ESSAY
Reading a Dysfunctional World
Why Merwin’s The Lice is needed now more than ever.
The Lice, W.S. Merwin’s sixth and possibly most iconic collection
of poetry, was published in 1967... its confluence of mythology and ugly physical reality struck a nerve with a world shaken politically and environmentally to its core... these are poems charged with uncertainty, written in a world on the brink of environmental meltdown torn by tyrants ...
The Lice is relevant politically and environmentally... because it gives us a mode to experience a dysfunctional world...
The Lice is relevant politically and environmentally... because it gives us a mode to experience a dysfunctional world...
Poets who had cut their teeth on Modernism and New Criticism ... found themselves turning more and more to political activism...Merwin discovered a different way of being political in poetry: the politics of negative capability.
In The Lice, Merwin abandons punctuation altogether... Losing punctuation in The Lice allows Merwin to loosen the relationship between sense and syntax... “For a Coming Extinction” begins,
Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing.” ...There is just enough connective tissue to hold all possibilities at once without the poem’s falling into ambiguous mush,
