"Reading a Dysfunctional World", an essay at the Poetry Foundation

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Ari Meermans

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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.
 

M Louise

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Saw this article a day or two ago and agree with you, Ari. I've been reading Merwin for years, in part because I love his commitment to a deep ecology (he restored an old pineapple plantation to a rain forest in Hawaii) and also because he has a prophetic courage in addressing what might be called American apocalyptic. I read The Lice while living under a State of Emergency in South Africa during the 1980s and it was about so much more than a brutal colonial war (Vietnam), it helped me recognise and name the dysfunctional and bizarre aspects of society all around me.
 

Ari Meermans

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Merwin is one of my favorite poets; you'll maybe have seen where I've referenced his work a time or two. I discovered The Lice sometime between '70 and '74—pre-everyday Internet, dontcha know—which wasn't so far distant to those turbulent coming-of-age late 60s. Having visited The Lice off and on over the years, I can see where that last line I quoted has become more true with each successive decade: "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." It feels strange to say that I have hope that some day The Lice does become dated, an artifact and a remembrance of struggle as it were, but I do.
 

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I'd love to live to see that day too, Ari. Not just the poetry of Merwin gives me hope, but the life he lived, a man quietly restoring a palm forest on a tropical island, a good man, a good poet. He reminds me of Gary Snyder in some ways, those poets who stay close to the land and work with a clear-sighted Buddhist and humanist perspective. Merwin's wife Paula (who died earlier this year) once wrote in an interview that people around the world wrote to Merwin to say he has been their companion through many years and difficult times, giving voice to their anxieties and longings. He wrote somewhere deploring the 'shamelessness' of men in power and I often think of that word on days when it is hard to be more appalled by the greed and corruption out there.
 
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