A sense of place
I first encountered the poetry of W.S. Merwin in 1987. I was a newly converted English major, and the assignment was to peruse our poetry anthology and note any poems that intrigued us. I still remember sitting in the dining hall, thumbing through Robert DiYanni’s “Modern American Poetry: Their Voices and Visions.” Somehow, I found myself reading Merwin’s “A Door” and “When You Go Away.” Almost immediately, I could feel the entire room moving away from me, as though it were on a conveyor. I had never encountered anything like his poems: dark but beautiful, accessible but otherworldly, grave yet lyric. Reading those poems in that book on that day changed my life.
Without question, Merwin is America’s most important living poet. He has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (twice), served as poet laureate of the United States, and been rumored to be in the running for a Nobel Prize. He is also one of the great translators of our time, whose version of Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” may be the best English Neruda available.
This is a landmark year for Merwin. It marks the 50th anniversary of “The Lice,” one of the great books, in any genre, of the 20th century. In spare, haunting poems that marry myth and existential grief, Merwin takes on the Vietnam War, political unrest and his growing sense that everything — even language — is falling apart. “The Lice” remains one of the most influential books published after 1950, and it shaped entire generations of writers. To honor this milestone, Merwin’s publisher, Copper Canyon Press, reissued a special edition of “The Lice” that, amazingly, still feels timely and relevant.
This year also saw the publication of “The Essential Merwin,” a kind of collected poems, lovingly and thoughtfully assembled by Copper Canyon’s editor, Michael Wiegers, Merwin’s editor for 25 years. This stunning collection anthologizes nearly 70 years of Merwin’s poems and offers an unparalleled sense of his arc as a poet and translator, and just how penetrating, how prescient, how durable is his poetry.
Though Merwin’s literary accomplishments are widely acknowledged, perhaps his most enduring legacy is the largely unknown Merwin Palm Forest, one of the largest collections of different palm trees in the world.
In 1977, Merwin, a native of New York City, bought a piece of land near Haiku, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, that was thought to be unusable because of over-farming of pineapple and sugar cane. Merwin and his wife, Paula, painstakingly planted palmtree seed after seed after seed, most of which died. Over time, however, some of the seeds found purchase, and slowly the seedlings transformed into something magical. There are now nearly 3,000 individual trees of more than 400 different species.
I visited Merwin’s house and the forest in September on the occasion of his 90th birthday, itself a milestone. Two days of public events on Maui honored his work as both poet and conservationist. People from all over the world came to the island to celebrate his birthday. Wiegers and the poet Edward Hirsch gave moving tributes, as did both of Merwin’s sons, Matt Schwartz and John Burnham Schwartz. When I talked with Merwin at the end of the second night, he was exhausted but utterly thankful. I told him what he already knew, that his work had meant a great deal to me. He seemed grateful for my comment and for the event, but even then, everything seemed to come back to the interactive event of his poems.
“It was a great occasion for me,” he said. “I was especially moved by the unexpected gifts from people I had not met but who know me through my poetry.”
One unexpected gift was an announcement by Hawaii’s governor, who proclaimed Sept. 30, Merwin’s birthday, as W.S. Merwin Day in Hawaii. I spent the day with Mary Lock, a gardener for the forest and a board member of the conservancy, and her husband, Michael. For hours, we wound through a dizzying diversity of palm trees from around the world. I went back the following day with Michael Wiegers, walking different paths and seeing new palms. Both days, I spent time in Merwin’s dojo, which he built himself, and where he would meditate every morning before sitting down to write. Being in that space, which I can describe only as sacred, moved me beyond easy articulation.
One of Merwin’s most famous poems, “For the Anniversary of My Death,” appears in “The Lice.” The speaker, likely Merwin, realizes that every year, without knowing it, he passes the day on which he will die, “when the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out / Tireless traveler / Like the beam of a lightless star.” I thought about this poem a great deal in the forest, in part because this year for Merwin has been marked not just by honors, but by death. In March, Paula died after a long bout with cancer. She was instrumental in establishing the Merwin Conservancy, a foundation charged with sustaining the work they began many years ago. Paula’s death, along with budget cuts imposed at the EPA and proposed to the National Parks Service, sparked worry about the forest’s long-term survival. But within the past few months, the Merwin Conservancy raised its first $1 million, meaning both the forest and Merwin’s house are likely to be preserved in perpetuity. Eventually, Merwin’s house will become a retreat for artists and writers — planting the seeds for future trees and future poems.
On my second day wandering among the palms, I began noticing similarities between Merwin’s forest and his poetry. Both are wild, untamed and deeply nuanced. Both reward revisiting because they are immersive. Most importantly, both are projects made by humans but that ultimately transcend human limitations. Trees, like poems, are beyond epistemology or biology. They signify beyond themselves. Each makes its own order, its own radical beauty. We won’t all be able to visit the Merwin forest, either this year or perhaps in our lifetimes. But this, his 90th year, would be the perfect time to reacquaint yourself with, or encounter for the first time, Merwin’s strange and exquisite poetry.
Dean Rader is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco and the author of the poetry collections “Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry” and “Works & Days.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com