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Advertisements  A master gardener of verse  By Elizabeth Lund /
April 24, 2003  Despite more than 20 books of poetry and a
Pulitzer Prize, W.S. Merwin sounds more confident about his
tree-planting than his writing. In fact, this major American
poet, long known as a master craftsman, insists that he may
never write again: "Poetry can't be done as an act of will. You
can't say, 'I will now write a poem.' "  Skip to next paragraph
Still, each morning Merwin does write, always on scrap paper -
"It has to be a piece of paper that is worthless. The idea of
taking a blank sheet would be very intimidating." Later, he
plants a few palm trees, some of which are rare or extinct
except in captivity, on his 18 acres in Maui, Hawaii. The land
was almost ruined, he says, when it was used unsuccessfully to
raise pineapples in the 1930s.  Merwin doesn't view his
endeavors as two forms of restoring a landscape, but those who
know his writing could easily draw that