Merwin says poetry is all about listening

"Poetry always begins and ends with listening," according to celebrated poet W.S. Merwin, who will speak and read from his work at the Salt Lake Main Library on Tuesday.

"You listen for something only you can hear," Merwin said by phone from California. "It is not something you immediately understand. To me there is a big difference between prose and poetry. You read prose but you respond to poetry by listening to it. It gets you in a way you cannot describe."

Because Merwin believes so strongly in the sound of poetry, he considers it important for poets to make their public readings expressive of their work. "Some poets read very well and others read terribly. Robert Graves, a poet I worked for in my 20s, was a terrible reader. He mumbled and dropped his lines. Robert Lowell was a very bad reader. Jane Herschfield is a good reader.

"I don't like performance poets. They read as if they were rock stars with microphones. But that's not what I'm talking about. The reader might think the poet reads dramatically but he doesn't need to fling himself around. Some are quite plain and simple in their reading — but they're also very clear."

The prolific Merwin, now 78, was born in New York City but currently lives in Hawaii. He has spent many years in Europe both as a poet and a translator of Latin, Spanish and French poetry. The author of 15 books of poetry, 20 books of translation, numerous plays, four books of prose and a memoir, Merwin won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The Carrier of Ladders" in 1970.

His newly published book "Migration" is a collection of poems that spans his 50-year career and includes both his early and his most recent work.

Merwin is especially well-known for his rejection of poetry's traditional rules of meter and punctuation. Since he became a serious poet in his 30s, he has generally written poems with very long lines and no punctuation. Some critics have teased him about that. One writer, James DeFord, mocked him in 1994 by writing a very long paragraph describing the nature of Merwin's work. It had no punctuation.

"It seemed to me the rules of poetry were not very important," said Merwin. "Prose has a protocol of its own, but that's not true of poetry. When you and I talk to each other over the telephone, we don't have periods and semi-colons in the air all the time. We understand each other without them."