, in 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats'.
But Merwin's own words, too, return, a defence of poetry in the face of powerlessness.
"Since I could first make letters, what I wanted to do was to write poems, and I didn't quite know why, and partly I still don't. But poetry is about what we can't talk about. It's about what we can't express."
W.S. Merwin reads with Don Paterson and Paul Durcan at the Pavilion Theatre , Dún Laoghaire , on Friday at 8.30 p.m., introduced by Gerald Dawe (box office: 01-2312929)