Acclaimed Poet William S. Merwin visited San Antonio Wednesday, Oct. 19, for a “Dialogue and Reading” at the Health Science Center. Merwin gave the 2005 Ewing Halsell Distinguished Lecture, supported by an endowment from the Ewing Halsell Foundation with the goal of bringing internationally prominent speakers in the arts and sciences to the San Antonio community.
The event was hosted by the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics, where author Abraham C. Verghese, M.D., is director, and the Joaquin Cigarroa Jr. Chair and Marvin Forland Distinguished Professor.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to hear one of the most important voices in literature,” Dr. Verghese said. “In my view, there is no doubt that Merwin is the greatest living poet of our time.”
There was a dialogue between Dr. Verghese and Merwin, followed by the poet reading his own work. Dr. Verghese has known Merwin for several years through participation in the Sun Valley Writers Festival.
“Merwin’s voice is one of the most essential, important, powerful voices today,” said Naomi Nye, poet. “He is a gracious, eloquent speaker who cares about dialogue and has a deep sense of responsibility about our world.”
Following the presentation, there was the formal opening of Carolee Campbell’s book-art exhibit, which features a broadside of a Merwin poem, as well as works from Campbell’s well-regarded
Ninja Press at Twenty retrospective.
With the publication of
Present Company in September, Merwin has produced his 24th volume of poetry in a prolific and varied writing life. Merwin, who was a protégé of W. H. Auden, has been influential in the lives of many younger poets, including Nye. Auden chose Merwin’s first book,
A Mask for Janus, as the Yale Series of Younger Poets winner in 1952. His work has appeared regularly in the
New Yorker and
The Atlantic for decades.
Merwin has been awarded the prestigious Tanning and Lenore Marshall Prizes for poetry and is a recipient of the Lila Wallace-
Readers Digest Fellowship. He also received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
In addition to his accomplishments in poetry, Merwin is a respected translator and essayist. In the early 1950s, he worked in Europe as a translator of Latin, French, Spanish and Portuguese medieval poetry and literature. In the 1960s, he moved to the south of France and later lived in Mexico. He has lived in Hawaii with his wife, Paula, since 1975 and maintains a large property that he devotes to the cultivation of rare and endangered plant species.
Although his early poetry was formal, by the 1960s he had developed the less structured style for which he is famous. He writes of loss, especially loss of places and destruction of the environment and has an intense feeling for landscape, along with a humility and directness that has contributed to his broad appeal.
The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics was formed in 2002. Directed by physician-author Abraham Verghese, M.D., it is a unique program in its emphasis on narrative, on encouraging student self-reflection and on celebrating bedside clinical skills. The full-time faculty, along with 22 volunteer faculty, focus primarily on the medical student experience. The classroom curriculum, which is fully integrated into the four-year medical school program, is complemented by special presentations by physicians, patients, visiting scholars and artists, and by exhibits, readings and performances.
Students come to medicine with a great capacity to imagine the suffering of patients and a great desire to serve. The goal of the Center is to preserve these wonderful qualities which, paradoxically, can be threatened by the rigorous nature of medical training. Studying literature and narrative is one means of being reminded of the larger world out there and being able to imagine the patient’s experience.
For more information about the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, please visit
www.texashumanities.org.
