Dog Dreaming by W. S. Merwin The paws twitch in a place of chasing Where the whimper of this seeming-gentle creature Rings out terrible, chasing tigers. The fields Are licking like torches, full of running, Laced odors, bones stalking, tushed leaps. So little that is tamed, yet so much That you would find deeply familiar there. You are there often, your very eyes, The unfathomable knowledge behind your face, The mystery of your will, appraising. Such carnage and triumph; standing there Strange even to yourself, and loved, and only A sleeping beast knows who you are. Today is the birthday of the poet W.S. Merwin, born in New York City on this day in 1927 and raised in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. He won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008). He also won the 2005 National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems. He started writing poems when he was four or five years old, he said — at first, they were mostly hymns to give to his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied literature and Romance languages at Princeton, gained the admiring attention of W.H. Auden, and published his first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, the year he turned 25. He wrote plays for the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, edited poetry for The Nation, and translated a lot of other peoples poetry. He has translated verse from French and Spanish and Italian and Portuguese and Latin, and also from Yiddish and Japanese and Sanskrit. He translated Dantes Purgatorio and works by Pablo Neruda. He lives in Hawaii on the lip of a dormant volcano in Maui, on what used to be a pineapple plantation. Hes devoted to cultivating endangered palm trees and reforesting his land with native Hawaiian plants. Hes deeply interested in Buddhism. His books of poems include The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), Travels (1993), The Vixen (1996), and The Moon Before Morning (2014). (Writers Almanac)
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 11:56:21 +0000
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