“Homecoming” (W.S. Merwin)

Many thanks to my guest today, Mark Olival-Bartley. Born and raised on O'ahu, Mark is a freelance compositionist based in Munich, Germany. He studied at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Hawai'i Pacific University, and the City College of New York. In addition to Honolulu and Munich, he spent significant periods of time in Greenland, Denmark, Johnston Atoll, Wyoming, and Harlem. For many years, he wrote on the theme of disease ecology for EcoHealth. His recently-finished dissertation at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München is a theory of poetry, titled Esemplastic Ecstasy in the Metasonnetry of E. A. Robinson.

In this episode, we discuss W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), one of our truly great poets. Merwin served as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010-2011, and he was the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. He wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. Throughout his career, he has been associated with the anti-war movement of the 1960s, Buddhist philosophy, and deep ecology. From his remote home in Maui, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island’s rainforests.

Links: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-s-merwin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin

https://www.theamericansonnet.com/mark-olival-bartley.html

https://merwinconservancy.org

https://www.linkedin.com/in/compositionist/

Theme music for Walking Inside Poems (“Girl in a Green Dress”) by Krajicek & Shafer, from the album Blue Midwestern Dream (Borderline Social Club).

HOMECOMING (W.S. Merwin)

Once only when the summer
was nearly over and my own
hair had been white as the day’s clouds
for more years than I was counting
I stood by the garden at evening
Paula was still weeding around
flowers that open after dark
and I looked up to the clear sky
and saw the new moon and at that
moment from behind me a band
of dark birds and then another
after it flying in silence
long curving wings hardly moving
the plovers just in from the sea
and the flight clear from Alaska
half their weight gone to get them home
but home now arriving without
a sound as it rose to meet them