Scranton-born American poet and Hawaiian zen master W.S. Merwin was named the 17th U.S. poet laureate on July 1, 2010.Before the Flood by W.S. Merwin
Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming.
"I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it. "
--from an Interview with The Paris Review
A list of poems published in the New Yorker:
- A Message to Po Chu-I
-
- In that tenth winter of your exile…
- Young Man Picking Flowers
-
- All at once he is no longer…
- Forgotten Fountain
-
- Water dripping year after year…
- Alba
-
- Climbing in the mist I came to a terrace wall…
- All day the stars watch from long ago…
- A Single Autumn
-
- The year my parents died…
- A Letter to Su T’ung Po
-
- Almost a thousand years later…
Poems in the Atlantic Monthly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment