Arto Vaun: Adhesives, Pancakes, and WS Merwin

Arto Vaun, author of Capillarity

The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. WS Merwin, The Paris Review (Spring, 1987)


It’s 1986. You are a boy-foal wandering the nighttime streets of Watertown, Massachusetts, a quiet, working class town next to Boston. Shivering legs, shivering tongue, looking at all the wooden homes with hesitant yellow lights leaking through drawn curtains. Homes and not homes. In one of them, your mother doesn’t understand those things on your teenage face, and your father is off to work the late shift at the adhesives factory by the Charles River. You might as well be in the middle of a slanted field being admonished by all the stars and planets. You don’t know yet that the more distant those bodies are, the more you are loved by them.

Words are a kind of gravity. They keep your skinny body from drifting away. And poetry is a particular kind of anchor. Each link of its chain seems to be its own infinity of play, knowledge, redemption, joy, and creation. And each link seems so familiar somehow, as though made by a master blacksmith just for you. You’ve been eating up pages of Rimbaud, Neruda, Césaire, and O’Hara. Their poems all seem like magic tricks; amazing slights of hand. You have no idea how it’s done but are obsessed with finding out and being a magician yourself.

So most days, you hop on the 71 bus after Catholic school, loosen your green plaid tie, and go

Capillarity, the début collection by Arto Vaun

straight to Harvard Square to aimlessly, joyfully, find safe haven in all the used book stores. There’s one in particular that you love, Starr Book Shop. It’s untidy and crammed with books, often with no clear order. Marc, the disheveled, bearded owner, gives you a nod each time you walk in and drop your book bag behind the counter. Sometimes he even says “Hey, kid” and that makes your damn week. You spend hours in the poetry section in the dirty basement. The titles don’t change that often, so it’s more like being in your own library somehow outside of time. The only other people there either browse other sections or leave the poetry section soon after realizing it’s your turf.

There are usually many new titles stacked high on a small counter by the entrance. Your favorite thing is to go through those because sometimes there’s a gem. That’s how you found Apollinaire and Paz. One day, as you’re putting down your book bag, you notice a worn book near the register, The Carrier of Ladders. The title alone mesmerizes you. That’s what I do. I want to escape, but I carry around ladders instead like a fool. And the author’s name, Merwin—this guy actually has a wizard’s name. Who better to learn from? Marc, who usually doesn’t comment on your purchases, notices you gawking at the book and suddenly says, ‘That’s a good one’.

From that day forward, W.S. Merwin becomes your mentor, more than any other poet. His audacity and skill with lack of punctuation, the surgically placed words at the ends of lines that inhabit multiple meanings, and the unabashed earnestness that doesn’t turn bland or contrived, these all welcome your awkward self as a long lost friend. ‘Plane’ is the first poem of his that you read on the bus back home, rumbling through snowy dusk.

We hurtle forward and seem to rise

I imagine the deities come and go
without departures

There is something so pristine and exact about these lines. Even as a kid you understand, though you may be confused on the surface. All is propelled without rhyme or reason and whatever laws or gods exist, their importance is secondary to the fact that everything is actually now and forever, both changing and not.

That night, you pack into the Oldsmobile with your mom and grandparents. It’s 1am and you’re headed to pick up your father from work. It’s an odd ritual. Maybe immigrants don’t sleep well because they’re constantly strangers. They all talk over each other in Armenian. When your father gets in the car, his smell is so gratifying. You reach up your little arm and curl it around his tired, warm neck. You all go to IHOP for pancakes. The waitress recognizes your family and gives you a little wink. You order for everyone. And in that moment, sitting there late into the night, you catch a glimpse of how poets like Merwin do it—they were foals too, but decided to gallop, come hell or high water. They didn’t know anything, just as you don’t know anything. And that is one of the keys, and it is beautiful.

Here
is the air

and your tears flowing on the wings of the plane
where once again I cannot
reach to stop them

and they fall away behind
going with me

Arto Vaun is a poet, songwriter, and musician from Cambridge, MA. He has attended Harvard and Glasgow University. His first collection, Capillarity, was published by Carcanet Press in 2009. He has appeared twice on The Verb (BBC3) and his poems have been included in The Forward Book of Poetry (2010), New Poetries V, Matter 10, Glimpse Journal, Ararat, Meridian, PN Review, and other publications. He has taught at Glasgow University, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Mass Bay College. He is the poetry editor for Glimpse Journal and is currently completing his second collection of poetry. His new record, The Cynthia Sessions, was released in 2013. 

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The Carcanet Blog Sale
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For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Capillarity by Arto Vaun! All books come with a 10% discount and free UK delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim the extra 15%, go to the website (or use the links above) and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!