W.S. Merwin: To Plant a Tree

W.S. Merwin,

voice-over

Poetry begins with hearing. It begins with hearing the sounds of passion.

Man

He was a minstrel, a troubadour, a jongleur, a throwback.

Different man

He has evolved as a poet in remarkable ways that I can't think there's a parallel in contemporary American poetry. He's different from most people. He would do whatever he needed to do-- cut his own hair, wear the same clothes, whatever it was just in order to maintain his independence. Some people have taken it as arrogance, but the truth is people are struck by his depth and his authenticity.

Man

For some time, I had "W.Shoped that William Merwin" would agree to be poet laureate of the United States.

Different man

...decades and author of more than 50 books of verse, translation, and prose, W.S. Merwin has won just about every major award... Selected for that series by W.H...

Bill Moyers

Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It's the second he's won.

Gwen Ifill

Tonight, a talk with the nation's newest poet laureate.

Woman

He's inter's interestd in the repeated references to all that is not known.

Man

Launched many distinguished careers in America. The Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Different man

For distinguished volume of original verse that focus on the profound power of memory. Congratulations, W.S. Merwin.

Applause

Birds chirping

Merwin

"Place." "On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree "what for not for the fruit "the tree that bears the fruit is not the one that was planted "I want the tree that stands in the earth "for the first time "with the sun already going down "and the water touching its roots "in the earth full of the dead and the clouds passing one by one over its leaves."

Woman

William's true life that he truly loves is writing poetry in the morning, and that involves reading and thinking and drinking tea and looking out at the palms, and then in the afternoon, potting and planting, planting trees. Merwin,

voice-over

I think a lot of people who love palms have that feeling that you're dealing with our elders with great, great antiquity. They've been here a long time, and they--they know more about the Earth in some ways than--than we do. These big, beautiful palms and this spath of seeds are one of the biggest of the Veitchias, the macdanielsii. I planted them with the help of one of the dogs back almost 30 years ago. I don't think anybody thought they'd grow here, but they--they look at home now.

Paula

We initially wanted to grow native plants, and we quickly realized that you couldn't do it, that the habitat is destroyed, the native birds are gone. They've all been driven out and--and cut down, so we grew what we could, the native Hawaiian Pritchardias. We've got most of. We're still missing 5 or 6, and then I realized that he was trying to see what they did together.

Merwin

The first thing to do is to put the canopy back, and the moment you get the canopy back and can get anything to grow, any trees to grow, the trees begin to make forest conditions, and that was my idea was to have forest conditions here. You know, you can't plant a forest because a forest is an ecosystem that no human being understands the complicated biology of microorganisms and mycorrhizas and insects and everything that come to make up a forest. It evolves. Those 3 trees back in the dark there that you can hardly see, that's a species that we--it's said that this garden saved it from extinction. It was supposedly extinct, technically extinct, so it's only--it only exists now in cultivation with people like--you know, nuts like me who are trying to grow it, and some of them--some of the nuts are amateurs, too. You know, if you leave it to the pros, they're-- they're better at it than we are, but there are fewer of them, and so, you know, things are gonna get lost. It's, uh--got to have a little freedom of attitude about that, too.

Man

I don't think William in his very earliest years started as a naturalist because he grew up in very urban environments, and he has the kind of love of nature that someone might develop who is in a way struggling to free himself of the concrete baked world of Union City, New Jersey.

Merwin

I was an urban kid. I mean, I grew up right across the river from New York in Union City, West Hoboken. My father's church was right on the edge of the cliff, and if I looked out out of the back window, I could look and see the whole of the Hoboken harbor, which is gone now, and all the river traffic, most of which isn't there now. I remember as a really tiny child well before I went to school, remember we had flagstones instead of cement on the sidewalks and seeing blades of grass in spring, and I was with my mother, and I said, "Where does the grass come from?" And she said, "Well, the earth is right under the stones." How happy I was to think that the real world was right down there underneath it, you know?

Paula

William's childhood was very repressive, and, uh, his father was always lecturing him, and his mother had lost everyone in her life that she ever loved by the time she was 20. Her first child died 15 minutes after he was born, so she was terrified that something would happen to William, and so the atmosphere was very tense.

Faggen

I think that his father at the very least seemed to be someone who was severe and also rather caught up in the importance of his, uh--uh, ministerial duties as head of a Presbyterian church, and I think William felt that he was a cold and alienating figure and probably prone to, uh, rather inexplicable swings in the degree of his severity.

Paula

If they gave him a toy train for Christmas, he was allowed to play with it on Christmas day, and then they'd put it up in the attic, put it away for the rest of the year, and he'd never go to other children's houses. They could come to his, but of course, they didn't want to. It wasn't much fun. One of the exceptions to not being able to have much to do with other kids-- I mean, I could go out and play for 10 minutes with kids in the vacant lot but not in rough games and, uh, you know, not in things where the baseball might go through anybody's window or anything like that. The kids would say, "Oh, let's go somewhere," one of these wild places where I couldn't go, you know? So off they'd go, but one of the ways out of it was Boy Scouts, and that got me away from home, and it was fun with other kids, and I really loved it, and my 11th birthday, I went with Billy Green for a hike up on a mountain. First of all, I learned from Billy Green how sex happened. I mean, I knew--I knew-- I knew the basics of it, but I didn't know the mechanics of it, and he told me about that. I thought that was pretty fascinating. That was sort of one of the subthemes of the day, thinking about that, and, uh, we came over this one place that we--that we both liked and had been there quite a few times before, where you came up a--a ridge in the woods, and it was very beautiful, and you looked over to the next ridge, and we came up to the next ridge, and then there wasn't anything there. There was a steam shovel down at the bottom of it, and this--the whole top of the mountain was gone, and there was this great ditch. Just nothing. And I--I just stood there with the tears running down my face. I didn't know what had happened. I said, "What happened?" And Billy didn't know either, and I thought, "Well, I don't know why anybody would--would do "this, but it's wrong. "It's absolutely wrong to do this. You can't--you can't just get rid of a place like that." Hi! I'm running off at the mouth. Um, and I never get over it. I still feel that way. I don't want to treat any part of the living world that way. This was a living place, and there's nothing there now.

Man

He had a completely different childhood from most people's. He was writing hymns, you know, for his father when he was a small child. He had very strong ideas about things very early, and the things that moved him are probably the things that move him still.

Woman

William's sister told me that as a child he would sit under the dining room table, making cards, and he would include artwork and verses. He would make up lines. He would quote from hymns and that he would sell them to the parishioners in his father's church, and she said, "And he sold them for a good amount, too! They weren't cheap." And I love that idea that a child who already has some idea that--the value of words on paper. This is a valuable thing. You don't sell it for a nickel.

Merwin

I didn't know how I was gonna do it, but I remember when I--when I first began to write poems, I was trying to write hymns, you know, to be sung in church, and I illustrated them, and they very weird-looking little things with words, uh, misspelled, and when I did it, I realized that I was in touch with the language that I'd heard from the King James version, and, I mean--and in some of the hymns, the language, which was not just like ordinary speech but had--had a different quality and different something, different life in it. I didn't know what it was, and, uh--but the moment I tried to write these little verses, I realized there's a very distant connection with that, and that's what I wanted to do was write poems, and the more I did it, the more I wanted to do it, and I really wanted to--I really wanted to make that a little of my life, and people kept saying, "How are you gonna earn a living?" And I said, "Well, I'll find that out as I go, you know?"

Faggen

At Princeton, my sense is is that he was rather alienated as, uh, someone, uh, not of means, that Princeton was especially in those days, which is again, uh, the end of World War II, it was largely for the wealthy, not exclusively obviously. William would not have gone there, and William was, uh, I believe, a busboy in the faculty club where the more privileged people ate, so I don't think he was, um, a good old boy at the university.

Paula

When he was in college, he had really no money. His parents sent him nothing. They didn't have much, and he dressed really out of the Salvation Army, you know, old Army clothes, Army-Navy store, stuff like that.

Merwin

I was very lucky in my late teens to know John Berryman and go and take him poems regularly, which he systematically destroyed, and, um, I learned a certain amount that way. There's never been anybody like him. He was, I think, a fantastic poet, incredible literary intelligence, tormented and very difficult man. I mean, I learned things from him that I learned from nobody else. Uh, so the poem is simply called "Berryman." "I will tell you what he told me "in the years just after the war "as we then called "the second world war "don't lose your arrogance yet he said "you can do that when you're older "lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity "just one time he suggested changing the usual order "of the same words in a line of verse "why point out a thing twice "he suggested I pray to the Muse "get down on my knees and pray "right there in the corner and he "said he meant it literally "it was in the days before the beard "and the drink but he was deep "in tides of his own through which he sailed "chin sideways and head tilted like "a tacking sloop "he was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was he was in his thirties"

Laughter

Merwin

"he snapped down his nose with an accent "I think he had affected in England "as for publishing he advised me "to paper my wall with rejection slips "his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled "with the vehemence of his views about poetry "he said the great presence "that permitted everything and transmuted it "in poetry was passion "passion was genius and he praised "movement and invention "I had hardly begun to read "I asked how can you ever be sure "that what you write is really "any good at all and he said you can't "you can't you can never be sure "you die without knowing "whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write."

Faggen

He went to visit Pound, I believe, when he was very young. I think he was still an undergraduate at Princeton, and he went to Washington, and he took it upon himself to visit Pound, and I think he was very much taken with the aesthetics of Pound's poetry, but visiting Pound at St. Elizabeth's at that time as quite a stunning act.

Merwin

Pound said to me-- it was absolutely true-- he said, "A poet--in order to be a poet"--you know, he loved--he loved being a sort of school teacher. He said, "A poet has to take himself seriously as a poet"--or herself--"seriously as a poet," which means try to work at it every day, and he said, "You should try to write 75 lines a day." Well, he said, "You haven't got anything to "write 75 lines about. "You think you do, but you don't, "and so the thing to do is to get languages "and translate because the work of translation is the best teacher you'll ever have." And he was absolutely right.

Faggen

William's dialogue with Pound really became about the troubadours, and what Pound did was to encourage William to translate as a way of developing his own style and also understanding traditions and also understanding more deeply the language. He became deeply interested in this very old, what one might call original kind of--of poetry, and that is what led him eventually to southern France.

Church bell tolling

Merwin

In the beginning, there was something secret about this part of the world. If you talked to French people, nobody came here. Nobody got off the--the train here here. It was always on the way to Toulouse or somewhere else, and it was the connection with an old-- of an older culture that, uh, I guess I hungered for. I mean, I really wanted to find that link coming all the way through, and I think this is not uncommon among American writers at all, I think. I mean, you--you look through "Moby-Dick" and you look through Faulkner certainly, again and again you find, uh, them trying to make that link again. It sounds very remote from growing up near New York, and in a way it was, and sometimes, I would say to myself, "How serious are you about this?" I thought, "Very serious. "I want to know this thing about these links, "you know, that we've lost, that we've paid "no attention to and how people live that close to "the seasons and to the weather and to the living things all around them." Knowing the place, you know? That's what I felt here. "To Paula in Late Spring." "Let me imagine that we will come again "when we want to and it will be spring "we will be no older than we ever were "the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud "through which the morning slowly comes to itself "and the ancient defenses against the dead "will be done with and left to the dead at last "the light will be as it is now in the garden "that we have made here these years together of our long evenings and astonishment." Poetry begins with hearing. It begins with hearing the sounds of passion. I think language began with the urge to articulate something that could not be said, great grief or great passion and great erotic passion or great anger. You couldn't put it into-- into--into--you didn't know how to do it. I mean, shrieking and howling and things weren't enough. You wanted to make it more intimate and clear than that, and that's the-- I think that's how language-- and that's how poetry began. Poetry is about not information. It's about expressing something inexpressible. It's there in the poetry. It's there all the way through Shakespeare. You know, that--that thing where he's so furious at his mother and he said, "And would it were not so you were my mother." Think of the complexity of that line, and it's right there in the sound. "And would it were not so you were my mother." Yeah.

Sniffles

Merwin

It just does you in the gut when you hear--hear a line like that. The bitterness and the hatred and the anger with--with all the other feelings, too, you know? That's in the sound. That's not in the information.

Moyers

I don't understand all of your poetry, but I get it. That's the important thing. So what makes a poem work? I don't know. I don't know. I'll never know what makes a poem work. But you once said that if a poem works "it is its own form." Yes. It doesn't matter what the form is... That's right. if it reaches you, touches you. Well, like, one of the things about poetry-- and this is different from prose-- when a poem-- when a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, "In other words, you mean." No. That's not-- that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean this. This is it, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but if it does work, that's--that's the way it is. When you really get a--a poem, don't you have a feeling that you're remembering it? Ooh. That you've discovered it yourself, that you--in fact, you might have written it yourself?

Paula

William never discusses anything he's writing at all, and I don't know it until it's done and I see it on the end of the dining room table without any notice at all. If he's finished a poem, he'll put it facedown on the table without a word, and sometimes, it might be a few hours before I find it, and he never says, "What do you think?" The most astonishing example of that was when he was working on "The Folding Cliffs," which is 300 pages of poetry and 5 years of research. I knew the story that he was working on. It's a true story, and it was all Hawaiian history, and I knew about the research. It's a fascinating story, but I always assumed it would be prose, and I almost fainted when I saw the manuscript on the end of the table, and it was poetry, and I sat down, and I read it almost at one sitting. It was just stunning. Absolutely, I wept reading it. It was so beautiful. I still do. William is a minstrel, a troubadour, a jongleur, a throwback to ancient Provence... or to medieval Italy. He has been true to himself, and that involved not being an academic.

Faggen

William is not an institutional man. If you look at his so- called career--if such a terrible word could be used for the life and work of William Merwin--he has not been associated with institutions.

Schwartz

He's different from most people. Sometimes, it's bothered some people that he's never--he never taught. Even though he didn't have any money, he never wanted to be a part of an establishment. He would do whatever he needed to do--cut his own hair, you know, wear the same clothes, whatever it was just in order to maintain his independence. Some people have taken it as arrogance at different times, but the truth is, people are struck by his depth and his authenticity.

Merwin

I never especially wanted to have a domestic life, maybe because of the domestic life I grew up in, so I didn't need a lot of money.

Schwartz

My mother and I were for some reason some years ago going through a closet downstairs, a couple of boxes of old photographs and papers. I'm not sure what we were looking for, and she pulls out this photograph of William. I mean, really good-looking guy, you know, big, strapping guy, and my mother--we just sort of looked at the picture in silence for a few seconds, and she--then she just said, "Boy." She said it very softly. She was mostly speaking to herself. She said, "Boy, I'm glad I didn't know him then. He looks like a lot of trouble." And I--I think he was, you know?

Faggen

Look. I get it. He's beautiful, and he writes well, you know, and he's really thoughtful. Uh, I--I mean, you know, as far as things go, if you really--if the relationship is really shaky, I'd say, yeah, you know, that he's not the guy you're gonna want to have around, and--and, um, he's courtly and gentlemanly, but he's not--let's put it that way--that gentlemanly. You know, he and Paula have been together for years, but, you know, back in the day--poets. Ha ha! This is troubadours, you know? As they say, eventually it was the sixties, and the fifties weren't so tame either. You know, if someone becomes sort of an eminence the way he has, you know, you can have a certain image, but back in the day, yeah, I think he got around pretty good.

Paula

It never bothered me at all that he was always surrounded by groupies and girls and women all, you know, clinging to him. I thought it was just fine. Every once in a while, there was--there'd be somebody that would come along that was a little bit too much. My radar is pretty keen on that, and I'd sound a quiet alarm. He--he couldn't tell the difference. But, no, I like seeing him surrounded by admirers, even when they're pretty girls. It's nice, and I just leave him to it.

Bloom

Even before I met the man, I liked the man immensely from the poetry. He clearly was full of a love for all creative beings, human, animal, vegetable, sky, earth, sea. Clearly just a lovely nature.

Schwartz

He will not put on any kind of act in order to come out and play with you while you're putting on your acts, and it's--I don't think he ever knew how to do that as a kid. Probably saved him a great amount of time wasted, and I also think he's simply in-- he's incapable of it. He sits where he is with his feet on the ground, and he listens, and he watches, and he is who he is. People who read William and have been moved by him and have been affected by his work, I mean, are affected for life.

Missile whooshes

Merwin

It was the time of the Vietnam War, that and a sense of the nuclear menace and of the human use of poisons for agriculture and to killing vegetation and other forms of life, the pollution of all the elements around us except fire, and the destruction of species and the biota, subjects that were barely being considered at that time. It filled me with a pessimism that made the act of writing something that I resorted to only when it became very insistent to me, for often it seemed pointless. The poems I wrote then only when they pushed themselves upon me sometimes came in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I would get up and walk at night, and those of you who have done this in the country, away from human habitation, know that, as the phrase is, you find your way, and this poem is about a morning coming down to the river, just being at the river just as the first light comes in at that historic moment that I was telling you about. It's called "Avoiding News By the River." "As the stars hide in the light before daybreak "Reed warblers hunt along the narrow stream "Trout rise to their shadows "Milky light flows through the branches "Fills with blood "Men will be waking "In an hour it will be summer "I dreamed that the heavens were eating the earth "Waking it is not so "Not the heavens "I am not ashamed of the wren's murders "Nor the badger's dinners "On which all worldly good depends If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything."

Schwartz

There's nothing that makes him more enraged than certain kinds of injustice, which most often have to do with barbarism or cruelty of some kind. It's not that he's against fighting at all, I think. I mean, he'll defend himself, and he'll defend people, but it's--it's the way the sort of cheap morality that's used and how people are injured, usually defenseless people, that just makes him enraged.

Merwin

I mean, look at the world now. Look at the way we're treating each other. Look at the way we're talking to each other. Uh, we don't want to have a discourse anymore. We want to have an argument. We want to find reasons to hate each other. Um, I can't deal--I can't deal perfectly with the violence in myself. I don't think anybody can. I don't think the Dalai Lama can. There isn't a day passing in any quarter of the world where people are not murdering each other, and is one just gonna go along with it? I don't know. Some people are, and some people-- and that includes me-- are not going to. I woke up down in the Village there thinking, "I'm angry all the time. I'm angry at what's going on, I'm angry at the way people are talking, I'm angry--I'm angry," and then the Cuban Missile Crisis hit, and I thought--I heard people in the streets saying, "We should have bombed them years ago," and I thought, "Jesus. These are people who don't love their "lives at all. "They don't care about their own lives, "but they're prepared to take somebody else's. "This is--this isn't good. "There's something the matter. I better get out of here." And I said, "And I better learn how to grow my lettuces and my beans and my potatoes and"...

Faggen

There was probably something by many standards that was a little bit punkish about not wanting to accept the Pulitzer Prize and wanting the money to go to a particular cause. Uh, by '71, you--you had had not only '68 and '69, you had had Kent State. Uh, William, I'm sure, was thoroughly disgusted. And W.H. Auden, who had given him, uh, his first prize, uh, with his first book wrote in turn to "The New York Review of Books" and said, "I agree with Merwin politically, "but he has no right say "how the Pulitzer committee should deal "with this money. "He can't name people for it. He either takes it or doesn't." And, uh, Merwin wrote back again--the letters column was really flying that season--to say that he was sorry to have offended the great poet but in the face of such a national disgrace he felt he had no choice but to not be a part of the officialdom that was honoring him. So he, uh--he was passionate from the early sixties. He participated in protest marches all over place, wrote essays in "The Nation" about, uh, the various disgraces but finally turned back to poetry, realizing he could get a firmer grip on the national psyche.

Bloom

I know scores of younger people who love William's poetry, and they don't love it because he cries out for the outraged earth, for environmental issues, even though he's obviously very strong on that, and they don't love it because historically he was a peace marcher and violently opposed the obscenity of our Vietnamese war madness or the Iraqi insanity or all our stupidities or that he opposes human viciousness in general. "All bad poetry is sincere." The divine Oscar Wilde said that, and I never let that get out of my head. I don't care about sincerity. William happens to be a passionately sincere person and poet, but that's not why his poetry matters. It matters because finally having assimilated everything he assimilated he started again and has given us something fresh, vibrant, and original. It matters because it has its own kind of cognitive splendor. And most of all, it is very beautiful. I first read William's poems when I was 18, and I still have the book in which I found them--"Naked Poetry" from 1969. William just--I--I love the whole book, but he stood out to me, and, uh, I remember not only underlining and marking many of his poems, you know, "Great poem! Lovely!" Stars. You know, those days in which you write in books, but writing in my journal so much about William and his poems, and I remember writing on the first day I ever read his poems, "I think this is a voice that could save us," and I still think that, having read him now for more than 40 years. Uh, it is a voice that could save us if enough people paid attention to what it says. He has evolved as a poet, uh, in remarkable ways that I can't think--I can't think there's a parallel in, uh, contemporary American poetry, and he does seem to me one of those poets like Blake or like Whitman who has had a kind of genuine, mysterious, uh, access to a kind of transcendence that most of us can't see or even know is there. So to watch a poet with these gifts change his mind about how to use those gifts, uh, and to push himself continually to greater access to something beyond us all has--I can't think of any American poet who has tried so hard and so successfully as he has. To what extent do you think the very personal nature of so many of your later poems has been influenced by your embrace of Buddhism, the inward turning that seems to mark-- I don't know the answer to that, Bill. Because I don't know the alternative, you know? Did the aspirin cure your headache, or would you have got over it anyway? I don't know. But you do manage to see light even in darkness. How do you explain that to yourself? I think if we don't, uh, that's just ultimate despair, and there's nothing to be said. Um, the--all of these things have been true always. I mean, we have been-- we have been cruel and dishonest, uh, we have been helplessly angry and greedy always. All of our faults have always been there, and, uh, all of our feelings have been there, and we haven't worked our way out of them. There's nobody. I just don't--I don't believe in the saints in that sense that these are people who've-- suddenly they're past all human failings. I don't think we're ever past human failings, and, uh, that's all right. We--and I think that we should forgive ourselves and forgive each other if we possibly can. 1975 was when he first visited Maui in order to study with a Zen teacher Robert Aitken out there, and in the same year, he went to Boulder, uh, Colorado, to study with a Buddhist master, lama really, named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and, uh, well, it was 1975. It was a time--you know, maybe a low point in Western civilization, um, and, uh, shag rugs and orange walls and whatnot but of a kind-- and drugs a great deal and people experimenting, let's say, with how to live and a time of extremes. And so during a Halloween party at the camp, uh, things got rowdy, drunken, druggy, and, uh, Merwin and his then companion Dana Naone, a beautiful woman, uh, were forced to strip naked, and, uh, it was just a horrible scene. And, uh, Merwin the next day sent Dana away but decided himself he would stay for two days to try to meet privately with Trungpa before whom he had been paraded the ni-- the night before, and he said to the great leader--he said, "Do you--do you think it's possible that you made a mistake?" And he said, "A reincarnated lama never makes a mistake," and Merwin said, "Now I see why you could never be my teacher," and left. Merwin,

voice-over

The vision that we're handed in the book of "Genesis" says humans are instructed to go out and "increase and multiply and have dominion over all the other forms of life," and the result is we're destroying species. Uh, 35 years ago, a biologist told me we were losing a species a week, and I was shocked. Now we're losing species every minute, and we can't put any of that back. This is irreversible.

Woman

A ke kuahiwi, a ke kualono Ku ana 'o Laka i ka mauna Noho ana o' Laka i ke po'o o ka 'ohu O Laka kumu hula Nana i 'a 'e ka waokele OK. The 5 lines descriptively tells you that in the summit of the islands, the kuahiwi, and up on the ridges on the mountains is where Laka is standing. She stands on the mountains. The third line tells you that she resides in the mist, and the mist is the 'ohu, and the 'ohu is that mist that rises from the Earth, and you see it early in the morning. That's--that's Laka, and Laka is a deity of the forest, and more specifically, she is the elemental force that causes that is evaporation and transpiration from the Earth. So it's like a breath from the Earth. So poetically, you would say, "Breath from the Earth," and this process of moving up is a very godly process, and it's a godly process because it's an elemental form. The elemental form is Laka, and when we go out and we plant these trees and allow them to do what they naturally do, we're doing a very godlike thing. We're becoming part of the god cycle, and so to me that's what William and Paula are doing, great--great stuff, godly almost.

Moyers

"On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree." Why would you want to plant a tree? It's a relation to the--to the world. It's not--it's nothing to do with thinking that the world is going to be there forever, but that's-- that's a relation with the world that I want is to be putting life back into the world rather than taking life out of it all the time. We do a lot of that, you know? But I--I've lived on Maui for, uh, 35 years, and I feel very, very lucky. Why do you live there? Why did you go there? A mixture of things. The ancient culture. The remnants of that fascinated me, and what I loved about the climate is that I could be surrounded by a garden all year round.

Nye

I think it makes sense that William would have fallen in love with a place as remote and removed as Maui because that sense that-- that many poets have of being an outsider to begin with, of kind of standing off the edge of the commerce of urbanization and the economics, the power structures of--of cities and greed and all that goes on. He wasn't interested in all that, and it makes sense that he would find a place as remote as Hawaii in which to put his roots down and put so many roots down, where he could belong to acreage in a way that very few of us will ever belong to the land where we live.

Kanahele

You become aware of cycles here, and you become aware of cycles in the environment because you live on an island, and so you can see a sun rising on the horizon, and you can see the sun set on the horizon, and the rise and the set of the sun is a whole, and you can see things in a whole. You can see the birth of something, and then you see the death of something. It's like the birth and the death of the sun, and he was able to see that, the idea of cycles to me. There's a lot of people that live here that don't see the cycles, and once you see the cycles, you become part of that cycle, but I think that's what he was attracted to, becoming part of the cycle.

Man

Well, over the last 30 years, the Merwins have amassed an extraordinary collection of palms from all over the world. I've been working this last week together with staff at the National Tropical Botanic Garden in trying to catalogue the collection. What William and Paula have done in this valley is astonishing. William was talking to me this morning about bush fires going through this property in the early stages. Can you imagine bush fires now? It would be an impossibility, and apparently, this whole valley was written off as being totally useless land.

Merwin

Oh, oh, John, I want to show you. Now two of the palms that I really want to know what they are are right up here. This looks Madagascan. Yeah? What is it with these wonderful petiole? Dypsis bejofo? Yeah? You think so. In fact, I'm talking rubbish. This is a Raphia. A Raphia. This is a Raphia, yeah. That's got to be a big guy then, isn't he? Yes.

Paula

It feels very important to be able to show people what you can do with a piece of land that was classified officially as wasteland, that you put everything into it, all the food scraps. For years, William put all his mail under the trees, but it's something that people can see. I think that's important, and we would like people to be able to understand that anybody can do it, and they can do it on very small pieces of land. They can plant trees and change the climate. It's 5 degrees cooler here because of the trees. When my last dog before Pea couldn't--she wanted to follow me everywhere, and she couldn't get across the stream bank, so we had to build a little bridge. Oh! If she's not in the next world, I don't want to be there. Heh heh heh.

Schwartz

I was in the White House in Obama's office with him. I was watching him and my mother in the office. We were all there together, and the intensity and the focus with which, you know, Obama said--first thing he said, "Well, tell me what you want to do as poet laureate." And I could tell he admired William a lot, but I still don't think he was particularly prepared for when you ask William "Tell me what you want to do." I mean, he--he wanted to talk about landscape and the imagination.

Merwin

Really, the thing that makes us so remarkable as a species is not our technology and not how smart we are and not any of those things. I think it's the imagination. We don't know where it comes from, but it's the ability to care about the whales in the Pacific that are dying from pollution and from malnutrition and the homeless people on the street and the people starving to death and mistreated in Darfur in Africa. What are they to do with us? Everything or nothing, and, uh, it's the imagination that says they're everything to do with us. If it happens to them, it happens to us, too. That's--I think that's it, and I think that's the source of the arts, and it's the source of the real value in--in humanity. That's why it matters whether we survive or not. You know, Thoreau was to me our great American prophet. He said, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." What does wildness mean? He's not just talking about rushing around with your clothes off and behaving like a fool. The wild is the sense of something that's just got away from you, something that you can't ever really hold on to, that's there, that's terribly important to you and you can't grasp it. That's the wild. That's what I'm calling the unknown. When you look up at the night sky, isn't it amazing that we're here at all? We've got this life, we've got these moments. We can look up at the sky, we can see the whole thing. The likeliness of it doesn't exist it's so small, it's so unlikely, and that's--that's--that's the wildness. That's the wildness that we're part of. If we lose respect for that, then we get self-important, and that's-- that's part of our problem, you know. This is the most self-important species on the-- on the Earth. This is a short poem called "For the Anniversary of My Death." There have been many birthday poems, but, uh, this is one of the deathday poems. It's brief, and it's shocking and moving, but you see, as well, how-- in all its strangeness how elegant the phrasing is. "Every year without knowing it I have passed the day "When the last fires will wave to me "And the silence will set out "Tireless traveler "Like the beam of a lightless star "Then I will no longer "Find myself in life as in a strange garment "Surprised at the earth "And the love of one woman "And the shamelessness of men "As today writing after 3 days of rain "Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what."

Faggen

You know, the listening, that-- a word that still recurs in his poetry, if anything more now. "Listening," "waiting," "mystery," uh, "not knowing," or even "unknowing," and he seems not just comfortable with not knowing things, but it seems to be a state that he encourages. Now it's interesting because the other side of this is if you've ever watched William tackle a subject--botany, horticulture, I mean, all the palms in his gardens, or languages when he's translating--you'll see a rapacious mind go after, you know, a series of encyclopedias and books, and he will just absorb the knowledge. There is no present. The past is what we have. Memory is what we have. We live on memory. To see the present is something that happens very rarely in a brief instant of a spiritual state that suddenly you see the present and you see there's nothing there. There's absolutely nothing there. It's the huge nothingness of the night sky. You know, that's the present, but what we live in is the past so that what you see when you see this conversation with your mother and now you remember it, you understand something that you didn't understand at the time and that you didn't understand 10 years ago. That's what I mean. Sometimes, you--you really get to the bottom of something that you've been carrying around all your life. What a really pathetic, failed figured, scared man was my father was, you know, and my mother was timid, but she wasn't scared, and she was finally brave as a lion when she had to be, and their characters emerge with memory. You begin to know more about character. Everything comes together, and you can use it. These are things you couldn't use when you first knew them. Um, this is true in any of the arts, too. Sometimes, you have a--an inkling that, you know, you're gonna be able to do something with something, but you don't know what it is, and you just make a note of it and put it aside, and then the moment comes when you know what it's for, you hear it again, you know, and you can make something out of it. I think this happens in all the arts because where does the real thing, where does that real moment come from? We have no idea where it comes from. It comes from the night sky. I think that's one of the things that sometimes it take you a long time to come to realize that your original conversation with your mother was complete, but it didn't have the completeness that you've arrived at now, which is fuller, you know? "Rain Light. "All day the stars watch from long ago "my mother said I am going now "when you are alone you will be all right "whether or not you know you will know "look at the old house in the dawn rain "all the flowers are forms of water "the sun reminds them through a white cloud "touches the patchwork spread on the hill "the washed colors of the afterlife "that lived there long before you were born "see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning." The original documentary "Even

Though the Whole Announcer

"W.S.

Merwin

To Plant a World is Burning" available on DVD. To order, shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.