Christopher Merrill : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is the most important element of my poetry, perhaps because I am a musician manqué. It is probably no accident that I married a classical violinist; accordingly, I have had the good luck to spend a lot of time in the company of musicians, who give me new ways to think about the music of verse—i.e., prosody, which is one of my obsessions. My ear is attuned to speech rhythms, which may or may not fall into traditional meters, and my fingers are always tapping out the beats; when I hear something strange or off-kilter my imagination may catch fire. I live for that.

Christopher Merrill : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

The books on my desk are Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie, Pierre Joris’s translation of Paul Celan’s collected earlier poetry, Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech, Paradise Lost, Saint-John Perse’s Amers, Paul Merchant’s translation Twelve Poems About Cavafy by Yannis Ritsos, and Ani Gjika’s translation of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space.

Christopher Merrill : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Michael Benedikt’s anthology, The Poetry of French Surrealism, which I discovered as a graduate student in a used bookstore in Seattle, decisively shaped my thinking. The practice of automatic writing freed me to follow the language wherever it might lead, exploring subjects and themes I might otherwise have avoided. Then I co-translated André Breton’s Constellations, a collection of prose poems based on a series of gouaches that Joan Miró made during World War II, and a book that Breton wrote with Paul Éluard and René Char, Slow Under Construction; the first inspired my book, Necessities (White Pine Press, 2013), and the second gave me the idea for 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book (Trinity University Press, 2009), which I wrote with Marvin Bell, István László Geher, Ksenia Golubovich, Simone Inguanez, Tomaž Šalamun, and Dean Young. The joy I experienced in making that book led to a nearly-decade-long collaboration with Marvin Bell. We published the first volume of what we imagined to be a trilogy in 2016, After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts, completed the second volume, If & When, at the start of the pandemic, and were about a third of the way into the final volume, Here & Now, when Marvin passed away in December. Working with him was a pure joy, and the grief I feel over his death has left me reeling.

Christopher Merrill : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was born in Amherst, Massachusetts; hence I wish I could say that Emily Dickinson was my first tutelary spirit. But as a teenager I was drawn to Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Herman Hesse, and then I began to fall in love with one poet after another, including W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Strand, John Berryman, Charles Wright, and so on. Marvin Bell liked to say, “Read a poem, write a poem,” and that is what I still do.

Thirty years ago, I published Norman Dubie’s collection of aphorisms, The Clouds of Magellan, one of which is central to my thinking about the nature of a literary apprenticeship:

If you are a young writer who admires the work of a single older writer, then you are in great danger. Admire the work of two older writers, or more. Give your mind a problem and your mind, without permission, will solve that problem.

 

 

Christopher Merrill : part one

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Photo credit: Ram Devineni

What are you working on?

I have just sent off the galleys for a new book of prose poems, Flares, which White Pine Press will publish in May, not long after the University of Iowa Press issues “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings, A Selection with Commentary, which my colleague, Ed Folsom, and I wrote. Meantime I am writing The Trials of Roger Williams, a biography of my first relative in the New World, while remaining alert for something that might become a poem.