Merwin
BG: You've said that images are a way of seeing the world that one hasn't noticed before, but that as a poet one can't make them by an act of will. Is it fair to say, then, that you don't start with an image when you're writing, that you prefer to arrive at one rather than begin with one? What's the germ of a poem for you?
WSM: The germ of a poem to me has always been hearing something and hearing the sound of something, or a phrase-hearing the life in a few words, hearing a phrase or a few words in a way I'd never heard them before. Suddenly it's exciting and the excitement, to me, is leading to something. Sometimes it's related to its subject right at the beginning. Sometimes not. It's a way of putting words and lines together, a rhythm together, that makes sense to me. Hearing is the sense that's most important to me for that thing. It's not visual. The image is a metaphor that invents itself. It comes out of you, and you come to see that, too. Mandelstam had a wonderful way of describing an image. He said that a real image is like running across a river on a bridge of boats, and when you look back all the boats have moved and you couldn't do it again.
BG: That is beautiful. So the sound and the rhythm of the poem-that's something you find very early on and try to follow?
WSM: Yes, I don't mean it has to sound like Swinburne or very mellifluous like Tennyson. But sometimes you'll hear what I'm talking about in a passage of Shakespeare, something that you can't get out of your head, and it may be very simple. Very simple. Think of the line in Henry the Fifth, the scene before the Battle of Agincourt, where King Henry is walking, disguised, before the battle that everyone thinks they're going to lose and even he thinks they're going to lose. He meets a soldier, Michael Williams, who doesn't recognize him, and Williams asks about his own commander, "I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?" And Henry says, "Even as men wrack'd upon a sand, that look to be wash'd off the next tide." That's an incredibly simple thing that just takes your breath away. You hear that. It's not that it has to be wonderful meters that put you to sleep. It's the life of the language. BG: That's the sense I get all the time when I'm reading your poems, especially this last collection, The Pupil. It feels as though you're trying to tap into some kind of primordial music, the thing that's always been there somehow.
WSM: I want it to be very simple. I want it to look as though I hadn't done anything. That's the kind of art I admire most, the art that looks as 76