Yet he's ambivalent about solitude. A Merwin poem is a highly crafted thing. He doesn't use punctuation anymore, and often begins a sentence on the preceding line. We are sitting on the porch of his house. The house, small and quite dark, is built on the lip of a dormant volcano, Haleakala, that rises 10,000 feet above the sea.
Poetry is physical.
As Pound said, poetry has one pole in reason and one pole in music. It's like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing. Merwin admits his work is sometimes abstract. It's the way the fact is heard or seen that counts.