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.
Week One of National Poetry Month 2019
National Poetry Month is upon us! This year ASP has decided to celebrate by featuring several poems each week curated by different members of the ASP team. Now that the first week is over, let’s take a look back at the poets and poems we have featured thus far.
Craving More Grace? Check out the Poet Laureate on the NEA’s “Art Works”
Craving more Grace Cavalieri? Of course you are! Maryland’s newest Poet Laureate is active, about, and spreading the word; that is, her words. Even though Poet Laureate is largely an honorary position (it is unpaid, and one is “honored” more with a title than a job much like a knighthood or a medal of freedom), Grace Cavalieri seems determined to become the most active and community-focused Poet Laureate in Maryland’s history. Recently she was featured on Art Works the official podcast for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Grace Cavalieri’s Interview on Midday with Tom Hall
Grace Cavalieri stopped by WYPR last week for an interview on “Midday” with Tom Hall. The Poet Laureate and author of ASP’s Other Voices, Other Lives, mused on her life and work, meditating on the loss of her late husband, and reading from her deep poetry catalog. This interview is well worth the 40 minutes it takes to impart the important wisdom of one of Maryland’s foremost sages.