Poetry event: “W.S. Merwin and Place”
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At the Cornwall Library, author and editor John Burnham Schwartz, Merwin’s stepson, and writer Robert Becker, Director Emeritus of The Merwin Conservancy, will read from Merwin’s work and hold a conversation about Merwin and the importance of place in his poetry and prose, especially his relationships with rural France and Hawaii.
In a career that spanned seven decades, Merwin wrote twenty-eight books of original poetry and nine of prose, and published a dozen more of translations. A supremely elegant and spare writer who celebrated the power of language, he was known as a poet of protest and desolation early in his career, especially after the publication of The Lice (1968), an unflinching screed against the Vietnam War. However, through his Zen Buddhism and a profound personal connection with the natural world, Merwin became, in time, as Edward Hirsch put it, “a poet of praise.” His two Pulitzer Prize collections might be called products of his immersion into place: The Carrier of Ladders (1970) was written in a farmhouse he restored in a corner of the Dordogne barely touched by the modern world, and he wrote The Shadow of Sirius (2008) in a house he built by hand on Maui and surrounded by a palm forest he planted himself one tree at a time over 45 years.
Merwin won most awards available to American poets, including the Bollingen Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, a Ford Foundation grant, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He was also awarded fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Merwin was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and two-time U.S. Poet Laureate (1999–2000, 2010–2011).
JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Red Daughter, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into 20 languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing for all the major Hollywood studios, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies. Schwartz is Executive Editor at Penguin Press and the longtime Literary Director of the Sun Valley Writers Conference. He lives with his wife, writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, in New York City and Salisbury, Connecticut.
ROBERT BECKER is a writer living in Cornwall and New York City. He was on the editorial staff of The Paris Review and Andy Warhol’s Interview and is the author of Nancy Lancaster; Her Life, Her World, Her Art (Knopf). He has written about art, architecture and history for more than forty years for publications including Architectural Digest, Interview, Art and Auction, Flash Art, Town and Country, British Vogue, The Paris Review, The Hawaiian Journal of History and most recently Hyperallergic, The New Criterion and ArtForum, and is currently at work on a history of American colonialism in 19th century Hawaii. In 2020 his essay Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin was published by the British literary journal Granta.
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