Aging and the Arts
Join Innovations in Healthy Aging: Arts and Aging for monthly poetry discussions, led by docents from the UArizona Poetry Center. The event is free and no preparation or knowledge of poetry is necessary to participate. For anyone who enjoys poetry or learning more about poets in a conversational setting, this informal gathering includes many opportunities to contribute to the conversation and ask questions. It is also a great way to meet people in the community who have similar interests.
About W.S. Merwin: In addition to the appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010, W.S. Merwin has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the Bollingen Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Lilly Prize and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His "Migration: New and Selected Poems" won the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry and "Present Company", which closely followed it, earned him the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Merwin has also translated both Dante’s "Purgatorio" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", for which he won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Howard Morton Landon Translation Prize. In 1999, W.S. Merwin was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for a jointly-held position along with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glück. He has been honored as laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia, receiving the international poetry award, the Golden Wreath Award. He received the 1971 Pulitzer prize for Poetry for his collection "The Carrier of Ladders", and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The Shadow of Sirius", widely praised as one of his finest books and lauded by one reviewer as “the irreducible essence of his art.” The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was awarded to Merwin in November 2010.
As his many accolades attest, Merwin’s poetry is monumental. It is both brilliant and relevant. Merwin quietly and insistently reminds us that we are part of an endangered ecosystem and that all life is precious. In his later years, Merwin lived in Hawaii where he and his wife, Paula, restored a rainforest.
