February 28, 2006

One of America’s greatest poets W.S. Merwin to give a rare public reading of his work at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• W.S. Merwin
• An Evening of Poetry
• W. S. Merwin, one of most acclaimed U.S. writers, has won the Pulitzer, Bollingen, Yale Younger Poets, Tanning and Ruth Lilly Prizes
• Merwin is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the College of Creative Studies
• A Poetry Month in Santa Barbara Event
• Thursday, April 13
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public: $10 / UCSB students: $8
• Tickets/information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

W.S. Merwin, one of the most widely read and revered poets in America, will give a rare public reading of his work on Thursday, April 13 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. Merwin served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1999, and over his five-decade career has won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His 400 poem collection Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001, a landmark event in the literary world, won the National Book Award for poetry and was also selected as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. The Los Angeles Times writes, “Merwin is one of the great poets of our age,” while The Nation asserts, “In a time when so many writers are satisfied with simply writing publishable poems, it is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change.”

Over the 50 years of his career, Merwin’s poetic voice has moved from the more formal and traditional—influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating—to a more distinctly American voice. That change was particularly spurred by two years he spent in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like and full of praise for the natural world.

Merwin’s first book A Mask for Janus was published in 1952 in the Yale Younger Poets series, chosen by W.H. Auden. His book The Carrier of Ladders was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. His other books include The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, Flower & Hand, The Compass Flower, Feathers from the Hill, Opening the Hand, The Rain in the Trees, Travels, The Vixen, The Lost Upland, Unframed Originals, and The Folding Cliffs. His recent works include the collections of poems The River Sound and The Pupil, as well as a new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio and his critically-lauded translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has also published a book of prose entitled The Mays of Ventador, as part of the National Geographic Directions series. Recent reissues of his books include The First Four Books of Poems, and his luminescent translations of Jean Follain’s poems Transparence of the World, and Antonio Porchia’s Voices.

In 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard released The Ends of the Earth, a gathering of essays expressing the breadth of W.S. Merwin’s fascination with the natural world and the explorers who have journeyed through it; this work is Merwin’s first new prose collection in more than a decade. His recent publications include the book of poems Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, fall 2005) a memoir entitled Summer Doorways (Shoemaker & Hoard, September 2005), and his selected poems collection Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 (Copper Canyon Press, spring 2005).

In a recent interview in Poets & Writers, Merwin said: “The poet’s role is always the same, which is trying to see and hear it whole. If you really hear a line of Shakespeare, it will tell you everything. There’s a sort of holographic quality to the arts: If you could get one moment right, it would tell you the whole thing. And that’s true of your own life—each moment is absolutely separate and unique, and yet it contains your entire life.”

Courtesy of Borders, books by W.S. Merwin will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

W.S. Merwin is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the College of Creative Studies. The event is supported by Solo Press. The reading is a Santa Barbara Poetry Month event. Tickets are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. Ticket prices are subject to convenience fees. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.