The Poet and the Forest
Seeking solitude and renewal, W.S. Merwin turned a scarred Maui hillside into a sanctuary of palms & poetry.
story by Paul Wood
portrait by Larry Cameron
photographs by Daniel Sullivan
On a windswept ridge above Maui’s north shore in 1976, W.S. Merwin began with nothing but barren soil and time. The poet who had long sought silence and meaning found both here, in a place apart from the world he had known.
Merwin built his home by hand – off the grid, no telephone – meditating each morning, writing each day and planting a tree each afternoon until the hillside became a forest.
Few on Maui knew him. Famous in Manhattan, he lived quietly in Peʻahi. By 2010, with two Pulitzer prizes and 50 books behind him, he became the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate.
Locals later learned that the soft-spoken man on a weathered Upcountry farm was among America’s most honored poets. He valued solitude but he was no recluse. He had a close network of island friends, received visits from literary colleagues, married one of them – his wife Paula Dunaway – and occasionally appeared at local schools and the college. At Mana Foods in Pāʻia, shoppers may have brushed past him without knowing it.
For a man so private, Merwin spoke with rare candor in a 2010 PBS interview with journalist Jeffrey Brown, who asked about his daily life on Maui: “In Hawaiʻi you live … away?”
“Pretty well off the grid, yes,” Merwin replied. “I love them both. When I’m in the country I miss the city – some of the time. When I’m in the city I miss the country all the time.”
Merwin died at his home in 2019 at 91, having outlived his wife by two years. By then he had expanded his land to 19 acres and transformed the once-depleted hillside into a tropical arboretum – a forest of towering palms from across the world, many endangered in their native ranges. He had done it one tree at a time, one bucket of water at a time each afternoon.
His beloved property in Makawao is now known as The Merwin Conservancy. It holds more than 3,000 palms representing 480 species – one of the most extensive palm collections on earth.
Today the nonprofit carries Merwin’s quiet vision forward, maintaining the property and extending his legacy through residencies and educational programs. Residents create in the stillness he cultivated, while visitors learn to see language, landscape and care for the earth as one practice.
In 1976, poet W.S. Merwin settled in Hāʻiku, where he built his home and cultivated the land into a thriving conservancy.
The Conservancy stands as a living testament to what one person can do with steady, daily care for the earth. For many, it’s not a tourist attraction but a pilgrimage – a quiet return to the vision of a poet.
William Stanley Merwin was a Princeton graduate, born in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian minister. In his 20s he gained attention for a new kind of poem – spare, unpunctuated and open-ended.
In “Dusk in Winter,” he wrote:
The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
It goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way
With his boyish good looks, bright blue eyes and genteel East Coast Ivy League manners, Merwin didn’t seem the type to end up living without plumbing on the ragged edge of a tropical island. Yet he was drawn to Zen Buddhism and to the guidance of Robert Aitken.
Aitken Roshi, as he was known, had grown up in Honolulu. Captured in Guam during World War II and imprisoned in Japan, he became a fervent student of Zen. After his release he earned the title “roshi” and, in the 1970s, maintained the Maui Zendo in Haʻikū, a quiet hall above a bend on Kaupakalua Road. There Merwin found both Zen and Upcountry Maui. After a few years, Aitken returned to Honolulu. Merwin stayed.
By the early 1970s Maui was in transition. Sugar and pineapple still dominated the landscape, but the first resorts were rising along the coast as the plantation era gave way to tourism and suburban life. Gas-powered machinery had reduced the need for labor.
The plantation system had long rested on a social hierarchy of a few wealthy white landowners, “haoles” as locals called them, and legions of imported laborers housed in camps. When the companies built tract housing in town, the descendants of those workers became mortgage-payers, tradespeople, teachers and politicians. The core of the community became “locals.”
For most working families, landownership meant a small lot in town, while remote acreages – long cleared for pineapple and left without water, roads or electricity – remained within reach for only the most determined. A new wave of settlers – “da hippies,” to some – made their way along the island’s backroads; however, Merwin was not one of them.
He arrived without baggage of “haole” or “local,” only with intent. His motivation, he later wrote: “The condition of the soil did not, in itself, daunt me. I had long dreamed of having a chance, one day, to try to restore a bit of the earth’s surface that had been abused by human ‘improvement.’ ”
“I loved the windswept ridge, empty of the sounds of machines, just as it was, with its tawny dry grass waving in the wind of late summer.” Beyond that, the sea reached to Alaska.
“I was captivated by the sense of distance along the coast,” he wrote.
Far from the literary circles that once defined him, Merwin embraced a life of solitude and simplicity until his passing in 2019, rising each day to meditate, write and tend to his trees.
Musing about ancient Taoist and Buddhist monasteries, he hoped to have a house “set among trees and visible only as one actually arrived there on foot.” Working with skilled off-grid neighbors, he created this monastic refuge – a small garage at roadside, a path downslope to the hushed serenity of the main house.
Both stand above rain-fed cisterns, and the roof gleams, as Merwin wrote, with “the green, glazed tiles of Oriental houses in the islands and around the Pacific Rim.” He wrote that he wanted “to disturb the land as little as possible and to make as small a footprint of cement as possible,” adding that “no bulldozer was used at all in preparing the site for the house.”
The floors, made of dense, dark auburn eucalyptus harvested and cured on Maui, are built to endure for generations. The architecture’s clean dimensions emphasize space and silence, the white walls and unornamented wood inviting attention. The dojo (meditation room) sits adjacent to the study. Merwin’s writing room remains as he left it – airy, with hundreds of worn, annotated books on plain pine shelves, a broad desk hewn from a single slab, palm fronds glinting beyond the windows.
Reflecting on his design process, he wrote: “I realized that the idol of the world of terminal acceleration had never been my guide. Convenience, I believe, never comes gratis, and invasion is always part of the price.”
Access is limited and the quiet remains – a final echo of the silence and meaning he sought. Those who enter often sense what Merwin himself described: “Visitors arriving here for the first time … sometimes say, as they come in the gate, that it seems like somewhere with a clear character of its own – that of a place apart.”
In the stillness of that place, the poet’s vision endures.
Today, The Merwin Conservancy carries his vision forward. Home to one of the most extensive palm collections on earth, it serves as a sanctuary for art, ecology and reflection.
