Making the World a Better Place, One Writer at a Time
In the wake of the ill-advised canceling of federal funds for Iowa's world-renowned International Writing Program, TFP revisits our 2022 conversation with friend and IWP Director Christopher Merrill.
Iowa City, Iowa
Days before it was announced that the Trump administration had cut off all federal support for the world-renowned International Writing Program (IWP) here at the University of Iowa, I asked Christopher Merrill, a friend and the IWP director since 2000, for coffee. “Later in the week might work,” he replied. “We will soon make public some terrible news.”
Terrible is an understatement.
On March 6, the University of Iowa announced that the U.S. State Department had “terminated” nearly $1 million in federal grants long earmarked for the IWP, stating that the grants “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.” Due to this loss of funds, the IWP will be forced to drastically reduce its 2025 Fall Residency program (cutting the number of international writers in attendance from about 30 to fewer than 15) and shut down its summer youth program, distance learning courses, and creative-writing mentorship program.
“Terrible news” for the IWP and Iowa indeed. But while Merrill and others associated with the IWP and the University of Iowa would never say it, it’s also a travesty and unforced error of historic significance. Not least because it displays—in full view, for friend and foe alike—the idiotic shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s trashing of the postwar network of security alliances, soft power, and cultural diplomacy that those who fought and won World War II, the Greatest Generation, formed in hopes of preventing the next global conflagration. The amount of goodwill toward the U.S. that the IWP has generated worldwide since its founding in 1967 is immeasurable.
Moreover, the notion that this is about “efficiency”—as in the unelected Elon Musk’s manic, chainsaw-wielding Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—is also blatantly false. The relative pittance of federal funds annually granted to the IWP has, year in and year out, earned the U.S. not just goodwill but revenue. As the University of Iowa has made clear, “The literary contributions of the International Writing Program significantly impact the University of Iowa and Iowa City communities. Further, writers and their cohorts have generated economic investment in the state of Iowa that would ordinarily be sent elsewhere. More than 90% of funds associated with the IWP’s federal grants are spent domestically, which would have resulted in slightly less than $1 million going back into the U.S. economy over the next year.”
In a recent IWP statement, which can be read and listened to here, Merrill thanked the local and global literary community “for their messages of support,” which he called “truly heartening in this difficult moment.” The IWP remains, he said, “committed to continuing to host the best possible Fall Residency this year and in coming years, and we’re grateful to have you with us in that mission. Many of you have asked how you can help. There are three ways that you can get involved.
“First, help us keep telling our story. Talk to your friends and family about the impact the IWP has had on your life, on Iowa, and on the international literary community, and let them know how important it is to continue the Fall Residency.
“Second, if you have the means to support us financially, we very much appreciate donations of any size. Remember that for people in the U.S., donations to the IWP are tax deductible. All funds will go directly to financing the Residency, including travel, lodging, cultural programming for writers, and public events like readings and panel discussions at the Iowa City Public Library.
“Third, if you want to really go above and beyond, combine these two things: organize in your community. Talk with friends and colleagues about how you can collectively raise awareness and funds for the IWP.
“While this is certainly a challenging moment, we also see it as an opportunity to renew our commitment to connecting writers around the world. Sometimes it takes the possibility of losing something to appreciate what you have. We hope to take this chance to build new connections with local and international communities, as we have done for nearly six decades now, and strengthen the bonds we have. We hope you’ll join us in that mission.”
I, for one, will continue to join my friend Christopher Merrill and the IWP in that mission. And I hope that all TFP readers will as well. In that spirit, I’m lifting the paywall on my February 2022 TFP conversation with him, in which he—an acclaimed poet in his own right—explains why we return to our favorite poets and specific poems throughout our lives: “We keep coming back to them because they carry the promise of revealing something new to us at a different moment in our lives, when we will most need whatever insight it is the poet managed to grasp all those years and centuries and countries away.”
If ever there was a time we needed those insights, it is now.
—MJ
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Feb. 16, 2022
Making the World a Better Place, One Writer at a Time
A TFP conversation with Christopher Merrill—acclaimed poet, journalist, memoirist, and director of the world-renowned International Writing Program.
By Michael Judge
The first time I met Christopher Merrill, the award-winning author, translator and poet whom W.S. Merwin rightly praised as “one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinarily rich generation,” he was doing, perhaps, what he does best—welcoming writers from around the globe to a small Midwestern college town and a shared experience that will change them forever.
It was a late summer day in 2005. Merrill was standing in the sun in his unadorned Iowa backyard surrounded by writers from Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Burma, China, Slovenia, Libya, Kuwait and Kosovo, among other nations, when I introduced myself. I’ll never forget the gleam in his eye when he offered his hand and said warmly, “Michael, welcome, welcome. I’m so happy you could make it.”
Merrill has been the tireless director of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa since 2000, where over the past two decades he and his staff have welcomed more than 600 writers from scores of countries, particularly from parts of the world where literary and personal freedom is restricted. The IWP was founded in 1967 by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle as a nonacademic, internationally focused counterpart to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Since then, over 1,500 writers from more than 150 countries—including two subsequent Nobel Prize winners [and in 2024, a third]—have been in residence at the University of Iowa.
The IWP’s stated mission is to “promote mutual understanding by providing writers from every part of the world the necessary space, physical or imaginative, for creative work and collaboration in an intercultural setting.” That mission, supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is “anchored in the values of freedom of expression and inclusiveness, and in the belief that creativity has the power to shape the world.” Those may sound like lofty goals in our increasingly tumultuous and polarized world, where nationalism, not internationalism, is on the rise. But each year, that mission is accomplished, friendships are made, and the world inches toward understanding.
After our first meeting in 2005, I boldly sent Merrill some of my poems and asked if we could meet. We met over coffee where we quickly moved from my poems to more interesting subjects—our travels, our backgrounds in journalism and poetry, and above all our affection for, to borrow Czeslaw Milosz’s phrase, the “tournament of hunchbacks” that produce what the world later calls literature. Before long, my wife and I were hosting an annual IWP party, complete with open bar, live music, and a smoke-’em-if-you got-’em policy the writers loved. I soon thought of Chris as a friend and mentor—wise, gentle, and understanding of the silliness, braggadocio and insecurities that so often accompany the talents of a writer. This, I believe, is his true gift. The ability to see the person who is the writer, and offer that person a home, not just for a few months on a Midwestern campus. But a home in a true community of writers, a welcoming home, where one can return again and again.
Merrill was born in western Massachusetts in 1957 and raised in New Jersey. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also published translations, several edited volumes, and six books of nonfiction, including Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars (1999); Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (2005); and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (2011). His work has been translated into nearly 40 languages, and his journalism, essays and poems appear in many publications. Much of his work stems from his 10 wartime journeys to the Balkans from 1992-96, as well as his journeys to over 50 countries as director of the IWP. His most recent book, Flares, is a collection of mesmerizing prose poems that flow from his travel notes. [In 2023, after our TFP conversation, Arrowsmith Press published Merrill’s masterful book-length poem, On the Road to Lviv, translated into Ukrainian by Nina Murray and hailed by poet Ilya Kaminski as “an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war.”]
It’s not in Dubai or Zagreb, but a more domestic setting that I reach my old friend. Merrill is at his home in Iowa City, just a few miles from my own, when I reach him by telephone.
“I’ve been reading all your books of poetry and nonfiction these past few days,” I say, “and marveling at your output. It’s quite astonishing.”
“Well, that's just a function of having lived long enough to accumulate some pages,” laughs Merrill.
“I’ve lived almost as long as you and the pages aren't accumulating that fast,” I reply. “You seem to have four clones that do things for you.”
“Yeah, if only.”
“We’ve known each other for about 16 years now, which is hard to believe,” I say. “But I woke up this morning and I thought, well, I better take a look at the news, so Chris thinks I know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t good. Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Burma and the reimprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the ongoing nightmare of Syria. So already I’m depressing myself. And then I remember something I used to say when I was attending the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: ‘The world would be better off if we delivered poems to people’s doorsteps instead of news.’”
“I can imagine that went over well,” chuckles Merrill.
“It didn’t go over well,” I laugh. “But I’m starting to believe that once again. And this is one of the reasons why I started The First Person. All the polemics and all the talking heads talking at each other instead of with each other is not going anywhere. While the first person that we speak with in poems is in many ways a speaking with the sacred within ourselves. And in meaningful conversation, we engage in that as well. It’s a back and forth and we can take each other’s places and arrive where we never imagined we would go.”
“Right,” says Merrill, who from the start helped me hammer out and fine tune the concept of The First Person before it was launched. I tried out a host of names on him, and it was he who said definitively The First Person is the one. He also offered to suggest writers from around the globe to contribute TFP guest essays, an invaluable help for a publisher with a weekly deadline.
I recently read a fantastic interview with Seamus Heaney in the L.A. Times, published in late 2000, “Can a Poem Stop a Tank?” by the Chinese poet and political activist Bei Ling. “Heaney says of course a poem can’t stop a tank,” I tell Merrill. “This is after Tiananmen and Bei Ling is saying ‘Come on. You’ve got to give me more than that! Tell me then, what is the function of poetry?’ And Heaney goes into this beautiful thing about poetry and the ‘we’ versus the ‘I.’ He says, beautifully, ‘The first function of poetry is to allow poetry to happen again, to make it continue. . . . I would say that the pressures on me have indeed been to some extent political, but I don’t think of politics as my subject. I think of some form of response to the surrounding conditions as being my responsibility. I don’t know whether one can play with this in Chinese, but there are these two words in English, ‘responsibility’ and ‘answerability.’ . . . The responsible poet is the poet who is answering to whatever is out there in the world. Answering with his whole being. I think, in other words, that the poetry of personal journey, which can seem to be self-enclosed, is often an answer, often even a cry back at circumstances. Maybe it is a cry of pleasure at the sight of still water or a cry of anger at the sight of atrocity. But what’s important is the answering energy. That is the fundamental responsible thing at the heart of poetry.’”
“Perfect,” says Merrill. “The first thing that comes to mind is a line Charlie Simic wrote in an essay on the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia. ‘Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.’ And with that statement, he’s trying to distinguish between the claims of the tribes of we, and what he regards as the oldest values in human society, the individual lyric. Charlie sides with the individual lyric, which is very close to what I imagine the poet’s role is. We bear witness to whatever place we find ourselves, in a physical sense, in an imaginative sense, in a sense of memory. And our job in responding to what we see and experience is to record as faithfully and vividly as we can, what that experience, that imaginative action might be. I often think that what my job is as a poet is to keep my eyes and ears open for whatever might be traveling down the pike toward me.
“At 3:00 this morning, for example, some lines started running through my head, which so often happens. And I have no idea where those lines are coming from or where they might take me, but that’s the point at which I open up my phone and I send an email to myself with some of those lines. And then of course, once a few lines appear, they demand more lines. And before you know it it’s 7 a.m. and you're thinking, ‘Oh my God, I have a long day.’
“But there are also some lines that I have no idea where they’re going to take me, but if I’m alert and if I respond accordingly to the possibilities embedded in each word, in each line, then I have the chance to travel someplace that I likely never have been before. And that's a place where, with any luck, I will learn something about the meaning of my walk in the sun.”
“That’s beautiful,” I reply. “And sometimes I think as poets and journalists we are in a way lucky—or cursed—in that we have another way to talk about the world through journalism. Heaney gets to that later in his interview with Bei Ling. He says basically, well, there are other ways to address political questions and terror. And some of these things are better addressed through journalism.”
“I think that's a really useful way to think about it,” says Merrill. “When I was covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, at a certain point I realized that I was not going to be writing poems about what I was witnessing. Those poems were the province of the poets living there. They knew in the marrow of their bones what it was they were undergoing. I felt that my job was to record, to document in prose, the kinds of encounters I had, the interviews I did, the stories I heard, the jokes people told. I thought that my job was to get all of that down. And it was a very long time before I even thought that I might try to write poems about it.”
“In the Heaney conversation with Bei Ling,” I say, “He talks about Auden's attempts during the Spanish Civil War to write partisan poetry where he slips into the we instead of the I. And Heaney has this great saying, he calls this the place where you are herd, H-E-R-D, instead of heard, H-E-A-R-D.”
“Yes,” says Merrill. “The poet is the one off on the side, observing and listening, and, ipso facto, the poet should be outside the herd.”
“Which reminds me of one of my great heroes,” I say. “And I think one of yours, René Char, who seems, heroically—and almost miraculously—to engage in both worlds at once. He’s the poet and the warrior, the witness and the hero. And in Hypnos Waking, and before that in Leaves of Hypnos, his ‘war journal’ written while fighting Nazis as a leader of the French Resistance, it’s almost as if the fragments and aphorisms are the only way he can address this duality.”
“Exactly,” says Merrill. “They are the distillation of what he has experienced. And in a warzone the experience . . . it's so complicated, because you're trying to understand what's happening through the fog of war. And yet it’s utterly simple: Am I going to survive this or not? And Char is so brilliant at capturing that. And you’re right about those aphorisms. They are for me the distillation of that experience.”
I say, “Char has a one-line entry in one of his books: ‘How can you hear me? I speak from so far.’ He’s calling out to the reader to experience what he's experiencing.”
“Exactly,” says Merrill.
“And then there’s you in your bed at night, hearing ‘this voice’ and writing it down as a poem—it’s the same. That’s the lyrical I—the first person that he’s hearing when he says, ‘How can you hear me? I speak from so far.’”
“That’s right on the money,” says Merrill. “It also makes me think how, in his early years, he was affiliated with the surrealists. And there’s that line that André Breton had about just as he was dozing off, that's when he would hear lines that would make their way into a poem of his. And I think that in that liminal space between being awake and falling asleep, strange things can happen. Yet with Char we have to remember that Hypnos is waking—because at the end of the day, there is no one more awake, more alert than René Char, both as a leader of the French Resistance and as the poet documentarian of his own life.”
“One of my favorite short poems is a Franz Wright translation of Char’s prose poem ‘Line of Faith,’ which reads:
The grace of the stars resides in their compelling us to speak, in telling us we are not alone, that the dawn has a ceiling, and my fire, your two hands.
Char is awake by the fire, at daybreak. And he knows the grace of the stars resides in their compelling us to speak. I’m thinking of Jeff Bezos flying up to the stars while Char understands that no, the beauty of the stars is that we need to speak together. We need to communicate.”
“Right, right, right,” says Merrill.
“But before the pandemic, I never fully understood that Char’s literally sitting around a fire—probably in the mountains after drinking wine and eating a roasted rabbit, and maybe sabotaging a few Nazi operations. And his comrade is there, by the fire, maybe dozing off. And he writes this poem and the last image is the dawn has a ceiling, and my fire, your two hands. It took on a different meeting at the height of Covid, when I was having friends over, sitting around a campfire in the backyard, talking and drinking. We would sit for hours, warming our hands. And all of a sudden, I thought, ‘My God, this poem has come back to life for me.’”
“And that’s what poems do,” says Merrill. “At different moments in our lives, we return to them. And they tell us something that we did not hear in any earlier reading of the poem. We keep coming back to them because they carry the promise of revealing something new to us at a different moment in our lives, when we will most need whatever insight it is the poet managed to grasp all those years and centuries and countries away.”
“I was talking to our mutual friend Xu Xi the other day,” I say. “She recently wrote a lovely essay for TFP about Beijing’s clampdown on freedom and democracy in Hong Kong. She says she can already sense a shift in Hong Kong toward allegory. It’s a way for writers to continue writing and commenting on authoritarian regimes, similar to poets like Zbigniew Herbert writing in Eastern Europe during and after World War II. There's a passage in Herbert’s poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” where he writes:
you have survived not so you might live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when reason fails you be courageous in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts and your helpless Anger—may it be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten may you never be abandoned by your sister Scorn for informers executioners cowards—they will win go to your funeral with relief throw a lump of earth a woodworm will write you a smooth-shaven life and do not forgive in truth it is not in your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn beware however of overweening pride examine your fool’s face in the mirror repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring the bird with an unknown name the winter oak the light on a wall the splendor of the sky they do not need your warm breath they are there to say: no one will console you . . .
“A couple things come to mind about that,” says Merrill. “One is, remember how Herbert ended up writing for the drawer for a certain period of time, refusing to knuckle under to the artistic tenets of Soviet realism. And then how he discovered ways to address these issues in a fable-like manner, his enigmatic poem “Pebble,” for example. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson said, in ways that the authoritarians won’t be able to understand. Mr. Cogito is one of the masks that Herbert adopts in order to tell all the truth. And what I've discovered over two decades at the IWP, where we host many writers living in authoritarian countries, is that one way or another they discover their own narrative means or devices to tell the truth and hopefully not end up in prison—or worse.
“It is instructive that we find ourselves at this moment in history realizing that we need to relearn those lessons,” continues Merrill. “Because that dark cloud is coming to hang over large parts of the earth, including this country. That reality, I think, all writers need to find ways—small or large—to accommodate or embody in their work. So that the lessons of this time don’t get buried.”
“Which brings me to your book,” I say, “published in 2021, Flares. It reminds me a bit of James Tate and his prose poems in Distance from Loved Ones. But it’s also reminiscent of Henri Michaux’s work and Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, which I loved in college. I was like, man, I want to be this guy. But somehow you sort of became that guy in a different way, traveling the globe finding visiting writers for the IWP. At the same time, Flares seems to me a reference to shooting flares up into the sky, a cry for help in a way, in a world that’s spinning out of control.”
“Much of that book,” explains Merrill, “was written during cultural-diplomacy missions. I had notebooks filled with lines from my travels. I also gave writing exercises to students in places like Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, and I did the exercises along with them. On some level I was tapping into a deeper part of what that experience might mean to me. It makes me think of when I first met Bill Stafford—it was in Salt Lake City—and he said he had just been in Texas. And the editor of the Texas Review asked him if he had any poems about Texas. And Stafford looked at me, and he had this twinkle in his eye, and said, ‘I told him no, but by golly, I got one the next day.’
“So, on some level, I think I adopted that attitude. I thought, OK, if I’m going to be in Harare, Zimbabwe, I’m going to try to write about this, but I’ll come at it from a different angle. But I didn’t go about it thinking I’m going to write a book of prose poems. And you’re right to note the influence of Cortázar and Michaux. I would add Kafka to that. All writers whose magical view of the world, often a darkening magical view, have helped me to write my own poems.”
“Which brings me to the importance of cultural diplomacy,” I say, “which is really what you’ve devoted your life to, alongside your writing. What exactly is cultural diplomacy and why is it so important now?”
“Well,” explains Merrill, “cultural diplomacy has been defined as the exchange of information and ideas preferably in person-to-person exchanges. What we hope to do at the IWP is to create a space in which talented writers from all around the world can gather and research and write new books, but also engage in conversations with people who, under any other circumstances, they would never manage to meet.
“I was in a meeting earlier today; we were talking about a project in South Sudan, and I mentioned the ways in which we often have in residence at the same time an Israeli and a Palestinian writer who never agree on political matters, but who with more regularity than one might imagine, find lots of common ground. The same is true for Indian and Pakistani writers or Turkish and Armenian writers. We find a way to have conversations in less of a charged political atmosphere. In an atmosphere of creativity and hope. As I say to the writers on the first day: ‘We hope that you leave with many new pages written. With many new impressions of this country and of the various literary traditions you will be exposed to during your time here, and with many new friends.’
“And that's the dream of cultural diplomacy that you build up at least some small reservoir of goodwill, so that when the going gets really tough in any charged political situation, you hope that writers will take a more nuanced view of what's happening than they might have taken before they had a face-to-face encounter with a writer from a country that their own country is at odds with. And in that way, we hope that by the end of their IWP experience, they have a bigger view of the world. Which by my lights is always useful for writing. I know that the writers I'm most drawn to are those who seem to have the largest field of vision because of their experience or their reading, or their temperament, or some combination of the above.”
“And perhaps the writers will also come away with a different understanding of America and the diversity of the American people,” I say. “Is that part of it?”
“Exactly. Just one somewhat mundane example. It is so often the case that writers here see how much volunteering happens in the United States. I mean, we have volunteers at this and at that. And for many of the writers coming to Iowa City who've never experienced such things, that in itself is a revelation. And this program would look much different if it were hosted in, say, New York or L.A. or D.C. Here in the middle of the country in a small, very creative city, the writers have the chance to interact with people from many walks of life, as well as from many different literary traditions. When they return home, they may still have a chip on their shoulder about the United States, but we hope it's a more informed chip on their shoulder.”
“I'll wind this up quickly,” I say. “But I just came across this great Albert Camus quote, which I think in some ways encapsulates this tension between journalism and poetry and maybe journalism and prose poetry, and journalism and fiction and allegory. He, of course, was a Nobel Prize winning writer. But as Mathew Lamb reminds us in his Public Things newsletter, Camus was also a fearless journalist. The press, Camus argued, must ‘operate far from the deafening tumult of partisan voices’ and offer ‘a forum where independent minds can still bear witness without pretentiousness or fear.’ In an ‘age of lies,’ he wrote in 1947, the same year The Plague was published, ‘even the clumsiest frankness is preferable to the best-orchestrated ruse.’”
“That is so true,” says Merrill. “We are so often brought up short by someone delivering a blunt truth. And what keeps writers going is that you hope at some point in the writing of a poem, you find yourself somewhere you've never been. And you can say in the plainest possible terms what it is you think is actually going on and then test that insight against all the possible ways in which you could have it wrong. The poet Robert Hass has that wonderful exercise—a list of things to do or don't do in a poem. And the last one is if the poem ends with a truth or truism, reverse the terms and see if that isn't even more truthful, and I've always thought, that's what you do, that’s it. You keep writing. You’re listening around the edges. You’re trying to understand what you think you’re witnessing. And when you come to some conclusion, just say, ‘Well, let’s just see if the exact opposite conclusion might be even closer to the truth.’ Surely when I was covering the Balkan war, I could tell when it was time to get to the other side, when I found myself in conversation, parroting things that I’d heard from too many people on one side of the war or another. And I would realize this and say to myself, ‘Ah, OK, I’ve got to get to the other side. I’ve lost my clarity here. I’m starting to echo people I’ve heard. Time to move on.’ And that was a really useful lesson to learn and relearn and relearn. Which is, after all, the fate of a writer, isn’t it?”
TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE
Thanks for this. The world needs more.
Thanks, Chris I’m reminded of René Char’s short intro to Hypnos Waking:
“These notes record the resistance of humanism aware of its duties, discreet about its virtues, wishing to keep in reserve the inaccessible as a free field for the fantasy of its suns, and resolved to pay the price for this.”