Puttering About with Palms and Psalms

Christian Science Monitor reporter Elizabeth Lund interviews W.S. Merwin, who seems pretty happy in a Hawaiian semi-retirement, planting trees and jotting down verse on bits of scrap paper.

In his early books, Merwin's poetry was tight and traditional. Later work, however, was hazier, more abstract, more experimental. Punctuation completely disappeared. Some critics called the work obscure. The challenge in achieving clarity, Merwin says, is that poetry "tries to convey some inner experience that there is no way of expressing. Language evolved not to convey information so much as to convey some inner experience that there was no way of expressing. It was an attempt to convey an inner sense of passion - although it did have information in it - but the feeling was more powerful."

illustration by J. Kehe/CSM