JAN GARDEN CASTRO: Your first main division s included poems.

JAN GARDEN CASTRO: Your first main division s included poems, an edited collection Outcroppings: John McPhee in the West, translations of Andr?© Breton, and The Forgotten Language: Contemporary author of poemss in Nature. In your introduction to the latter, you made near important points-that language is like nature "an order larger than any individual," and, quoting W s Merwin, "if nature is demolished the nature of language, too, will be forgotten or eradicated." Could you further discuss what you mean and the ready dangers language is facing?

CHRISTOPHER MERRILL: When I was putting together The Forgotten Language, my trouble was with the wholesale destruction of the natural order, a destruction which has not abated, particularly in the common political climate when it have the appearances that the Bush administration is hell bent forward eating up as much of the wilderness and easing as many of the industrial regulations as possible. moreover one might also argue that in a time of 24/7 freshs cycles, where television is the dominant media of the day, the kinds of complexity embodied in numbers for example, or literary fiction or literary essays can also be endangered. We live in a time in which what passes for political discourse amounts to a two of talking heads screaming at each other from the right and the far right. It present the appearances to me that what submit tos in language-what makes language in such a manner vital-are those efforts by literary artists to perpendicular the depths of the language to find disclosed something about the complexity of our experience-the complicated, ambivalent nature of our walk in the day-star What I saw fifteen years ago in boundarys of an attack on the natural world appears to me to be emblematic of a larger attack forward consciousness.

CASTRO: Your influences span many improvements and generations and include Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot, Mann, Marquez, Perse and Milosz. Would you like to explanation on your choices?

MERRILL: In Burma this winter I spoke with a writer who said he a great deal of preferred to read than to write, although he had published 45 novels. I be moved the same way. Writing waxs out of reading. And the days that I dedicate to reading are some of my best days. I gain mechanical value and inspiration from other author of poemss and writers, for the range of literary possibilities is almost infinite. The more widely we read the better chance we have of glimpsing something forward the periphery of our consciousness-which might lead us to of recent origin terrain. I'm always eager to reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point across new writers, new visions of for what cause to go forward in my have a title to work.

CASTRO: As you've pointed without to me earlier, the map of the International Writing Program participants spans almost all of the continents and includes a thousand people

MERRILL: My do job-work is a daily education in the limitations I have as a writer and thinker. IfI eternally imagine that I know something about any part of the world, I shortly rub up against my blindness in the work of someone writing at the zest of what's possible.

Last year we had our first writer from Madagascar, and I have to say that before he arrived I had given no conceit to the literature of Madagascar. he was a portentous literary ambassador for his land and what I felt in his company was, Ah, by what mode little I know. Indeed we as a folks know very little about the caesura of the world-a problem given the enormous political, military, and economic power we put in action around the world, often in a unilateral fashion. If the education that I realize on a daily basis were repeated at the top on a levels of our government it might exasperate the humble foreign policy that George W Bush, for example, promised in the 2000 electoral campaign.

CASTRO: in what manner true. In fact, even granting you seem to make the world your family you've spoken of exile in your interview with Farideh Hasanzadeh, as the "essential human condition-whether we imagine ourselves to be exiled from childhood, our homeland, or paradise." Could you discuss to what extent you've variously shaped personal experiences of exile into poesy and prose?

MERRILL: I'm reminded of Czeslaw Milosz's notion that exile, like poison, if it doesn't kill you, will make you stronger Of course he knows an altogether different order of exile than I was talking about in that interview.

But it is veritable that we are all exiled from something-our childhood, our homeland, our language. And that perception of loss motivates some to write-to fill the emptiness at the heart of being. This is with what intent I am interested in writers like Milosz who are determined to make feeling out of their exile. For Milosz is the great religious imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer of our time. We think of him as a political author of poems and indeed he went into exile when he broke with the communist direction in 1951. But the larger issue of exile he addresses is the idea that in the recent age the imagination has been drained of its religious satisfied What will fill that hole? These are the questions he addresses-theological questions addressed by way of the likes of Donne, Herbert, and Hopkins-questions that relate to me, although I address them, of course, in a greatly diminished way.

CASTRO: That transforms the question. In 1992 you were planning to pass hiking in the Balkans with your friend Ales Debeljak. Had you read Rebecca West's account of her travels in then Yugoslavia in Black Hawk Grey Falcon'? for what reason did you educate yourself about the literary sentences of your friends and the complicated history and politics of the region?