In today's newsletter from the Poetry Foundation: a link to an excellent essay Reading a Dysfunctional World, which discusses W.S. Merwin's collection The Lice. This is a collection that still resonates—every bit as much in 2017 as it did in 1967. Recommended.
The Lice, W.S. Merwin’s sixth and possibly most iconic collection of poetry, was published in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. When the book first appeared, some readers shuddered: its confluence of mythology and ugly physical reality struck a nerve with a world shaken politically and environmentally to its core. The book “perfectly captured the peculiar spiritual agony of our time,” Laurence Lieberman wrote in The Yale Review. Today, on its 50th anniversary rerelease by Copper Canyon Press, the book feels eerily of the moment: these are poems charged with uncertainty, written in a world on the brink of environmental meltdown torn by tyrants. Yet what continues to draw poets and readers to The Lice is ultimately not its content but its form. The Lice is relevant politically and environmentally, but more important, it is revelatory aesthetically. The Lice neither shies away from current events nor falls so deep into the weeds that it feels dated. We need The Lice now not because it is a record of a specific time and place but because it gives us a mode to experience a dysfunctional world.