W.S. Merwin

U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin will deliver Davidson College’s annual Joel A. Conarroe Lecture on Monday, May 2. Also on the calendar next week: writer Malcolm Campbell is in town for a meeting of the Charlotte Writers’ Club North.

POET LAUREATE LECTURES MONDAY

U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin will deliver Davidson College’s annual Joel A. Conarroe Lecture on Monday, May 2. The public is invited to attend the event presentation, reception and book signing, which begins at 8 p.m. in Davidson College’s Duke Family Performance Hall.

Tickets are required for admission, and are free if picked up in person at the College Union ticket office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. Or tickets may be reserved online at www.davidson.com/tickets ^[1] at a service fee cost of $11 per ticket. Tickets may not be reserved by phone, but information is available at 704-894-2135.

Merwin was appointed as the Library of Congress’s 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2010. He is the author of 16 collections of poems, essays on environmental and literary ideas, and a memoir. In addition to his original compositions, he has translated works by Dante, Follain and Porchia and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has received numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Tanning Prize.

Merwin studied poetry at Princeton University with critic R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman. His first book of poetry, “A Mask for Janus,” was selected by W.H. Auden to be published in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1952. In the 1960s, Merwin began developing a distinct style, in which he omitted punctuation and capitalized only the poem’s first letter to convey the flow of language found in the oral tradition, reflecting his belief that poetry is deeply connected to song.

Some of his most influential collections — ‘The Lice” (1967) and “The Carrier of Ladders” (1970) —tie classical myths and legends to political issues of the time. These works express Merwin’s opposition to environmental destruction and the Vietnam War. He famously donated the prize money from his 1971 Pulitzer Prize for “The Carrier of Ladders” to the draft resistance movement.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism. He purchased land and built the home that he lives in today with his wife, Paula Dunaway. He restored the land, which was then a denuded plantation, to a tropical forest that now contains 700 endangered species of indigenous plants. In 2010, Merwin and his wife created Merwin Conservancy to preserve the home and the palm forest as a retreat for writers and botanists.

CAMPBELL AT WRITERS CLUB

Charlotte Writers Club North presents an evening with Malcolm Campbell on Thursday, May 5, in Davidson. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at Davidson College Presbyterian Church Room 201, Concord Road and Main Street.

Malcolm Campbell is the author of two adventure travel guidebooks, editor of professional golf instructor Dana Rader’s golf instructional book, “Rock Solid Golf,” and founder of the independent publishing house, Walkabout Press. In 20 years as a commercial writer, he’s written everything from power-tool-accessory catalogues to television commercials to cover/feature stories for national magazines. He is the 2008 recipient of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, and he teaches freshman writing at UNC-Charlotte and at Queens University.

Founded in 1922, CWC is a membership organization whose mission is to support Charlotte’s community of writers. Charlotte Writers’ Club North typically meets at 7:00 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, room 201. The public is always welcome to attend. For more information, please visit www.charlottewritersclub.org ^[2].