The Blind Seer of Ambon (1994)
text by W.S. Merwin
I found Merwin’s poem in a copy of Esquire that I was aimlessly leafing through on a flight from New York to Los Angeles at a particularly dark moment in my life. The poem virtually set itself and was completely sketched out into five discrete songs by the time I landed.
At the time I wrote the work Merwin was a recluse somewhere in Hawaii. His publisher initially refused to allow me to use the poem in the (already finished) cycle and was under instructions by the poet not to take messages. In 1995 Merwin returned to lecturing and reading. At a reading at Yale I had the opportunity to play the piece for him, which, to my relief, pleased him greatly.
Ambon
