W.S. Merwin's Johnny Appleseed Turn

PBS NewsHour tracks down American poet W.S. Merwin in Hawaii, where he plants palm trees. He bought three acres of an old pineapple plantation in the '70s, the spot where a forest of palm trees now grows. From NewsHour:

JEFFREY BROWN: It’s Hawaii, so, yes, you do expect to see a palm tree or two, but you don’t expect this, a whole forest of palms, some 3,000 of them of incredible variety, fans of many sizes, twists and shapes of many kinds, even sharp thorns, more than 400 species from all over the world on 19 acres of land on the northern coast of Maui.

W.S. MERWIN, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet: I can’t stop them from destroying the Amazon forest, but I can go out and plant a tree, you know?

JEFFREY BROWN: The tree planter is W.S. Merwin, now 87 years old, better known as one of the nation’s leading poets. And the two pursuits he says comes from exactly the same place. When he began the Maui garden, for example:

W.S. MERWIN: I was feeling my way and trying — learning — learning all the time from failures, as well as from successes. And I had one thing leading to something else.

JEFFREY BROWN: And how is that like poetry?

W.S. MERWIN: Exactly like poetry. I think a real poem always, always, in my experience, takes you by surprise. [...]

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