Katherine E. Young Reviews Merwin's THE VIXEN for 25 Year Anniversary
25 years after it was originally published, Katherine E. Young looks back on one of Merwin's most underappreciated masterworks
Katherine E. Young's retrospective on W.S. Merwin's The Vixen appears in The Adroit Journal. Her newest collection of poetry is Woman Drinking Absinthe available from Alan Squire Publishing. An excerpt from her essay follows. Read the full review HERE.
Is there such a thing as too much good poetry? My uncle, who made a lifelong habit of sending me copies of each of W.S. Merwin’s books upon publication, thought so. “He writes too much,” my uncle would lament each year when the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the few major prizes to elude Merwin during his long literary career, was awarded to some other writer. In a career as prolific as Merwin’s—more than fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including multiple literary masterpieces—it stands to reason that not every book can be a great one. Right?
Consider Merwin’s 1996 collection, The Vixen. Coming on the heels of Travels: Poems, winner of the 1993 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, The Vixen is in many ways a quiet book. While the poems in Travels are set all over the globe and vary considerably in form, length, and even appearance on the page, the sixty-four poems in The Vixen, most of them no longer than a page, follow a single form: a long line that starts at the left margin, followed by a second, indented line (which is sometimes enjambed and sometimes syntactically independent of the preceding line), mimicking the appearance of call-and-response on the printed page. (In his original review of the book for Boston Review, poet and critic Richard Howard called it “one poem in 64 sections.”) The look of the poems is neat, tight, controlled. “Quiet” and “controlled” are not synonymous with “lesser,” of course, and for anyone seeking poems that nourish and challenge, The Vixen offers a rich bounty.
Earth Day Reflections: To See for the First Time
“Our communications are profuse and immediate, as is our consciousness of the interrelationship of all that exists. We’ve seen what we often leave in our wake—homeless populations, spoiled wilderness. We can see the way the decisions and investments that we make, here, everyday, can effect just how much milk a baby in Uganda gets. Our world is a teeming, mysterious, multi-cultural mousetrap of a place where everything seems to hinge on something else. We share a new concept of this planet as a finite space, dense, and more difficult than ever to navigate. We live in an environment fraught with hazard, and it is important to have good guides, guides with insight—those who tread softly.”
Joanna Biggar’s Picks for NPM (Week 3)
Week three of National Poetry Month is here and we are still celebrating! So as the champagne continues relentlessly foaming for party-goers catching their tipsy mid-air, we asked author, Joanna Biggar, to select three poems she thinks are worthy of applause between wassails.
James J. Patterson’s Picks for NPM (week 2)
In honor of National Poetry Month, We asked author and essayist extraordinaire, James J. Patterson, to select three poems he’d like to see celebrated. Along with Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night Alone” (featured above), he chose Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with Us”, And Last but not least, the famed American Poet Robert Bly performing the poem “On Being a Man” by the famed Spanish poet, Antonio Machado.