W.S. Merwin: On Reading What You Want, Reading It Slowly, and the Beauty of Trees

W.S. Merwin and Paul Holdengraber discuss the pleasure of literary discovery, the joys of paying attention, and much, much more.

W.S. Merwin on reading poems, not poetry…
I think you should read them one at a time and pay attention to them, not to what you ought to be doing. I think it is terrible reading poetry or anything else because you ought to. We grew up that way and we ought to have outgrown it by now, don’t you think?

W.S. Merwin on reading what you want to…
Read what you want to. If you like to read Hallmark greetings cards, then read lots of Hallmark greeting cards.

W.S. Merwin on when his father introduced him to literature…
He read the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah and I was so taken by the sound of the language that I had memorized it just by hearing it. I thought, I have to find more language like that because I really want that to be part of my life.

W.S. Merwin on the pleasure and necessity of reading slowly…
Oh, yes, that’s very important. There have been other poets—really great friends of mine—that did it the same way… Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. We used to take walks around London and they read that way.

W.S. Merwin on losing the act of reading slowly…
I expect we are. If we are, we’re losing some extremely important part of our civilization, of who we are, something that will keep itself in our lives if we let it.

W.S. Merwin on feeling that the world is new…
I think I’ve been looking for that all my life and sometimes I found it and I wasn’t ever really that far away from it. I think I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a long and happy life not cluttered up. I’ve lived a very simple life. The house in which I’m speaking to you in is one that I designed and built myself 30 some years ago in Maui. It’s a great pleasure to be here. I think I’m extremely lucky. What that means I simply don’t know, Paul. What is luck and where does happiness come from?

W.S. Merwin on what trees can teach us…
They’re everything. They’re a kind of life that is incredibly ancient. People say why palms and I say palms are 90 million years old and we don’t know anything about them. All you have to do is just pay a little attention to them and you can be learning from them all the time. You should be feeling a great pleasure in being alive. Trees have these connections between the roots and the leaves. A drop of rain that lands on the leaf of a tree is not the same as the drop that later falls down into the ground. There’s so much about it that we don’t understand and we don’t have to understand it. It’s not about understanding. It’s about our one life, our one and only life.

W.S. Merwin on the ending of his poems…
I want them to have a feeling that they wrote themselves.