W.S. Merwin is leaving some elements of his public reading at the University of Hawai'i on Wednesday up to chance.

"I never like to plan these things out except in a very general way," says Merwin, 79, "If you plan (a reading) too carefully, it comes off as dead. It's like reading a laundry list."

Instead, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet will carefully survey his audience of academics, poetry lovers and the general public before deciding just what to pull from a body of distinguished work.

Selections from "Rain in the Trees," "The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative" and a new collection, "Migration: New and Selected Poems" (winner of the 2005 National Book Award) are likely, he says. The rest will be left to Merwin's instincts.

He has much to draw from. Merwin's published nearly 30 books of poetry and prose and has translated some 23 other works over the course of a career spanning some 54 years. He was awarded the Pulitzer for his 1970 collection "The Carrier of Letters."

Merwin's appearance, somewhat of a rarity given the poet's preference to stay close to his Maui home, kicks off the UH English Department's new Marjorie Putnam Sinclair Edel Reading Series.

Sinclair, widow of former UH President Gregg Sinclair, was a noted poet, author, biographer and teacher. The series, which features celebrated writers, places special emphasis on three of Sinclair's lifelong interests: poetry, Hawai'i and Hawaiian culture.

Merwin and his wife, Paula, were close friends with Sinclair and her second husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Leon Edel. They lived in Edel's apartment in Honolulu shortly after arriving in Hawai'i in the mid-1970s.

"She was well-read and elegant," Merwin says of Sinclair. "Very gentle and sweet-natured."

Merwin, son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in New York and raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He broke from his conservative roots early, studying writing under John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur.

Well regarded for his translations of French, Spanish and Latin poetry, in addition to his own early works, Merwin came to national attention as part of a generation of poets (including Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg) opposed to the Vietnam war.

He has reservations about political writing. "When you start with a point of view about something, it can make you self-righteous," he says. "It makes you two-dimensional, and it spoils it as a poem." Still, Merwin says, the work he and his colleagues did were effective as acts of conscience.

"Most war poems are terrible," he says. "But I think maybe they helped in some way. They influenced (President John) Kennedy to understand that a large number of people vociferously opposed the war. It would be unthinkable for us not to do that.

"Writers who are able to speak their mind have a duty to do so for those who can't."

To Merwin, being a poet is a political statement in and of itself.

"(As a poet) you insist on the final and complete value of individual values and individual integrity," he says. "If we give that up, we fade away."

While Merwin remains politically engaged — he read the poem "Ogres" at a "Poems Not Fit for the White House" event at Lincoln Center before the start of the war in Iraq — much of his work over the past 30 years has been influenced by his equally strong stand as an environmental activist and lover of Hawaiian culture.

Merwin lives in East Maui, less than half a mile from the sheer ocean cliffs, in a secluded forest in which he has planted more than 800 varieties of palms, most grown from seed.

For Merwin, the forest is a garden of sorts, perhaps not unlike the wildlife reserves and refuges he sees under constant threat from development. The etymological shift in what the word "garden" has come to mean intrigues the poet.

"It's changed significantly," Merwin says. "A garden used to be a place you closed off to keep the natural world out so you could cultivate something different. Now (with national parks and wildlife reserves), a garden is something you protect from human intervention, from being exploited and destroyed. We have a different relationship with the wilderness now."

Some of his palms survive and thrive, others die and return to the earth, not unlike the poems Merwin works on from early morning to mid-afternoon daily.

Merwin says his creative works are not just actualized in language, but inspired by it. Sometimes it's a simple word or a phrase. It could be something he's heard all of his life.

"Hearing connects you to everything else," he says. "The big difference between prose and poetry is that you don't have to 'hear' prose to get it. If you don't hear the sound of a poem on some level, you don't really get it."

That was the lesson learned by thousands of readers of Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs," an ambitious and potentially intimidating narrative in poetry. Merwin says many readers who thought they couldn't finish the piece were drawn in once they started to read the words aloud.

"One of the problems with the way poetry is taught in schools now is it loses sight of what poetry is supposed to be — pleasure," Merwin says. "In schools, you're taught what you're supposed to like rather than encouraged to find out for yourself what you like."

Merwin says poetry also has fallen victim to television and other highly structured or highly organized forms of entertainment that stunt imagination.

Merwin takes nothing for granted — not his garden, not his audience, not his work.

"You can't write a poem by deciding to," he says. "Every time I finish a poem, I think that it might be the last one that I ever write."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.