Merwin

The Shadow of Sirius

This book put me to sleep in a good way. After reading it, (and I mean this happened both times I read it completely through) I looked over at my clock and realized I had dozed off. It just lulls me into such a zen and serene mood that I fall asleep. I like that.

I envy Merwin in the worst way for his punctuation. He punctuates without periods, commas, etc. and it bothers me so much because instead of forcing you to absorb the poem you experience it in a way you couldn’t possibly understand if you had to take a breath at the end of the lines. I myself depend on punctuation so much that it borders on the obsessive, which is why I think I envy his ability to let the images exist simultaneously as well as overlapping each other so they become inseparable.

I can’t help wanting to ascribe a theme to his book. I realize that it delves into memory and what it means to be a super old guy and I do mean old guy not old girl because even though he doesn’t gender the speaker in his poems, it isn’t exactly androgynous either. I’m not sure this changes anything. In any case, I feel like I’m missing something in the title the shadow of Sirius that gets plastered over every poem and adds yet another layer that is significant. One doesn’t lightly title a work of poetry the same way one doesn’t lightly title a poem. It means something. What is it about the brightest and closest star in the sky that interested Merwin enough to name his collection after it. Is memory closest? Is the brilliance of stars closes to memory? Does its being the dog star have any bearing on his subject? I’m contemplating writing him about this because I desperately want to know.

It bothers me that he doesn’t have a poem about clocks. I get that the theme of time and age and memory and past and future having a clock as a metaphor is obvious and therefore beneath Merwin (I don’t imagine he would dare write an obvious poem) but neither does he do anything with physical measuring of time (that I noticed). The interplay between language and perception of time and memory is of course really really interesting, but he either ignores or doesn’t care about the physical manifestations of the concept(s?). How would the work be changed if suddenly at the end Autumn was tearing apart a watch with a leather band and playing with the second hand while leaves fell somewhere in Europe and the old lady wept at the pinnacle? Are we trying to grasp time when we hold pocket watches and cell phones with timepieces? I need Merwin to answer this for me, I think. Although, I really do get lost in his ideas about memories and transience of experience and what it means to experience versus name and identify and exist beyond meaning. I apologize for that sentence not making much sense.

I realize I’m rambling on, but I have one more point (or maybe two?). Why does Merwin use stanzas?! I love his lack of punctuation and the ability to meld images together and moments and his use of sometimes nearly even line breaks (in space not meter) and his confusing yet simple language. I can’t figure out why he also uses the stanza. I know he wouldn’t do it just because it felt like it needed a break. But there are poems in which the sentence/image/thought/whatever continues onto the next line and that line is sometimes the next stanza/paragraph/unit. In Lament for a Stone (35), it works for the waves receding into the previous stanza only to rush on again forward in the next over the stone and the idea and the rhythm, BUT what about all the other poems that begin and end with a single line as its own stanza?! I feel like I’m opening and closing the book of those poems except he gives me no book imagery and aside from the simple fact that I’m literally holding one, I have nothing about books in front of me. Books, either as metaphor or vehicle, have no presence in the collection, I’ve resigned this projection to my brain, but I haven’t figured out his stanza-construction-thing. He’s so intent on making everything blend together that I don’t see why he would separate things in odd places. There is a logic to it, there has to be.