Merwin to give public reading

U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin is scheduled to give a public reading on
May 4 to close the Library of Congress’s spring literary season.

{mosads}Merwin will also sign books after the reading. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, most recently in 2009 for his collection The Shadow of Sirius. He also won the prize in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders. Other award-winning works among his library of more than 30 books include Present Company and Migration: New and Selected Poems.

Next week’s event will mark Merwin’s second reading at the library since being named poet laureate in July. He first read at the Library of Congress in October as part of the literary season’s opening. The poet laureate typically gives public readings at the LOC twice a year.

Merwin, 83, was born in New York and raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but since 1976 has lived in Hawaii, where he has raised endangered palm trees on a former pineapple plantation.

An avowed environmentalist who often writes about the relationship between humans and nature, Merwin told The Hill in an interview last year that he accepted the position of poet laureate with the goal of making poetry a bigger part of Americans’ daily lives.

“I would like to interest more people in poetry,” he said. “I’d also like to make the connection between poetry and the rest of life.”

The reading is scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium on the Thomas Jefferson Building’s ground level. The event is free and open to the public.