News at Eleven: "I remember starting [the collection],"

[W.S.] Merwin says. "The first one of them was 'To the Unlikely Event,' and it came from being on an airplane for the umpteenth time listening to the speaker say, 'In the unlikely event of a water landing,' and all that airline lingo that they go into, which is a deformation of the English language, and I thought, 'In the unlikely event, what do they mean in the unlikely event?'

from Metroactive: Present in Company: Translator and poet W.S. Merwin muses on the importance of nothing

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