In the Way of Poetic Craft: Marilyn Chin & W.S. Merwin
There are two poets whose craft in poetry stand out for me: Marilyn China and W.S. Merwin. Their approach towards their work is inherently different. Chin once said, “today’s poets have become too monolithic, static.” Chin also has stated that she speaks for the minority. Merwin, when a young poet visited Ezra Pound, who advised him to “read the seeds, not the twigs, of poetry” (Merwin, 810). Perhaps the poet’s experience can affect the manner in which craft in a poem takes.
Chin admitted that her main goal in writing poetry is to stir up the muse. She believes that form and content should work together. In speaking for the minority, Chin has also said that she had made several references to African-American aesthetics, since they have suffered in history, as did the Chinese American. Yet, Chin’s subject matter has included: God, the devil, the death of Jews, racism, Hitler; people and deities often become the metaphors in her poetry.
Chin pays tribute to the African-American experience with this poem where she has incorporated lyrical blues in her poem Blues on Yellow (#2) (Chin; Rhapsody, 67):
Twilight casts a blue pall on the green grass
The moon hangs herself on the sticky date palm near the garage
Song birds assault a bare jacaranda, then boogy toward Arizona
They are few this year than last
Chin’s ability to break away from traditional poetic structures creates a more powerful voice behind her poems. Although her poems are technically structured on a sophisticated level, there is a certain degree of experimentalism and unpredictability that reflects the nature or behavior of the emotion of anger. I believe it is the anger, which she uses sometimes as a collective voice, or the voice of other, that she gains a sense of freedom within the poetic structure, thus creating new avenues of expression.
One variation of her stylistic features can be found in the poem, Where We Live Now (Vol. 3, #4) (Chin; Rhapsody, 63):
When / my / mother / painted / bamboo /
She / saw / bamboo / and / not / herself /
When I asked Chin what the forward slashes represented in this poem she said they represented bamboo. What stands out with Chin’s work is her ability to take advantage of the page and position them where she sees fit. Furthermore, her creative positioning creates white space around her poems, which create an even more dramatic effect. Here is only one of several examples where Chin takes advantage where she positions the words on the page and changing the font size to create a disappearing or softening affect; shown again here in her poem, Where We Live Now (Vol. 3, #4) (Chin; Rhapsody, 63):
zenfully
gunrack rattling
blue void
gun rack
blue
void
Chin uses a combination of segmentation, changing the size and appearance of the fonts, places the words around the page at her free will. Often times Chin is attempting to make her point, not only through the subject matter in the poem, but how it appears visually. In most cases, I find Chin’s approach liberating while other times it can be a distraction. I believe the content in Chin’s poems are rich enough to stand on their own without manipulating their visual appearance or the structure of the poem, which in some cases work against the subject matter in the poems. Nonetheless, I find Chin’s work to be compelling and inviting.
Chin is very tactful in her word choice, which is an instrument in the craft of poetry. She best illustrates it here in her poem, Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) (Chin; Rhapsody, 24). Here is speaks about the relationship between her mother and father, and the mother’s hysterectomy:
The worm has entered the ear
And out the nose of my father
Cleaned the pelvis of my mother
And ringed around her fingerbone
Other approaches to Chin’s craft are tied to her subject matter, thus in the case of bringing in traditional Chinese beliefs, which are commonly weaved into her poems. One example of this is in the poem, Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) (Chin; Rhapsody, 26) this is the last stanza:
Discs of jade for her eyelids
A lozenge of pearl for her throat
Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils
They will rob her again and again
In this poem, Chin does not use any punctuation and does this in several other poems. This may be a style derived from E.E. Cummings, but today in contemporary poetry it is frowned upon as a gimmick and the proper punctuation and grammatical rules are instead encouraged. In any case, I don’t feel that the lack of punctuation hurts the poem and still find it to be one of her stronger pieces.
Chin’s work is revolutionary in several aspects: she honors the fundamental ethics of creativity and the production of art. Chin can be found, time and time again, surrendering, as she becomes the vessel in which the art is funneled. Surrendering to her “muse” as she says, fuels the way she produces poetry, masters her craft. Chin is the mouthpiece for what should have been said, moments that would have otherwise been lost between two worlds (East and West). She said that she is even aware that the reader’s eye moves from left to right, left to right. She takes notes of the tiny details that might be a more comprehensive approach in reaching her audience.
W.S. Merwin is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and translations. To study the craft of Merwin would account for several volumes to bring to light his craft techniques, even how his writing has changed through the decades. Eventually in Merwin’s poetic career he took measures to avoid the formal or traditional conventions to move towards a ‘spoken language’. In the preface—which Merwin wrote—in the book The Second of Four Books of Poems, he says: “From the beginning they are less obviously formal—it might be more to the point to say that whatever may provide their form is less apparent. By the end of the poems in The Moving Target [1963] I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in” (Merwin, Preface I).
By 1960’s Merwin was ready to change his style, and when The Moving Target published in 1963 he had abandoned the formalities of his previous poet works; thus, changing the style of his craft. When The Lice appeared in 1967 Merwin’s tone and content had been changed due to a historical context of what was happening around him: the new world—full of contradictions in the sixties, war, changes, which Merwin believes still haunts many. As for poetry, Merwin says, “Poems are written in moments of history, and their circumstances bear upon their language and tone and subject and feeling whether the authors are conscious of that happening, or not, but it is hard to conceive of a poem being written only out of historic occasion” (Merwin; Preface 2). In knowing this, how does it affect Merwin’s craft? And what stands Merwin out from other predecessors?
To fully understand how Merwin uses craft we must turn to his poetry. Much of Merwin’s poetry are segmented in nature, including one-line stanzas, the absence of punctuation, and extremely short poems, such in the case with his poem, Sanvonarola that is only two lines, to poems that go on for pages. Is this considered a craft in poetry? Yes. Merwin, for I believe, is very conscious of his word choice; therefore, I cannot be swayed into thinking if the poem is only two lines that it doesn’t bear the weight of one that is twenty lines.
One of the several things that stand out in Merwin’s work is his ability to personify the natural world around him. He brings simple things in the every day and adds a slant of emotion. For example, in his poem, December Night (Merwin, 108) he says:
Merwin brings the cold slope to life by letting the reader know it’s standing in darkness. Another example of where he does this in the poem, December Among the Vanished (Merwin, 109):
The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Another facet of craft with Merwin is his naturalness in line breaks and when to make the next line into a new stanza, all in a way that simply flows. This poem, like many, does not contain punctuation, which is not my personal preference; yet, I didn’t feel it hinder the poem or the meaning behind the poem. In his poem, Habits (Merwin, 242) the line breaks don’t feel forced and move with Merwin’s voice and rhythm:
Even in the middle of the night
they go on handing me around
but it’s dark and they drop more of me
and for longer
then they hang onto my memory
thinking its theirs
even when I’m asleep they take
one or two of my eyes for their sockets
and look around believing
that the place is home
when I wake and can feel the black lungs
flying deeper into the century
carrying me
even then they borrow
most of my tongues to tell me
that they’re me
and lend me most of my ears to hear them
Other poems by Merwin are heavily segmented. Merwin uses numbers and lines between each stanza to make it clearly separated. Other styles in craft include repetition and center justifying a poem. What I find interesting is that Merwin gets away with it each time, whereas contemporary poets in college are often discouraged to stay away from manipulating the format of their poem. Furthermore, if today’s poets do choose to do to take on unconventional methods in their poetry (no punctuation, font size and positioning on the page) they are often warned that it must add to the poem, not distract the reader and/or the poem. I agree with this.
When I think about Merwin’s strongest aspect in his craft I believe it to be his word choice. The fat, so to speak, is trimmed from his poems leaving them rich with meaning. Take a look at the first line of the poem and representing itself as a one-line stanza, Before That (Merwin, 56):
It was never there and already it’s vanishing
Both W.S. Merwin and Marilyn Chin display not only bold, but also sophisticated approaches in their poetry. Both use the page like a blank canvas in which to paint their words. Neither of them appear to be hindered by the possibilities of the power of the word, metaphors, similes, or appearance/format of their poems. For me, observing Merwin and Chin’s craft at a closer perspective offers encouragement to me as a poet to branch out. One example is to follow some of Merwin’s techniques of one-line stanzas, or force me to consider the word choice, or language, in my poems. The greatest gift I could receive in continuing to study their work is to turn to my own writing and ask myself, how could I make this a better poem?
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Works Cited
Chin, Marilyn. CSU Fresno – Visiting Writer Series; Q&A. 24. Feb. 2005
Chin, Marilyn. Email to the author, 22, Mar. 2005
Chin, Marilyn. Rhapsody In Plain Yellow. WW Norton: New York, 2002
Chua, C.L. Rhapsody In Plain Yellow. Magill’s Literary Annual (2003): 670-671; 668-669
Gioia, David, David Manson, and Meg Schoerke. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. McGraw
Hill: New York, 2004
Graham, Pilar. Personal Interview: Marilyn Chin. 1. Feb. 2005
Merwin, W.S. The Second of Four Books of Poems. Copper Canyon Press: Washington
