Memory is a tricky thing, as poet W.S. Merwin explores in his poetry. “I have only what I remember,” he writes in “A Likeness,” a poem in his 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning collection, The Shadow of Sirius. Merwin, a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, discusses his work tonight at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre.

Merwin also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for The Carrier of Ladders, and in his recent poems—written without punctuation or capital letters—he explores his own past, focusing on memory and events of his childhood. Merwin, who has restored a banana plantation in Hawaii to its natural rainforest state, also fittingly meditates on humanity’s separation from nature in his poetry.

Merwin appears on stage tonight in conversation with poet Stanley Plumly, an English professor at the University of Maryland and the Poet Laureate of Maryland.

W.S. MERWIN DISCUSSES HIS WORK TONIGHT AT 7:30 P.M. AT THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, 201 E. CAPITOL ST. SE, $12, (202) 544-4623