Dispatch from Hawaii: exploring Maui with Merwin

W.S. Merwin has said he hopes to remain Hawaiian soil during his tenure as poet laureate. Its no wonder, then, that Dean Kuipers reports from Maui for the Los Angeles Times, traipsing around with Merwin on the poet’s 18-acre pineapple plantation. Merwin, who is currently at work on a follow-up to his 2009 collection Shadow of Sirius, talks inspiration (“You never know where poetry comes from. The more it takes you by surprise, the better it is") ecopoetry, living a so-called “marginalized existence,” and why his love of the earth and his passion for poetry are inextricably linked.

Read more at the L.A. Times:

Michael Wiegers, Merwin's editor at Copper Canyon Press, notes that Merwin's ability to infuse the personal with the timeless is partly a product of his Zen Buddhist practice. "It's a daily practice, and in a daily practice, you follow your breath. He's removed all the punctuation. The words seem to float above the page — they follow the breath. He's making a poetry less fixed in time."

Merwin spends his afternoons in the muck of the streambed, and when his famously elliptical poetry arrives, he jots it on an envelope or in a spiral notebook.

"I've never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It's a part of it," Merwin says. "But we have a tradition as a society that is saying the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit without any concern about the consequences of it. It's very short-term and in my view it's suicidal."