DB: In a way then, the acquisition of good syntax and varied ways of saying something is almost as important as the image.

Merwin: Well, it's a tool. It's like trying to be a fine carpenter when your only hammer is a six-pound sledge and you have a cold chisel. You're going to have a hell of a time, you're handicapped. I think this is related to the matter of the life of the language coming out of colloquial speech. In real vernacular, in real colloquial speech, there's always the energy of the language and we know of contemporaries, critics, and writers, who insist that one must have the colloquial and not the formal or that one must have the control of the form that the colloquial line is put in. I think these are poles which make the tension in which the language operates and the literature can be written. You can't let go of either one without the tension just all disappearing, one must honor them both, absolute energy of colloquial speech, as long as it has not been totally debased by debasing uses of it, such as advertising, communal abstractions, committee English, and things of that kind, and on the other hand, the honoring of the tradition of the language itself and its formal possibilities. They're both assumptions of the life of the language, into the life of what we can write in the language.

Don Boes
Artful Dodger Interviews