W. S. Merwin's Essays

W. S. Merwin, who died March 15, 2019, published over two hundred works of poetry and prose in The New Yorker: see Hannah Aizenman’s “W. S. Merwin in The New Yorker” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2019). As a long-time reader of the magazine, I skimmed many of these pieces. They didn’t resonate with me. I found them toneless, colorless abstractions. 

But a few years ago I looked into a book of essays by Merwin called The Ends of the Earth (2004), and I was hooked. His essays are warm, vivid, companionable – the exact opposite of his poetry. 

Take for example his wonderful “The Tree on One Tree Hill,” a profile of Captain Cook’s young shipboard artist Sydney Parkinson. It starts in the British Museum (“While passing the sarcophagi and the glass cases, the sense of human knowledge may seem neither definite nor near at hand”), and ends in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where Parkinson makes his famous sketch of a “huge, dark, ancient tree” – the One Tree on One Tree Hill. In between, Merwin puts us directly in the Great Cabin of Cook’s Endeavour as it sails the South Pacific:

Most of his work was done at sea in the Great Cabin, with the other “gentlemen” and, no doubt, officers of the Endeavour present at the same table, often in bad weather, with the bark pitching and rolling (“seldom was there a storm,” Banks wrote, “strong enough to break up our normal study time”); in the midst of almost continuous motion, he was portraying an illusory stillness.

My favorite piece in The Ends of the Earth is “The Wake of the Blackfish: A Memoir of George Kirstein.” Kirstein was the wealthy publisher of the magazine The Nation, and a paternal figure in Merwin’s life. In a memorable passage, Merwin describes a harrowing trip through a hurricane that he and Kirstein took on Kirstein’s thirty-eight-foot yawl, Skylark:

We hurtled forward as though falling down stairs, and struck the troughs between waves as though they were floors. When I was at the wheel there were sickening instants when I thought that the compass card had spun ninety degrees and more, and that we were out of control and about to be swamped broadside.

The essays in Merwin’s The Ends of the Earth are completely different from his cold, surreal poetry. They have the breath of life. I highly recommend them.

On Lucie Brock-Broido: Chiasson and Vendler

Lucie Brock-Broido (Photo by Karen Meyers)

Hannah Aizenman, in her “The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), From The New Yorker Archive” (newyorker.com, March 8, 2018), refers to two New Yorker reviews of Brock-Broido’s work: Helen Vendler’s “Drawn to Figments and Occasion” (August 7, 1989) and Dan Chiasson’s “The Ghost Writer” (October 28, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are admiring. Vendler says of Brock-Broido’s “Elective Mutes,” “The rhythmic momentum of this piece of Americana and the audacity of throwing it into a poem about mad English twins suggest the drivenness of Brock-Broido’s imagination, which at other times can be delicate and lyrical.” Chiasson writes, “Brock-Broido’s poems can be baffling, but because of their stylish spookiness (some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks) they are never boring.” Note that “stylish spookiness”; Vendler calls Brock-Broido’s “Heartbeat” “spookily lyrical.”

Both pieces are also critical. Vendler writes,

Some of the hazards of Brock-Broido’s enterprise are easily seen: preciousness, exaggeration, a histrionic use of the more sensational edges of the news. Other hazards, less immediately apparent, take an insidious toll in the long run – chiefly the persistent use of a few obsessive words, among them the adjectives “small,” “little,” “tiny,” “frail,”, “fragile”; the nouns “child” and “girl”; the verb “curl.”

Chiasson says Brock-Broido’s poems have a “blurted quality, as though long-roiling tumult finally blew off the stopper.” He continues:

The thrill of improvisation is precisely that it cannot be isolated from the risk of mere looniness or doodling. I don’t like everything in Brock-Broido’s work, but, to steer clear of tour de force, a style like this one has to fail some of the time; it has to find some subject that suits it badly.

I like that “thrill of improvisation.” It gets at the quality in Brock-Broido’s work I most enjoy – its combinational wizardry. Vendler catches this quality when she says of Brock-Broider’s “I Wish You Love,”

A broken heart, death, the exhumed body of Mengele, ecological disaster, commercial slaughter, the humdrum, the extravagant, the technological, the distorted, the lyric all lurch together into an eclectic postmodern elegy.

That “lurch” is inspired. It exactly captures the wayward dream logic of Brock-Broido’s dazzling art.