new Poet Laureate

W. S. Merwin was writing and publishing poetry before I was born, and continues to do so today. His teachers and collaborators make up a who's who of 20th century poetry: Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Rober Bly, to name a few. An outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Merwin donated the prize money from his 1971 Pulitzer to draft resistance organizations. Many of his poems reflect his interest in Buddhism and deep ecology. Here is his 1967 For a Coming Extinction:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

In June, Merwin was named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. A year earlier, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize, for The Shadow of Sirius.

--Andy