Tricycle | Awake in the World

“Many lives ago I stood where you are standing,” writes W. S. Merwin in his poem “Fox Sleep,” “and they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them/ about waking until one day one of them asked me/ When someone has wakened to what is really there/ is that person free of the chain of consequences/ and I answered Yes and with that I turned into a fox.” The poem paraphrases Case 2 of the koan collection The Gateless Barrier, a case called “Pai-chang and the Fox.” The koan deals with the nature of liberated activity within the realm of cause and effect, and it is one of the most widely commented-upon koans in Zen literature. But you won’t likely hear the new U.S. Poet Laureate talking about it. While Merwin is known to have studied with Robert Aitken Roshi in his adopted state of Hawaii, and has spoken a bit about Buddhism publicly (for instance, on PBS), he made it clear when we spoke this summer, that—as the famous narrator of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” continuously insisted—he “would prefer not to.” When I mentioned The Gateless Barrier’s appearance in “Fox Sleep,” he said, “That’s pretty rare, because I try to keep [direct] references out of the poems. But that was all there because of the fox.” But to say that Zen infuses his poetry would be an understatement. Even before Merwin took up formal Zen training, he seems to have evinced an affinity for its meditation practice, which is, after all, based on unifying the mind, body, and breath. As Ian Tromp writes in the Times Literary Supplement, “Another [Merwin] poem names and demonstrates the principle at the center of Merwin’s poetics, speaking of the ‘furrow/turning at the end of the field/and the verse turning with its breath.’ Since 1963, Merwin’s poems have relied on the breath as their fundamental measure, and his work is best read aloud.” So why is he reluctant to discuss this central aspect of his work? Perhaps his reticence relates to what Merwin told me about Jorge Luis Borges, the renowned Argentine poet and short story writer: “I remember Borges giving a series of talks. And they’re all very very interesting. The one on Buddhism is a little silly. There’s a whole lot he didn’t understand. But there’s a whole lot nobody really understands [about it].” But, of course, when Zen people talk about not understanding something, it can mean what we normally mean; or it can mean something else entirely. In Case 20 of the Book of Serenity, one finds the key phrase “not knowing is most intimate,” “intimate” here being roughly synonymous with “awakened.” This calls to mind Shunryu Suzuki’s famous observation in the Western dharma classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” So is it possible Merwin was indeed talking about Zen (“there’s a whole lot nobody really understands”), despite his intention not to? Sure. In “A Letter to Su T’ung Po” (2007) Merwin brings alive something of the blend of openness, responsiveness, and resonance with the world that is the mind of not knowing: “Almost a thousand years later/ I am asking the same questions … / I do not know any more now/ than you did then about what you/ were asking as I sit at night/ above the hushed valley thinking/ of you on your river that one/ bright sheet of moonlight in the dream/ of the water birds and I hear/ the silence after your questions/ how old are the questions tonight.” I’ve heard it said that in its intellectual content, Zen neither has nor is a philosophy, but rather it is a literary tradition. Merwin, for obvious reasons, seems drawn to this aspect of Zen, and while general questions about Buddhism and his own practice did not interest him, the literary tradition was a different story. He is a writer with a huge range of literary influences, and in talking about his work, just as in the work itself, he can’t help but converse with and about the various streams of influence. Merwin has won the Pulitzer Prize twice (most recently for The Shadow of Sirius), along with nearly every prize an American poet can win (Yale Younger Poets prize, the Tanning Prize, the Lenore Marshall, the Ruth Lilly, the National Book Award). He has written more than forty books of poetry and prose, and he has done translations from a great number of languages (he is quick to point out that he does not speak them all). His work is often political, yet by never compromising on aesthetics, he has helped firmly link the peace and environmental movements with American letters. In “Avoiding News by the River,” an early poem, Merwin writes, “I am not ashamed of the wren’s murders/ nor the badger’s dinners/ … If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything.” This Poet Laureate has identified himself for decades as stridently antiwar, anti-pollution, indeed anti-hurry, anti-acceleration—almost anti-worldly or anti-modern. But Merwin’s earlier indignation has mellowed and turned inward and speculative in his later work. Traveling to visit him, I saw that almost everywhere you look, from the state’s license plates to its daily sun shower– drenched skies, you see Hawaiian rainbows. His major nonpoetry project is the Merwin Conservancy, some eighteen acres of rainforest he has assiduously restored from a pineapplefarmed wasteland. For three decades Merwin has toiled in this “garden” that preserves endangered plant species—mostly palms, including the local Pritchardia varieties. The day we meet, a Tuesday in August, we sit on an open-air veranda overlooking acres of palms. A Hawaiian thrush, the ‘oma’o, sings to us. From the moment I shake Merwin’s hand, I sense an only slightly distracted warmth, poetic keenness radiating from his eyes. Warmth that is, as poet Elizabeth Bishop described a sandpiper: finical. His wife, Paula, serves us a lunch of fresh pasta with basil and, later, mangoes. She chimes in affably (his masterpiece is The Folding Cliffs, she suggests, in response to my favoring The Lice). Looking out at his palms, he lets slip an encyclopedic storehouse of literary biography and memorized verse. Relentless from the outset, the mosquitoes are now only somewhat held at bay by a burning dab of punk. I swat; Merwin is composed. In describing his life, his literary influences, he remains—this is again the word—composed. But in discussing his interests, he can also relate very naturally, legacy for legacy, to a 13th-century Japanese Zen master and poet, Muso Soseki, whom he translated and who he says fascinated him. This and remembering first reading the Diamond Sutra seem to animate him more than anything else we discuss. He admires Soseki’s sensibility toward gardening above all, not to mention his swordsmanship—a swordsmanship, as it were, without a sword. More »