W.S. Merwin

Q: So many of your poems describe the place that you’re in, but also what you’re feeling about it. How do those poems come about?

A: Robert Louis Stevenson said a writer should always have two little books: one to read and one to write in. I have had a little notebook ever since I was in college. So I take notes. Sometimes, out of them, something comes. I really don’t know how poems happen. I know they begin by hearing something in language.
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Q: Some of your poems talk about living in the moment, not trying to live so far in the future. We all struggle to do that, don’t we?

A: I think that we have to do it all the time. One of the things about the human mind is the imagination which is the source of everything wonderful and the source of being able to put ourselves into other people’s situations and to recognize that suffering is universal and to recognize that other people’s joys and sorrows are not so very different from our own. But it’s also something that insinuates itself between us and what is immediately around us. Even in moments of great joy and pleasure, we find ourselves thinking about something else or imagining something else. We live with both of these things. I don’t think that you can undo that, but you can become aware that it’s so. That makes that scrim between you and the world around you become a little bit more transparent. So that you can live a little bit more in the present. But I think you have to keep reminding yourself.

—Johnette Rodriguez/Providence Phoenix 10.24-30.03