April 28, 2011

Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin

by Kelly Beggs

U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin will deliver Davidson College's annual Joel A. Conarroe Lecture on Monday, May 2. The public is invited to attend the event presentation, reception and book signing, which begins at 8 p.m. in Davidson College's Duke Family Performance Hall.

Tickets are required for admission, and are free if picked up in person at the College Union ticket office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. Or, tickets may be reserved online at www.davidson.com/tickets at a service fee cost of $11 per ticket. Tickets may not be reserved by phone, but information is available at 704-894-2135.

Merwin was appointed as the Library of Congress's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2010. He is the author of 16 collections of poems, essays on environmental and literary ideas, and a memoir. In addition to his original compositions, he has translated works by Dante, Follain, Porchia and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has received numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Tanning Prize.

Merwin studied poetry at Princeton University with critic R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman. His first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was selected by W.H. Auden to be published in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1952. In the 1960's, he began developing a distinct style, in which he omitted punctuation and capitalized only the poem's first letter to convey the flow of language found in the oral tradition, reflecting Merwin's belief that poetry is deeply connected to song.

Some of his most influential collections -- The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) -- tie classical myths and legends to political issues of the time. These works express Merwin's opposition to environmental destruction and the Vietnam War. He famously donated the prize money from his 1971 Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders to the draft resistance movement.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism. He purchased land and built the home that he lives in today with his wife Paula Dunaway. He restored the land, which was then a denuded plantation, to a tropical forest that now contains 700 endangered species of indigenous plants. In 2010, Merwin and Paula created Merwin Conservancy to preserve the home and the palm forest as a retreat for writers and botanists.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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