{"id":129979,"date":"2019-04-08T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=129979"},"modified":"2019-03-26T13:51:17","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T13:51:17","slug":"berryman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/04\/berryman\/","title":{"rendered":"Berryman"},"content":{"rendered":"

I will tell you what he told me
\nin the years just after the war
\nas we then called
\nthe second world war<\/p>\n

don\u2019t lose your arrogance yet he said
\nyou can do that when you\u2019re older
\nlose it too soon and you may
\nmerely replace it with vanity<\/p>\n

just one time he suggested
\nchanging the usual order
\nof the same words in a line of verse
\nwhy point out a thing twice<\/p>\n

he suggested I pray to the Muse
\nget down on my knees and pray
\nright there in the corner and he
\nsaid he meant it literally<\/p>\n

it was in the days before the beard
\nand the drink but he was deep
\nin tides of his own through which he sailed
\nchin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop<\/p>\n

he was far older than the dates allowed for
\nmuch older than I was he was in his thirties
\nhe snapped down his nose with an accent
\nI think he had affected in England<\/p>\n

as for publishing he advised me
\nto paper my wall with rejection slips
\nhis lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
\nwith the vehemence of his views about poetry<\/p>\n

he said the great presence
\nthat permitted everything and transmuted it
\nin poetry was passion
\npassion was genius and he praised movement and invention<\/p>\n

I had hardly begun to read
\nI asked how can you ever be sure
\nthat what you write is really
\nany good at all and he said you can\u2019t<\/p>\n

you can\u2019t you can never be sure
\nyou die without knowing
\nwhether anything you wrote was any good
\nif you have to be sure don\u2019t write<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote over fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin’s unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I will tell you what he told me
\nin the years just after the war
\nas we then called
\nthe second world war<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":129980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}