W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) was an essential poet: one who shows us life, who writes us into living and into becoming old. His last poems, collected in Garden Time, were written as he was going blind.
Kevin Young's beautiful remembrance tribute to Merwin in The New York (March 20, 2019) remembered his oysters; Dan Chiasson's remembrance reprinted his arresting and beautiful poem For the Anniversary of My Death:
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
As Chiasson writes, now we know which day: March 12, 2019.
In the clip below, W.S. Merwin talks about writing poetry and about meeting Ezra Pound when he was 18 and still at college and Pound was in the psychiatric ward at St Elizabeth's Hospital. He then reads 'Late Spring', a poem included in his Bloodaxe Selected Poems. This film is from the Academy of American Poets DVD The Poet's View: Intimate Profiles of Five Major American Poets, which features Kay Ryan, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht and W.S. Merwin:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17029