Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

DB: I guess what I was trying to get at was the decisions you made back twenty

years or so when you evolved the absence of punctuation and you were doing things that

tried to make your work more poem-like.

Merwin: I was trying to do things that I suppose poets always try to do. I was

trying to write more directly, and in that sense more simply. One of the ironies of that

was there were critics who immediately and for a long time called poetry hopelessly

obscure. They thought it was simply willfully obscure and that I was trying to write

incomprehensible poetry. I was really trying to make it more direct but at the same time

more inclusive, to make it contain more experience and to transmit it more directly in

words and do it in a way that carried more of the cadences of pure language, of speech.

DB: Were there any poetics that you can think of behind why you started using

what I call the "gapped-line"?

Merwin: You mean just a few years ago? Yes, we were talking about that

yesterday. I realized that the predecessor, not even the predecessor (I think of it as the

subterranean tradition) of English prosody is the Middle English line that was over laid

at the time of Chaucer, by Chaucer, a great genius who brought this Romance meter into

English and did it so brilliantly and beautifully. It became the classical meter of

English. But is is an importation and I think Middle English line is absolutely native to

English and it’s been there all along. I think that it is even deeper and older than that.

I think it is a manifestation of a parallelism that is the basic structure of verse in

most languages that I know anything about. I was simply trying to pick that up and use it

in a way that would make it available to me and possibly suggest to others that this was

every bit as native to our language and consequently as legitimately useful to us as

iambic pentameter, which is rather a weary form when most people use it nowadays. It

carries a terrible freight of habit, of mere habit, although I think that students should

read an awful lot of it and write an awful lot of it to start, to be able to master it, to

be able to hear it, to be able to talk it if they have to. Otherwise these bits of the

tradition are liable to come as ghosts and use us rather than our using them. Stevenson

used to complain about that, that he couldn’t write prose without its being filled with