On Plants and Poems:

W. S. MERWIN--PULITZER PRIZE-winning poet and author of over 30 books--is standing on Dunster Street talking about garden equipment. A window display for a Harvard Real Estate office, decorated with potted plants, has caught his eye.

He sees three trowels set next to the plants, and he wants them. "Would you mind stopping in there for a moment?" he asks. "I've been searching for stainless trowels."

Merwin, who lives in Haiku, Hawaii, devotes much of his time to gardening. "Every day, at about four o'clock, I go out and work outdoors till dark, and that's a wonderful part of the day..."He smiles, exposing gaps in the teeth.

The trowels, as it turns out, are not for sale. Nor are they stainless. We continue down Dunster Street.

But we still aren't talking about poetry. Instead, Merwin is reading aloud from a book given to him by a man at Au Bon Pain. The book has a king, a queen, and a character named Tumur. Merwin never mentions the title.

"On the train coming up here," he says, "I was reading...all the old, Egyptian funeral texts--what used to be called the Book of the Dead. It's very beautiful."

He squints, stops, and takes out a pair of sunglasses--enormous ones, which resemble safety goggles. He asks me to try them on.

Twenty minutes later, we are sitting in Winthrop Park, and the talk turns to poetry. Merwin speaks with the humility of a reader, rather than the assertiveness of an acclaimed writer.

"There are a lot more people reading and writing poetry than there were a few decades ago," he says. "I think that has to do with times being very critical. When, you're very upset about things, you're more likely to read a poem than something else."

He hesitates to past judgement on the literary scene. I can't evaluate [poetry]," he says. "Critics evaluate I'm much more like the old lady who was at the show and annoyed the impressionist painters and said, "I don't know anything about art. I know what I like."'

Analysis can only reveal so much. The best writing happens when "you forget you ever thought about it. You're just doing it. That probably doesn't happen for long or one hundred percent...[but when] you forget that you're watching, it just happens by itself, and that's wonderful."

The tendency to "think too much about it" is the chief "danger of a good education." Merwin looks suddenly paternal. "But that's not a reason you shouldn't have one."

Merwin himself had a Princeton education but does not let that binder his creativity. He uses the routine of writing to bypass his critical faculties. "I just try to work every morning." Flaubert said, "Inspiration consists of sitting down at the same table at the same time every day. That's wonderful, because it's so plain and takes all the sort of breathiness out of it. And Flaubert was a very great writer, don't you think?"

Merwin defers repeatedly to the masters--to Flaubert, to Shakespeare, to Dante. He hardly mentions his latest book, Travels, his speech for the Nieman Journalism Fellows, or his reading at the Poet's Theater--the occasion for his visit to Cambridge.

A Jazz quarter unloads some drums from a van and starts setting up behind the Newtowne monument, Merwin says, "You know, Auden said, 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' That's something everybody quotes and it may or may not be true."

Merwin's own work aims to "make something happen." He says, "I think that the idea of art for art's sake--it's OK, but it ends up with reacrame., You know, if you like reacrame, that's fine, but there's no reason why it should be supering in stamp collecting or anything else, and I don't think that's what poetry is about." He gestures a passing ambulance. "It's about life and death."

Merwin's writing often focuses on ecological issues. "One of the things that's never separate any longer from anything I do is the relation of humans to the rest of life. I don't even like using words--I mean, I use them--but I don't even like using words like nature or the environment, because they assume that there's a separation, that there's us and then there's that...And dangerous, probably fatal, consequences arise from that and we see them all the time."

Merwin speaks as he writes--in long strands of clauses. And he writes in imitation of the spoken word. "The main current in poetry," he says," and the kind of poetry that really matters to me can't ever lose that pole that's in the oral--it's in the spoken word." He doesn't punctuate his poetry for this reason.

When we sit on this park bench talking to each other," he says, "we don't put in little commas and colons and exclamation points. We don't need them, because we hear it." Merwin folds his sunglasses on his lap. "The closer words get to poetry, the more the spoken language is there. And that's not punctuated."

Early in his career, Merwin did use punctuation. He wrote in traditional forms, with traditional use of rhyme and meter. Critics make much of Merwin's formal shift.

Characteristically, though, he understates the change. "I don't think it was as dramatic a break as people have said it was." He averts his eyes; he's probably had to explain this before. "The pattern, the abstract form, has a life cycle...It seemed to me, maybe 20 years ago, that the iambic pentameter had become extremely dull...I think that's changed. I think some people now are writing it in a way that's interesting...And my own new book is quite formal--in a different way."

Merwin emphasizes the value of form. "[It] makes you pay attention to language." He argues that all writing is autobiographical. "Even when you're telling a lie, the lie is your truth at the time." And he emphasizes poetry as a practised craft. "This idea of spontaneity," he says, "there's lot of silly talk about it...We go to the ballet and we want the ballet to be spontaneous, but you know that it comes out of years and years of very hard practice."

While we're on the subject of "silly talk," Merwin debunks another myth--that poets can analyze their inspiration. "People get very smart and canny about it, but finally it escapes you. Isn't that great that you can never sort of get the jump on it...It's always smarter than you are." Another fleet of ambulances crosses Mt. Auburn Street.

Merwin is late for the Nieman fellows by now, but he doesn't look concerned. We get up and start toward the Square. He puts on his sunglasses.

"You know Auden said this wonderful thing. He said, "You always write out of what you know, but you don't know what you know, but you try to write it." It's a very wise thing to have said. Much wiser than the thing about poetry making nothing happen."