W.S. Merwin
2011/2012 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series
Monday
April 23, 2012
7:30 pm
Hubbard Stage, Alley Theatre
615 Texas Avenue
Directions & parking
Tickets: $5 general admission BUY NOW!
Reading followed by an on-stage interview, book sale and signing. To order books by W. S. Merwin, click here.
Submit questions for W. S. Merwin here.
Please note that W. S. Merwin will give a craft talk/Q&A session on the University of Houston Central Campus in the Honors College Commons at 4:30 pm on April 23, free and open to the public.
About W. S. Merwin
W. S. MERWIN, who served as 17th Poet Laureate of the United States, was advised by John Berryman, while studying as an undergraduate at Princeton University, to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day.” Merwin seems to have taken the advice to heart. During the last half century, he has written more than 20 collections of poetry, nearly as many books of translations, and numerous prose works, and has won every major literary prize. He was first awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971 and won it again for The Shadow of Sirius in 2009, for which he also received the National Book Award. He was awarded his first National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Of this 540-page distillation of his poetry to date, one judge wrote, “The poems in Migration speak a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection.” His first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1952 by W. H. Auden.
Peter Davison, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, says, “The intentions of Merwin's poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.” Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palm trees. Adrienne Rich wrote of Merwin’s work: “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.”
Links:
Bill Moyers interviews Merwin on PBS (text and video)
NPR article (and audio) on Merwin's appointment as 17th US Poet Laureate
Edward Hirsch interviews Merwin for the Paris Review
O Magazine article on Merwin's home in Hawaii and his love of nature poems
The Merwin Conservancy home page
