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Merwin and Mining

what he does / All his life to keep alive gets into / The grain of him

—W. S. Merwin, “The Miner”

I first read “The Drunk in the Furnace” in an English class at the University of Scranton. The instructor led us through a close reading and then asked if anyone knew where the poem was set. No one did. “Here, in Scranton,” he said. Most people in class were out-of-staters, mainly from New Jersey and Long Island, so they knew nothing about the furnaces. I didn’t know much about them either, I confess, beyond their location. It never occurred to me—or anyone else, I imagine—to visit them, despite the fact that the furnaces were no more than a few minutes’ walk from where we sat. Looking back, I see that I was being taught what most literary critics are trained to do: to keep my head down and pay attention to the text, only the text. Readers should put the ordinary world aside: you cannot get there from here anyway, after all, because a poem offers a perception of the world, not the world.

But these days, I cannot get the world off my mind.

Had we walked along Monroe Avenue, stepped across the railroad tracks behind the Lackawanna Station, and made our way down into the hollow to read the poem in the shadow of the furnaces, would our reading of it have changed?

I think so. If nothing else, we would have asked, in the open air, under the sun, a different set of questions, because we would have been reading the poet’s experience of the place in light of our own experience of it. We would have seen it, the poem and the place, from a new angle.

When I finally did visit the furnaces, many years later, the first thing I noticed was how big—and castle-like—they really are.

Literary scholars analyze poems and write about poems, and they require their students to write in response to poems, but they often don’t experience the places to which the poems respond.¹

Few, I bet, have rebuilt a stone wall, farmed in Kentucky, or shoveled coal. Poets may do those things, but scholars? I don’t think so. They have enough to do in reading, writing, and teaching. Texts take a lot of time and attention.

But this is changing, I know. Debates about the environment have led some scholars to do fieldwork, to see a text against the world it represents. A place-based study examines a literary piece in the “exact location about which the text being studied or used was written.” Stepping out of the office and into the field, a scholar traces the “correspondences... between the text and the place” in order to offer new readings of each.²

I tried this at home with some W. S. Merwin poems.

Studied alongside the places they portray, Merwin’s mining poems describe a shattered landscape populated by people who cannot see the damage around them, despite the fact that the damage haunts them. Here in the Anthracite Region, mines burn, “Smothered and silent,” as “Burning Mountain” suggests, and retired miners find that a life’s work “at last cannot / Be washed out, all of it, in this world.” Intimately exploring this “inexcusable / Unavoidable” ground, Merwin gropes for answers to a question I’ve been asking myself lately: what are we doing to the world—and to one another?³ If poetry—and any literature, for that matter—has any use value it’s that it leads us to rethink what we think we see. Merwin’s mining poems show us that we have an infinite capacity for making the unnatural natural.

The work we do shapes, for better and worse, the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. Coal mining landscapes may be an extreme and obvious example, but they are often out of sight, out of mind. With mines usually located well outside major population areas, Americans have the luxury of not seeing the “hard places” where the nation’s “dirtiest work” is done. Mine-scarred landscapes repel most people, I think, because they represent the “unfinished, crude, and imperfect; perhaps they are too honest a depiction of how we have treated the environment and each other.”⁴ One of those hard places, the Anthracite Region, has been described as a “lunar landscape,” as “one of industrial America’s sacrificial zones,” and as “grievously scarred.”⁵ Within the region lies Scranton, Merwin’s boyhood home, a city of mines.

Son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin moved to Scranton with his family in 1936, and he remained there until 1944, when he left for Princeton at age sixteen. In 1948, he sailed for Europe, returning in 1956 “to go back to Pennsylvania, and write about it.”⁶ His homecoming, I believe, shocked him, mainly because he saw his old neighborhood anew.

The years Merwin lived in Europe coincided with the final collapse of the anthracite coal industry.⁷ While the postwar economy boomed in much of the United States in 1946–1960, the Anthracite Region slid into its steepest economic decline. By 1956, strip mining was widespread, unemployment topped 10 percent, and most deep mines were idle.⁸ Although coal mining may have all but ended by the year of Merwin’s return, culm banks burned, abandoned breakers dominated former patch towns, and streams ran orange with acid. Its wounds raw in the mid-1950s, Scranton’s cityscape made visible the long history of environmental exploitation that made possible mid-century America’s political, economic, and military power. Merwin probes the damage that human work has inflicted on the Lackawanna Valley.

As others have noted, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marks a break between Merwin’s first three books of poems, which were “so objective, so mythic as to be anonymous,” and the next collections, within which one hears Merwin’s “personal poetic voice.” A “master-poem,” the title piece “radically recasts the material Merwin has been sifting over and over,” material that examined family history and place. Merwin later admitted that he was attending to one place in the last third of The Drunk in the Furnace: “The focussing on one place in that way was deliberate, and it led me to see how limited the possibilities of that were, for me, then.”⁹

Written in December 1957, “The Drunk in the Furnace” describes a particular place. Scholars mistakenly read the poem as referring to an “empty iron furnace [that] rusts” in a junkyard at the edge of a town.¹⁰ In fact, the poem depicts the Scranton Iron Furnaces, a structure of locally quarried stone that resembles a “bad castle” (14). Originally, the furnaces used anthracite to heat iron ore; later the company imported anthracite’s rival, bituminous coal. A nineteenth-century description of the furnaces notes that “one large coal mine opens directly between the stacks of the furnaces, and you pass into it through the buildings.”¹¹ In visiting the site and studying early photographs of it, one realizes that the furnace in the poem is a “hulking black fossil” because it represents a remnant of a large industrial complex that was dismantled in 1902 (4).

Large corporate interests and New York investors dominated the Lackawanna Valley almost from the beginning of white settlement. Scranton grew up around the furnaces, which produced rails for the railroads that made anthracite coal mining profitable.¹² During their sixty years of operation, the furnaces were “the single most significant factor in the economic, social, and industrial life of Scranton”; they helped to fuel nineteenth-century industrial development in the United States, which prepared the ground for many of the ecological problems we confront today.¹³ Lodged, then and now, in the heart of the city, the furnaces are today a tourist attraction beside a cleaned-up Roaring Brook Creek.

“The Drunk in the Furnace” depicts a place damaged by the ravages of coal mining. Early drafts of the poem describe the final version’s “naked gully” (2) as “stripped,” a word that echoes the strip mining and deforestation that denuded the surrounding landscape. The revision underscores that the hollow is defenseless against erosion, even that caused by a tamed Roaring Brook. The “poisonous creek,” which once powered the furnaces’ hot air blasts, is venomous with mine acid, a common problem of the region’s waterways (6). One draft’s description of the furnaces as “unregenerate” recalls the words “unacknowledged,” “unreclaimed,” and “unavoidable” in an earlier poem, “Luzerne Street Looking West” (30, 31, 39).¹⁴

The poem contrasts the drunk in the “unnoticed” furnace with nearby churchgoers, who assume better days ahead. In singing, the drunk nudges them to pay attention to what they have “added / To their ignorance,” the ground around them (5, 6–7). Self-closeted inside the furnace, “behind the eye-holed iron / Door” (12–13), the drunk’s intoxicated state is a metaphor for the toxic state of the land. A captive audience, the churchgoers are confined inside the church, asleep, or with their attention riveted to the abstract landscape of hell, which they don’t realize the furnaces’ “stoke-holes” have made manifest on earth (23).

In a 1969 interview, Merwin notes about the drunk, “I wanted to invent a figure who to me was absolutely sensual and who belonged completely to that part of the world.... And then this one turned out to be like an invented myth for the place... he was a man who probably couldn’t exist, but if he did, the place then had its man.” The myth he makes is that of the singer/worker; the poem alludes to Orpheus and Phaeton, which many scholars have noted, but also, I believe, to Hephaestus, the ugly, lame god of fire, the craftsmen of the gods, whose forge is located under an active volcano. The Orpheus myth, Merwin reminds us, “evokes a harmonious relation with the whole living world”; Phaeton, he explains, is a “myth based on ego, envy, and exploitation, in which you try to take the chariot into the sun and drive it whether you can drive it or not, and you end up by destroying what you drive over and being destroyed yourself.”¹⁵ A welding of these myths, the drunk represents the region’s people, who have retreated into their history and armed themselves with heroic accounts of building the nation that has forgotten them. Like the drunk, they cannot see straight.

A once-abandoned workplace, the furnaces become, under the drunk’s direction, a new workshop, one that takes work as its subject. A “twist of smoke like a pale / Resurrection” signals the drunk’s relighting of the furnace; at the sight, people are “astonished,” literally a stonied, driven to fear and wonder (9–10; 8). Announcing a new kind of work in “Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle / To his jugged bellowings” (17–18), the drunk’s music calls the churchgoers’ attention to the gully, reminding them of human transgressions against the hill and the creek, both poisoned and junked, a damage supported by their “tar-paper church,” a weatherproof haven underwritten by the abstract fears of sin that the reverend paints in his sermon (22). Instead of fashioning rails, the furnace, at the city’s heart, will now, with the drunk at its heart, shape songs that teach “agape” (i.e., love) to the sober churchgoers’ “witless offspring,” who “flock like piped rats to its siren / Crescendo” (26–27). Unlike the adult townspeople who nod off in their church pews and “hate trespassers,” the children “on the crumbling ridge / Stand in a row and learn,” gaping in rapt attention at what they hear and see, recognizing what they had been taught to ignore: the story of a careless destruction written into the world around them (24, 27–28).

The children, who will make their own mark on the land, can change the course of that history. Ending with the word “learn,” the poem asserts that our thoughtless wasting of the world is not natural. It can be unlearned. The genius of the poem asks us to remember what we’ve done in the world, never mind the next.

In September 2008, I attended at a local university a workshop about sustainability that was devoted to the writings of Wendell Berry. When discussion turned to practical ways to create a new relationship with the natural world, a political scientist wondered how such a relationship could be created in a landscape as damaged as that of the Anthracite Region. I wanted to say, you need to love it, critically love it. But even living here is suspect in some eyes. In discussing the poem, literary biographer Frank MacShane remarks, “One must be mad to live in such a place.”¹⁶ Maybe, but what MacShane refuses to see is that we all already live here. We may not be aware that we do, but we will soon be all too aware. The only madness is assuming we can escape the hard places.

The furnaces—and this lesson—have still not reached everyone. The next October, students and I gathered at the furnaces to hear art historian Darlene Miller-Lanning explain the site’s industrial history. We read the poem at the opening of one of its stone arches, before a grate that still contained pig iron. Of the half dozen students, who had all grown up in Scranton, only one had been to the place before, and then on an elementary school field trip. The other students had never set foot there and knew nothing of it; two of these students were women in their late sixties. No one had heard of the poem. Sad, I thought. If we don’t pay closer attention to our work in the world, all worlds will be lost. We pay a steep price for our inattention to places and poetry.

Like “The Drunk in the Furnace,” “Luzerne Street Looking West” (1956) and “Burning Mountain” (1960) are parts of Merwin’s “homecoming sequence.”¹⁷ As a set, they explore the diminished and forgotten landscape that anthracite mining left between urban and natural environments. This postindustrial landscape bears silent witness to industrialism’s lingering effects on people and places. These poems’ appearance coincided with a key moment in local history, one that challenged Scranton residents’ faith in material progress: the disappearance of deep mining in the Lackawanna Valley. The poems imagine the region’s human and environmental trauma, even as they acknowledge the region’s rapid deindustrialization, one of the first in U.S. history.¹⁸ In probing the region’s injuries, both literal and figurative, the poems gesture as much inward toward the local environmental legacy of coal mining as they do outward toward the universal human urge for order in the face of death’s inevitability.

“Luzerne Street Looking West” invites literary fieldwork. The poem places the reader on an actual street in Scranton and names a neighborhood cemetery, the Washburn Street Cemetery, and a stream, Lucky Run. To look west from Luzerne Street is literally to turn one’s back on the site of the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church, where Merwin’s father served as minister.¹⁹ To look west from Luzerne Street is to confront the human and environmental damage that mining leaves in its wake, damage done to land “that no one had known to save” (14). Moving from school to mountain, the poem asks us to think about how the space between them came to be.

Exploring the aftermath of mining, the poem depicts a postindustrial landscape of “unrelieved waste” (13) that lies between the city, nodded to in the opening phrase “Some blocks” (1), and “the real mountain with its / Four undisturbed seasons” (28–29). This in-between world, without people, stripped of vegetation, hacked open, and trashed, represents what human work has wrought in creating and sustaining built environments. An indeterminate space, this place divides two orders: the wholly human and the completely natural. This space demands our attention because “It is, above all, the unacknowledged, / The unreclaimed, the entirely / Useless, that will not be forgotten nor / Disowned, but follow us to spread / Their shapeless variety at the edge / Of all we have made, and give us / No peace” (30–36). A silent presence, this ground cries out, reminding us of the war waged against it.

If a pastoral landscape represents the middle landscape between city and wild environments, the negative version of this middle is a mining landscape, a sterile ground of massive upheaval. As much as a pastoral landscape may represent a positive link in a continuum between the urban and the wild, the in-between world that mining creates registers the negative picture, the absolute disconnection between city and wilderness. The pastoral may face in two directions, but mining turns away from both town and mountain. After all, mine land cannot renew itself the way farmland can, at least ideally. And no families live at the colliery. Mine land requires reclamation.

The land at the end of Luzerne Street has changed some since the mid-1950s. Instead of open space, there are two junkyards (ah, sorry: “auto recyclers”), one on either side of the street, a moving company, and no culm banks, although their remnants constitute the ground across which spread junk cars and trucks in various states of dismemberment. The street now extends beyond the railroad tracks, where it suddenly becomes Dalton Street. To one’s left, an abandoned boxcar sits alongside the tracks, forming a section of one junkyard’s enclosure. The area is still a blank spot on city maps. In fact, most of the blank spaces on Scranton city maps were once the locations of collieries. The blanks remind one of no-man’s-lands in war zones.

Those who wage this war graduate from the “new high school” of the poem’s opening line, West Scranton High, whose mascot is the Invader. “Some blocks beyond” the school, Luzerne Street ends in a “weedy tract / Of shale and cinders... / Too indefinite to be called a field” (1, 4–6) that stretches between the city, below and behind, and Bald Mountain, above and ahead. Bordering this space is the Hyde Park breaker, whose “disused mine-shaft, full / Of water, leads under the graves” (18–19) of the Washburn Street Cemetery, where the victims of the Avondale disaster are buried. Human-made, the graves and the shaft direct one’s attention to the underworld, the realm of the dead. The cemetery’s potter’s field, which “spills out / From among [the cemetery’s] trees,” points to the poor, the unknown, the unmarked, who are simply numbered to lie forgotten beside the community’s named dead (16–17). These lines, in their focus on death, echo what Merwin said in a 2009 TV interview with Bill Moyers: “It’s the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It’s the mystery. That’s always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.” In the same conversation, Merwin later claimed, “I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know.”²⁰

What the speaker knows is a human-made ruin. The graves echo the “canyons left over from / Strip mines” (20–21), which the landscape’s “shallow stream,” Lucky Run, fills with “bottomless basins, shoes, and [its] stained / Deposits” of mine acid (22–23). Beyond the canyons rise “Symmetrical mountains / Of culm,” orderings of waste whose mimicking of the real mountain calls attention to their sterile artificiality (24–25).

Studying “Luzerne Street” on Luzerne Street is a good idea, sure, but doing so raises issues of interpretation. Does one study the place as it was when the poet was writing about it? This would demand a historical approach that is itself a stew of questions (e.g., what can we really know about that spot in that time?). Or does one study the place as it is when the reader reads the poem? (Does it matter whether the reader is already familiar with the place?) Both poem and place are new moment-to-moment; connotations and contours change. But the poem and the place change independently of each other. Then again, each also expresses continuities; the poem’s words don’t change, we hope, and the place’s location remains constant, sort of. If it’s true that the grounds of interpretation shift over time, how does one build a case for a place-based interpretation of the poem, even an open-ended interpretation? You cannot, but you can try.