Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 18, 2012.

W. S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read poets in America, with a career spanning five decades. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. He currently holds the position of U.S. Poet Laureate.

Merwin’s first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952. Numerous poetry collections have followed as well as books of essays. He is a notable translator of poetry and drama, primarily from the French and Spanish, and also the classics, with nearly twenty titles published including a much-praised translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, and more recently, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. W. S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist beliefs. In a career spanning five decades, he has published numerous books that explore the relationship between language and landscape, including The Folding Cliffs, The River Sound, and Flower & Hand. His most recent collections are Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 which won the National Book Award and The Shadow of Sirius which garnered him his second Pulitzer Prize.

Edward Hirsch has written, “Merwin is our strongest poet of silence and doubt, vacancy and absence, deprival and dispossession. He is a master of erasures and negations, a visionary of discomfort and reproof, the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry.”

His distinctly American voice has been acknowledged with many honors including two Pulitzer Prizes, the Tanning Prize, The Bollinger Prize, a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry, and the PEN Translation Prize.

He lives in Haiku, Hawaii where, over 30 years, he has created a forest of over 800 species of palm that has been turned into a nature conservancy.

In this episode he is joined in conversation with Michael Silverblatt. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 18, 2012.

W. S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read poets in America, with a career spanning five decades. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. He currently holds the position of U.S. Poet Laureate.

Merwin’s first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952. Numerous poetry collections have followed as well as books of essays. He is a notable translator of poetry and drama, primarily from the French and Spanish, and also the classics, with nearly twenty titles published including a much-praised translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, and more recently, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. W. S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist beliefs. In a career spanning five decades, he has published numerous books that explore the relationship between language and landscape, including The Folding Cliffs, The River Sound, and Flower & Hand. His most recent collections are Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 which won the National Book Award and The Shadow of Sirius which garnered him his second Pulitzer Prize.

Edward Hirsch has written, “Merwin is our strongest poet of silence and doubt, vacancy and absence, deprival and dispossession. He is a master of erasures and negations, a visionary of discomfort and reproof, the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry.”

His distinctly American voice has been acknowledged with many honors including two Pulitzer Prizes, the Tanning Prize, The Bollinger Prize, a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry, and the PEN Translation Prize.

He lives in Haiku, Hawaii where, over 30 years, he has created a forest of over 800 species of palm that has been turned into a nature conservancy.

In this episode he is introduced by Michael Silverblatt and then reads from his work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.