Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering W. S. Merwin on his birthday 🎂
📷 Chris Felver, Berkeley, 1985
"It is as though the voice filters up to the reader like echoes from a very deep well, and yet it strikes his ear with a raw energy".
- Laurence Lieberman

W. S. Merwin by Douglas Kent Hall
"Merwin’s verse often gives the impression of language scavenged from the elements, its power reckoned only as its meanings assemble, phrase by phrase, against the white of the page."
- @dchiasso

W. S. Merwin by Bernard Gotfryd, 1960s
"He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth and underground."
- Peter Davison

W. S. Merwin by Tom Sewell, 2009
"Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time."

W. S. Merwin by Don Tormey
"The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go.... You’re always beginning again."
@ParisReview
theparisreview.org/interviews/269…

One of my favourite episodes of #PhoneCallFromPaul @Holdengraber
W.S. Merwin: On Reading What You Want, Reading It Slowly, and the Beauty of Trees
lithub.com/w-s-merwin-on-…
@lithub @CallFromPaul

W.S. Merwin by Larry Cameron
In W.S. Merwin's @ParisReview Art of Poetry interview he talks about receiving a postcard from Ezra Pound: "Read seeds not twigs E.P."

W. S. Merwin by A. Young
"When we walked through Greenwich Village, William greeted every dog we met, once lifting a terrier and looking into its eyes as though searching for its ancestors."
- Grace Schulman
Her wonderful remembrance of her friend:
theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/2…

W. S. Merwin in his study at his home in Maui
📷 Tom Sewell
The Guardian obituary of Merwin quotes the New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, who said “nobody has a right to be that good-looking”.