Poets Touching Trees

Tree Interview with Sophia Le Fraga Do You Ever Think About...

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:43:00 -0400

Tree Interview with Sophia Le Fraga

Do You Ever Think About Trees?

I think about trees constantly, almost as much as I think about the sky.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

A friend told me this once a while back: Every time we breathe in and out, we inhale and exhale many many molecules of gas. Each time we exhale, about 1.5x10^23 molecules exit our bodies and go into the atmosphere. That’s trillions and trillions. And tons of these are CO2, which plants love and need to photosynthesize. The atmosphere has a one year mixing period, meaning that after a year, gases in the atmosphere are blended evenly around our planet. This means that your breath from last year is in India and Brazil and Mexico and everywhere else. So plants and trees, which need this CO2, suck in huge amounts of it through their leaves. Some of that CO2 came from you. In fact, every blade of grass and every single leaf has about 6-20 CO2 molecules that came just from you. That same amount came from me, from every other Poet Touching a Tree, from my sister and your mom and anyone else that you know. And so we are all physically connected, through space and time.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Very. Trees keep us all connected. The Internet wishes it was a tree.

Go Green and checkout Sophia Le Fraga’s website: http://slefraga.blogspot.com/

Tree Interview with Bianca Stone Do you ever think about trees?...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:36:00 -0400

Tree Interview with Bianca Stone

Do you ever think about trees?

I have Important Trees of Eastern Forests on my desk. It’s a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service booklet from 1968. I’ve used it in a poem before.

I see now that the previous owner cut out a newspaper chart of “Plant Pests and Diseases” and left it in the book. One of the pests is the Japanese beetle. I remember those from my childhood. We’d pick them off the plants in the garden and the trees for grandma. She hated them. I’d put them in a tin can and throw in a leaf and slam it shut again. They’re hard to kill. They were huge and ravenous and shinny.

In this chart is says they have

Copper wings,
metallic blue
body

Plants and Damage

Tomatoes, eggplant, cu-
cumber, flowers.
Pepper leaves with
tiny holes

Control

0.75% rotenone dust
5% methoxychlor
dust, or 0.5%
lindane dust

Disease

Helminthospotium
blights and melting out

I love thinking about how Stephan Hawking said, while hypothesizing about alien life, that it might already be here…but they move so fast we seem like trees to them.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

There’s two cottonwood trees in our yard at mom’s house. They snow fuzz every spring; sending out their little seeds. It’s beautiful and horrible.

I used to climb up the smaller one all the way to the top and carve thing into the trunk. It’s all still there, year after year. I LOVE SO-AND-SO or I HATE MY LIFE or 1998.

Also I was a tree in our school play. Twice. The Wizard of Oz and in The Lorax.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

How could they not be?

We’re inextricably linked with them. And poets know that best.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her collection of poetry “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” is forthcoming from Tin House/Octopus Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

Go Green and read some Bianca Stone Poets: http://bombsite.com/articles/7075

Tree Interview with Michael J. Wilson Do you ever think about...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:29:00 -0400

Tree Interview with Michael J. Wilson

Do you ever think about trees?

All the time.

They remind me of the nervous system, the circulatory system. The branching strings of our insides made visible.

They look like nebulae. Spidery arms reaching from a cohesive center.

Their cycle. Endless death/rebirth. The apricot tree in my backyard is about to bloom. Watching the little fist-shaped buds is like waiting for a new life to start.

Winter trees are the best though. The dark, bone-like limbs rattling in the wind. Beautiful.

I’ve always wanted a tree house.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

When I was a kid my Grandmother had a group of apple trees and then a apricot and cherry tree. The biggest tree was this gigantic maple. The apple trees grew these wormy, bumpy apples that were inedible.

I would do ‘tree runs’ I would start at the back of the house and run and touch each trunk in order. Maple, apple, apple, cherry, apricot. Then back to the house.

Right before I started high school the trees were taken out. First the apricot and cherry. One died and the other was destroyed by gypsy moths. Then the apples, to make way for a shed.

The maple still stands but is slowly giving in to age.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I did a series of poems with titles and themes taken from native North American trees. Things like Hop Hornbeam, and Cherry Birch.

The poems deal with childhood and growing up. With death. The idea was to present a life cycle using a symbol of that life cycle.

I find the ‘youth’ of the USA to be interesting so there is a little of that thrown in there.

—-

Michael J. Wilson lives in Santa Fe. His work has appeared in KNACK, Spittoon, Lungfull, and Shampoo. He writes reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and works for a coffee roaster.

Go green and read Michael’s work here: gnashnosh.blogspot.com

Tree Interview with Darran Anderson Do you ever think about...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 12:07:00 -0400

Tree Interview with Darran Anderson

Do you ever think about trees?

There’s a giant one outside my window that looks like it’s holding up the sky. We’ve forgotten how strange trees are. These wooden creatures that sprout out of the ground and grow towards space and slowly turn and move towards the light. The root system used to strike me as sinister, like they were all linked underground, passing messages to each other in morse code, conspiring against us. Sylvia Plath wrote about mushrooms in a similar sense but she underestimated trees.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

The earliest one was a tree that had been split in two by lightning near a river we used to fish as children. It used to strike me as eerie somehow. Haunted. Or the trees out on the west coast of Ireland, all stooped by the wind in the same direction, turning their backs to the edge of the world. Last year, I was in a quite remote place called Ratanakiri and we’d been drinking and they have rainforests there. I went for a walk one night and hauled myself up onto a branch and my hands got covered with ants. They started burrowing under my skin. They were like malevolent clockwork machines. Something from Philip K. Dick. It was amazing to watch but the next day, my hands felt like they’d rusted up. The Werner Herzog phrase about nature being murder sprang to mind, for all the beauty of the place.

An earlier memory I have was of a massive oak tree in these fields in Derry that we used to light fires in and explore as kids. The whole area’s gone now but it had a tree that rose out of a bank diagonally. We shimmied out onto the top, ridiculously high up, and attached a rope with a stick at the end. We called it the ‘Death Swing.’ You sat on it, stood at the top of the bank and jumped off. By the time you reached the apex, you were nearly upside down and going at such speed and at such an angle, you could actually feel the g-force pressing on your chest. I don’t think anyone enjoyed it, it was terrifying but peer-pressure dictated we all had to do it. A younger boy who used to follow us around, did it once and it snapped mid-flight and he flew through the air, still holding onto the rope, with the end flapping in the breeze. He broke something I think. I can still hear him screaming across the fields. The good old days.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

They feature in quite a lot of poems. I wrote a thing once set on the Maginot line in the Ardennes forest and a short story about the tree that killed Albert Camus. I like the Brothers Grimm aspect of woods. This primordial place where reason can be left behind, a place with it’s own sinister magic and mythology. I think most people have that from fairytales and there was an element of reading old Irish stories when I was small; the idea that Hawthorn trees concealed the entrance to the underworld or the touch of a Birch tree could bring on madness or mad King Sweeney who lived in the trees like Calvino’s baron. They still put rags and trinkets on trees in the more remote places here, shrines next to holy wells. It’s a mythology maybe older than Christianity. Wickerman-stuff. I think these stories inevitably seep into your writing, consciously or otherwise. I doubt they’ll ever disappear, they just mutate or go underground and wait to be found.

—-

Darran Anderson is Irish writer & infidel / 3:AM Magazine & former Dogmatika co-editor. Currently working on a critical study of the novels of Jack Kerouac for Reaktion Books, a study of the Serge Gainsbourg album Histoire de Melody Nelson for Bloomsbury and a diary of my time living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia called The Torrid Zone.

For more Darran Anderson go green: http://darrananderson.com/

TREE INTERVIEW WITH JOE PAN Location:...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:24:00 -0500

TREE INTERVIEW WITH JOE PAN Location: Mount Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

Quite often, actually. A more pressing question is, do trees think of me? & if so, what do they think? I believe we may share overarching political views. & a love for appendages.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Too numerous to count, I’d reckon. But here are a few: as a child in Florida I remember being at my grandmother’s house & standing on a chair watching the advancing hurricane through a window. Everything was going sideways & the wind picked up trashcans & I watched in disbelief as across the street the wind picked up a pine tree & dragged it through a neighbor’s house. Another: My father built my younger brother & I a tree fort between two pines. I’ve written stories about this tree fort. Within its walls I cut my hand wide open with an X-acto knife, trying to make bows & arrows, & had to be rushed to the hospital. My father, holding onto a branch, fell out of the tree fort & thus became quite familiar with a chiropractor. Later on, after the divorce, my mother dismantled the tree fort & chopped the pines down & turned one into a sundial. The last memory I’ll share happened when I was a teenager. My friend had a truck & we were fond of driving the truck through the backwoods & occasionally into trees. This particular time I was standing up in the back of the truck quite ridiculously hammered, holding myself in place by gripping the open cab window & yelling loudly, when my friend decided to flip back on the lights just as we were approaching a rather small tree. The tree was clipped & leapt through the front windshield & we swerved wildly into several other small trees, for whom I had no pity, given what they had done to my father. We used the trees as kindling when we set fire to the truck.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

From where I sit & write in my house I can see a tree. It stands beside my radiator, surrounded by books (perhaps, even, an old friend). It is a small tree & it is dying. Each week a new leaf withers on its stem, turns brown, & peers toward the floorboards. I believe I can save it. I have to believe I can save it.

—-

Joe Pan grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, & currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Hyperallergic. His debut collection of poetry, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named the Best First Book of the Year by Coldfront Magazine. His poetry has appeared in such places as Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, & Epiphany, his fiction in the Cimarron Review & Glimmer Train, & his nonfiction in The New York Times. Joe is the founder & managing editor of Brooklyn Arts Press, an independent publishing house, & lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For more Joe Pan go green: http://joepan.org/

Tree Interview with Joe...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 08:54:12 -0400

Tree Interview with Joe Fletcher location: Mt Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

I do, and they know it. I remember reading a book (Jarry? Bataille? I’ll never find it.) in which the character or narrator despairs over his inability to make love to a tree. I think about that, and I think there is a way, and I think thought is when a chance wind spins the mirror shards strung from a spreading sycamore.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

In the woods behind my childhood home an oak had fallen into a swamp, yanking up with it a huge half-circle of roots and soil, leaving a gash in the ground at the swamp’s edge. After school, Yuri Minnick and I would get all jacked up on gas station junk food and go down there and climb around. We called it The Face of the Earth. It’s still there, disintegrating.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

The oaks by that house on Germany Road in Williamston, Michigan, behind whose trunks I dreamt ape-like monsters stood, the fragrant mountain pines along the Clark Fork west of Missoula, Montana, through which massive buzzing power lines arced, the bare banyan tree splayed against a hot sky I glimpsed from a bus window outside of Dakar when I was sick, the magnolia in Sunderland, Massachusetts that decided to unfurl its leathery blossoms twice in one year, the two maples in Okemos, Michigan that I used as goalposts for several autumns, the pecan tree in Carrboro, North Carolina that weeps sap and spits nuts all over my backyard—these and other trees form a kind of Dunsinane of which I am composed. Also, some people down here call me The Ent.

—-

Joe Fletcher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Already It Is Dusk (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press). Other work can be found in jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Puerto Del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hoboeye, Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Go green and read a Joe Fletcher poem:

http://hoboeye.com/2009/01/poetry-joe-fletcher-north-carolina-usa/

Tree Interview with Elizabeth Clark Wessel location: Mt...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:06:25 -0400

Tree Interview with Elizabeth Clark Wessel location: Mt Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

Yes. I think and talk about them. When I’m visiting my family we talk about the sick tree in my mother’s yard that needs to come down, and it’s like discussing the death of a beloved pet. When I was in grad school we talked about trees, how they move, and how that movement had something to with consciousness. I can’t remember the specifics, but it felt true and mind-blowing at the time. I also think about trees in connection with time. Like the vast majority of human beings, I love to see the trees turn green in the beginning of spring, and when they turn yellow in the fall it makes me a little sad.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

When I was maybe age 6 or 7, my best friend and I found a dead meadowlark on the road between our houses and gave it a sky burial in the branches of an old fat blue fir in her yard. I have a tactile memory of the bird (stiff, but soft) and tree (scratchy, but soft), and I have a very clear image in my mind of the bird’s yellow breast in the middle of the gray-green fir. I used to visit that particular tree for years afterwards. It felt sacred. I had all kinds of magical thinking about it. People were probably meant to worship trees.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Hmmm, well, my guilt and fear surrounding our imminent environmental apocalypse is related to trees, lack of trees, or disrespect for trees. As for my writing, the word “street” is five times as common in my poems as “tree”, but I do have a few poems with trees in them. I wrote one poem called Urville, which was inspired by the death of world’s oldest tree. I look out the window a lot when I’m writing, and what I’m looking at is the trees.

—-

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is an editor at Argos Books & Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her poems and translations have appeared in DIAGRAM, A Public Space, Guernica, Sixth Finch, Lana Turner Journal, Jacket2, and The Laurel Review, among others. Her chapbook, Whither Weather, was chosen by Dana Levin for the Midwest Chapbook Series. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a translator.

Go green and read a poem by Elizabeth Clark Wessel: http://www.twoseriousladies.org/two-poems-by-elizabeth-clark-wessel

TWO INTERVIEWS BY TWO COACH HOUSE BOOKS POETS::: Interview #1...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:33:00 -0400

TWO INTERVIEWS BY TWO COACH HOUSE BOOKS POETS:::

Interview #1 Sarah Pinder

Do you ever think about trees?

I often wish I could be better at identifying tree species than I am. My father was a forester for a time, and now has a large plot of land he’s been planting trees on. Walking the property line with him is always a crash course in tree ID-ing. I’m envious of his ability to read his surroundings so clearly, and to see what’s being said about a space by what or how the trees are.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

One of my first jobs was working for a tree-planting company in my hometown over a summer, cleaning up the vehicles they used to transport people into the bush to plant trees. There could not be a dirtier job, I swear to God. I washed the vans out with a pressure washer, then would scrub them out with a wire bristle brush on my hands and knees, then hose them down again. Earth was embedded in every single crevice and crack of those vehicles. Earth and crumpled up porn and granola bar wrappers. Everything was held together with duct tape and axe handles.

Treeplanting is often a large part of how forests exist in a Canadian context, what with clearcut logging being a common practice. That job gave me the chance to dwell on the idea of forests sometimes being heavily constructed environments (when I wasn’t scraping sun-baked band-aids off the roofs of rental vans).

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

The romantic idea of a forest as a wild, untouched space was formative for me, but I also lived in single-industry towns relying on resource extraction for jobs. That sense of wildness existed alongside an understanding that what we call wild is often heavily mediated. I haven’t lived near or worked in the bush now for several years, but I still think and write about that tension a lot.

—

Sarah Pinder reads a poem: https://vimeo.com/47450758

Sarah Pinder lives in Toronto. Her first collection, Cutting Room, is

forthcoming with Coach House Books in Fall 2012. Her writing has been
shortlisted for the Expozine Small Press Awards and included in the
anthology She’s Shameless, and journals like Room, Canadian Woman
Studies and invisible city. A zine-maker of over a decade, you can
find her work in Montreal’s Distroboto art vending machines, as well
as a mailbox near you. http://bitsofstring.wordpress.com/

Interview #2 Jonathan Ball * Do you ever think about trees? I’m...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:20:00 -0400

Interview #2

Jonathan Ball

Do you ever think about trees?

I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by “trees.”

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Again, I apologize, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I understand you wanted a picture of me touching something? I have a few of these weird things in my yard, so I touched one of those—it was scratchity. My father worked as a forester for a while but he quit when I was young and now he just cuts them down whenever he sees them. Every time he visits my house he cuts another one down. He never talks about them and won’t tell me why. I call them “Trevor Oscars” and they look funny and neat. This one has sourballs on it!

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

My worldview involves many items and objects, but not these “trees” of which you speak. I would say that integral to my worldview, however, is the notion that the truth of the world is horror and violence lies inherent in everything humans do.Are trees involved in that?

Jonathan Ball (@jonathanballcom) is the author of Ex Machina, Clockfire, and The Politics of Knives.

—-

Jonathan Ball teaches English, film and writing at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009) and Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2010), which was shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award. Like his newest book The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012), these books were published under Creative Commons licences, so you can remix their contents. Visit Jonathan online at www.jonathanball.com.

TREE INTERVIEW WITH IRIS CUSHING location: Mount...

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:55:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH IRIS CUSHING location: Mount Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

Yes. I think about them, and with them, and because of them. There’s a Sappho fragment, translated by Anne Carson: “Eros shook my mind/like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.” it’s like that for me too. My mind, beyond its thinking: erotic, shaking.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I’m having one right now—breathing.

Cottonwoods, ponderosa pines, eucalyptus, junipers and oaks.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Yes. The term “knock on wood” dates back to pagan times: in Scandanavia, folks believed that there were mischievious spirits that lived inside the trees, who liked to meddle with people’s business. So when they were saying aloud something they wanted, they’d knock on the nearest tree so that the spirit in the tree literally couldn’t hear what they were saying. In my poems, I would like to do the opposite of knocking on wood.

—-

Iris Marble Cushing was born in Tarzana, CA. In 2011, she was a writer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review and other places. She works as an editor for Argos Books and is a writing tutor at Columbia University.

Go Green and Read an Iris Cushing poem: http://www.twoseriousladies.org/three-poems-by-iris-cushing/

TREE INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW DURBIN location:...

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:50:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW DURBIN location: Ditmas Park, Brooklyn

Do you ever think about trees?

Oh yes, all the time. I love to watch trees, especially online now that I live in New York City and so rarely see wild trees. I often Google “trees” because the results create the most beautiful, diverse forest in the world. And you can scroll for pages and pages. There’s a great subculture of people on YouTube who film the wind blowing through trees. I also like to watch those videos.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

There was a large tree in my backyard in Brooklyn that my neighbors cut down. It didn’t seem to be a problem tree, but they sent two men into my yard one day while my landlord was away and they cut it down. It took two days and on the second day I stuck my head out the window and asked them to stop, but they wouldn’t. I frantically Googled NYC tree laws, but they’re unfortunately lax. I filmed the men with my phone and told them what they were doing was wrong, but they didn’t listen. Then they just killed the tree. Is that too serious? Not all my memories of trees are sad: I remember these trees all the time, for example.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Sometimes I think about trees and how I miss the freedom they create outside of urban and suburban landscapes. I used to live upstate and I used to like to walk through the woods and think. Trees are an aid to thinking. I can’t do that anymore unless I go to some nonurbanized space like Prospect Park or Central Park, but that’s fine. I try not to miss anything I’ve left behind. Since I like to Google trees, I’d say I’m very influenced by new media trees. They’re a forest you can never cut down.

—

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of art books, ephemera, pamphlets, and glossies. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor of Conjunctions and lives in New York City.

GO GREEN AND READ AN ANDREW DURBIN POEM:

“From Reveler”: http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/durbin12.htm

TREE INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LEGAULT Do you ever think about...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:52:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LEGAULT

Do you ever think about trees?

Most of my thoughts appear to me in the form of trees, though they’re not always thoughts about trees. ‘Hunger’ is an oak. ‘Love’ is a dogwood. ‘My internet isn’t working,’ is a gingko. The trees tell me what to do, populating my mind-forest with structures that prefer the animals who live inside of them — the way said trees live inside of me — to me, the future hibernating amongst us like a shaved bear painted to look like a birch. Both me and trees hate camouflage. We find wooden shoes immediately attractive and then, suddenly, are repulsed by them.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

If I weren’t Canadian, I could more fully embrace, and elaborate upon my experience with my national spirit-plant, the Maple. But instead I have to do so in an undisclosed manner, one that doesn’t become traitor to its impulse — to encounter each experience like a symbol of thought itself — lest someone claim a northern stereotype on my behalf, equating these majestic beings with the majestic beings of the NHL or the god of poutine herself.

The Maple is a private act. I cannot go any further.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Like Christine Kanownik, trees are also my worldview. And I just wrote the word, ‘Trees.’

So, yes.

What is the name for ‘trees that live in a house’? House-tree? Domesticated Tree? Room-tree?

Indoor tree.

—-

Paul Legault [Le-goh] is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the co-editor of The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat/Telephone, 2012).He is the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2012).

Go Green and Read a Paul Legault poem: http://www.notnostrums.com/Legault.html

TREE INTERVIEW WITH LONELY CHRISTOPHER Do you ever think about...

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:46:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH LONELY CHRISTOPHER

Do you ever think about trees?

I don’t but for the sake of this question, as an exercise, I tried to think about trees. This is what came to mind:

The tree is hurting me!

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Where I grew up there were some large trees that reached out over the lake; I would climb them with girls. My father owned a business called the Magnolia Motel (because there was a single, white-barked magnolia tree in the gravel parking lot). My father also owned a tract of land that, at some time in the past, was used as a Christmas tree farm; the conifers had grown gigantic since the farm closed. Our family received copies of Forest Owner Magazine in the mail and to this day, truth be told, I find the idea of “the woods” to be more evocative and important than a single tree. In my hometown there was a bar called the Big Tree Inn because it had a very huge old tree behind it; the tree eventually died and fell on the bar. There is a tall tree in Prospect Park that reaches out over a pond; once I climbed that tree at night with Robert Snyderman and he fell off a branch and into the pond. Once I kissed Paul Legault under a tree in Fort Greene Park. He said, “You can kiss me if you want,” so I did. Then he said, “That was a mistake.”

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Trees, and the act of climbing trees, appear frequently in my poems but they are supposed to be metaphors for other things that aren’t trees, unrelated to trees. Here is a tree line I wrote: “you shall parse all obligatory relegations in the tree of my odd youth.” Here is the title poem from my next book Crush Dream:

I am the little Dutch boy

in the branch of a linden tree

Nobody loves me I am

so lonely.

—-

Lonely Christopher wrote and directed the feature film MOM, which premiered this summer. He is the author of a story collection titled The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse. His latest poetry chapbook, Crush Dream, will be a summer release from Radioactive Moat Press. He lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Go green and read a poem by Lonely Christopher: http://www.radioactivemoat.com/lonely-christopher.html

Tree Interview with Nate Pritts ...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:30:00 -0400

Tree Interview with Nate Pritts

Location: Athen, GA

Do you ever think about trees?

I teach at a small college in Upstate New York. Every day I make my way to the same parking space, one that’s marked by a tree so that my car’s hood lines up dead center with the trunk. It is a generic tree. Standard issue bark. The leaves, during seasons when there are leaves, are colored as you might expect them to be & are shaped in exactly the way everyone, from third grade on up, might draw them. I am often thinking about trees, describing the landscape around me in terms of the quantity or quality of trees present, calculating my position in the larger landscape in relation to trees. I don’t want to feel far from nature, I don’t want to be swallowed by fabricated concrete. I don’t want to lose myself in the dull intentionality of constructed spaces. I want proximity to something which at least hints at the uncontrolled, the vast, the mystery.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I grew up in the suburbs & the most noteworthy aspect of the otherwise unremarkable house I grew up in was the massive Weeping Willow tree in our backyard. It was all green & yellow & shade. The fronds hung down like curtains & I was always enchanted by the way it created a space – a room – inside itself. You could part the long slim branches & step into something. Summers, I’d take a chair & sit “in the tree,” underneath it, & read for hours – all morning, whole afternoons. It was here I realized someone must have written the words I was reading – chosen them on purpose & set them down – to commune with me, to create some kind of connection. I knew I wanted to do that too – for the other kids like me scattered & lost in their own neighborhoods, wishing someone knew how to talk to them.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

These days I don’t have much of a yard, just a weedy green square in back with a few overgrown tangles of rich vines. Because of the awkward early 20^th century design of the house, none of the windows face there anyway. The property next door, an industrial looking box which serves as a halfway house for kids transitioning out of juvie or too old to go to another in a series of foster homes, has a few trees growing in back though. I can see those out my living room window from where I sit in my green chair. I sit there & read for an hour or so every morning, maybe a few other stray hours throughout the day. I read & sometimes I write, but I also spend a lot of time just looking out the window. The most arresting – immediate? necessary? – thing a person can see out the window is the ruined trunk of an old tree. But it looks fresh, as if it was only just hacked into, the wood bright & pulpy & damp. I’ve never gone over for a closer look. Starting at the ground & then maybe four full feet up the trunk it looks as if it’s been torn apart, shredded. I suspect, these last few months, that all of my poetry has been about that tree, that trunk, the way it shines like an open wound, the way its machinery is exposed, the way the tree itself looks otherwise healthy, thriving despite this structural flaw.

—-

Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing. A new chapbook, No Memorial, is forthcoming from THRUSH Press. He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press. Find him online at www.natepritts.com.

Go Green and read a Nate Pritt’s Poem: http://darkskymagazine.com/magazines/nate-pritts/

Photo

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:27:09 -0400

Location: Athens, GA TREE INTERVIEW WITH LAURA SOLOMON Do you...

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:28:00 -0400

Location: Athens, GA

TREE INTERVIEW WITH LAURA SOLOMON

Do you ever think about trees?

I notice myself noticing them regularly & I often photograph them, especially dead or maimed trees, trees forced to grow around things like powerlines, & those that are oddly shaped, or otherwise distinctive in some way. I have a lot of pictures of trees that seem to have faces or eyes or vaginas. That said, I’m not sure that I pay more attention to trees categorically than I do to any other sort of natural spectacle, & I don’t devote much time to thinking about what it would be like to be a tree, though perhaps I should. I do think quite a lot about the word tree, how weird it looks & sounds, as well as how bursting it is with ideas & images of human experience, all those centuries of usage, quotidian & poetic, hanging off of it so evocatively that conversely TREE can & actually does frequently slip into its own connotative magic for me & reappear as an incredibly rich blank.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I lived alone in the woods as a child. I mean, my parents were around, & I had a dog, but no neighborhood children to play with until I was 8. One of my earliest memories is of playing “enchanted forest” which consisted of imagining everything in the natural world around me as being alive & conscious & able to intervene on my behalf. Later, when I moved into a suburban neighborhood, I continued with this game & convinced friends to play as well. In order to enter the enchanted realm (my backyard), you had to pass through a gate made of trees & there within were three other significant trees, a cherry tree, a plum tree & a gigantic oak tree, all of which held alchemical properties & delineated different regions of this imaginary world; however, in the oak tree lived an wizard who advised the group on important matters, but whom only spoke through me. It’s a wonder my friends put up with this.

Another memory involving trees from the same period: the sudden presence of individual leaves on trees when I put on eyeglasses for the first time.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

There are a lot of trees in my poems—I even have a poem called “Tree,” but to be fair these “trees” are not trees but dreams, maybe not even of trees, but of states, or even words. But anything I say could be misleading. I do think it’s interesting that Buddha was said to have reached enlightenment while sitting under a tree, that trees tend to look like brains when bare, that the tree makes itself available in most religions, in Christianity again as a symbol of knowledge & later as one of unity with God, that trees tend to mark the mystic spot. This is all especially fascinating to me when I think of how foreboding trees are when depicted in groups, how threatening the forest usually is in our imaginative traditions, a place of darkness & confusion, of getting lost & perhaps of getting eaten, or transformed, a place of no return. Why is one tree a beacon & several acres of them a menace? Oh, I have no idea. Or too many. But can I recommend two pieces of art involving trees & end there rather than on my own thoughts? Bernini’s Apollo & Daphne & Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross, a fresco series in Arrezzo.

Laura Solomon’s books include Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002), Blue and Red Things (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), and The Hermit (UDP, 2011). Other publications include a chapbook, Letters by which Sisters Will Know Brothers (Katalanché Press 2005) and Haiku des Pierres / Haiku of Stones by Jacques Poullaoueq, a translation from the French with Sika Fakambi (Editions Apogée, 2006). Her poetry has appeared in magazines across North America and Europe and has been translated into ten languages. In 2010, she was invited to Slovenia’s international poetry festival, Days of Poetry & Wine, and this year was a recipient of an award from the Fund for Poetry. She has lived recently in Paris, Philadelphia, and Verona, Italy, but currently may be found in Athens, Georgia.

GO GREEN AND LISTEN TO LAURA SOLOMON READ “TREE”:

http://poetryproject.org/multimedia/laura-solomon-tree-10711.html

...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:31:00 -0400

Location: Montague, MA

TREE INTERVIEW WITH ALINA GREGORIAN

Do you ever think about trees?

When I think about trees I think about Vermont where I used to live. I would pick the birch bark when I was young. When I think about trees I think about trees in Arkansas and Nebraska, where I have never been, but where I would be happy to visit if only for the trees and wind. When I think about trees I think about forts, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a fort in a tree? In Brooklyn, where I live now, I feel calm and alive when I see a good tree.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

There’s a highway in New Jersey with a medium-sized tree that looks like a bonsai. I used to pass it on my way home. On the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, there are a lot mountains. And mountains usually come with trees. In Asheville I was told that if I climb this one tree I would see the tops of the neighboring houses. Instead, I went on the swing attached to the branch of the tree.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I have two small fake trees on my windowsill. They are the only tangible indication of my acceptance of trees. I write about trees sometimes. Once I wrote a poem about unknown pines in Berlin. The faux pastoral makes its way into my poems. A land of trees and trees where real cows roam.

Alina Gregorian’s poems have been published in Boston Review, GlitterPony, H_NGM_N, and other journals. She curates a poetry reading series at The Huffington Post, co-curates Triptych Readings, and co-edits the collaboration journal Bridge. The banjo is her favorite instrument that she will learn to play. Say hi to her here:alinagregorian.tumblr.com.

Go green: http://bostonreview.net/BR37.1/alina_gregorian.php

...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:48:00 -0400

Location: Ditmas Park, Brooklyn

Tree Interview With Ryan Doyle May

Do you ever think about trees?

When I was twenty, I spent a week in an abandoned prison in Morges, Switzerland. It was being renovated by a group of musicians, one of which was the lover of the woman I was traveling with. I am referring here to a time before college, pre-writing, pre-New York, pre-everything. One of the musicians, named Bjorn took me on a hike somewhere. I don’t remember if we were alone or not. I want to believe we were.

He led me into two giant willow trees. They were close enough together, that when we stood beneath them they encased us completely. Surrounded in green, the light breaking through the leaves reminded me of the stained glass windows I had seen in the gothic cathedrals I visited in France prior to my arrival. At the time I would not have been able to assign an architectural period to these cathedrals.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I was told to look away, so I looked up. I looked up because my babysitter’s daughter, a toddler, had fallen into the lake where we were fishing. Before I looked up, I saw my babysitter reaching for her daughter’s head, at that point, it was completely underwater. For a moment I thought she was under glass. I looked up and saw the branches of a dead tree. It was summer. Why are branches bare in summer?

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Throughout middle school and high school I collected stones and crystals, specifically black onyx. It was something between Goth and Grunge, and the color of the stone appealed to me. Black onyx is considered the devil’s stone. It has many healing and defensive properties, but is also thought to control sexual impulse. At the time, I equated being gay to an impulse. This is something you believe growing up in a religious household, this is something you wake up in the morning and pray about, you pray about it over the bathwater before you bathe. You pray the water clean.

Because my onyx wasn’t working, I buried it beneath an aspen tree in my backyard. I did this beneath the borrowed light of a full moon, left it there for a full week, in order to neutralize and cleanse it.

I buried the devil, and then I dug him up again.

——-

Ryan Doyle May’s work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Esque, Food I Corp, Supermachine, Divining Divas: 100 Gay Poets on the Women Who Inspire Them and others. He is the author of the chapbook The Anatomy of Gray (Corresponding Society Press) and acted as the lead in the short film August, which was selected for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and lives in Brooklyn.

Go Green: http://poetryproject.org/multimedia/ryan-doyle-may-the-anatomy-of-gray-the-mix-tape-42312.html

TREE INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN KARL Do you ever think about...

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:19:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN KARL

Do you ever think about trees?

Back in 2003, I was obsessed with owning an avocado tree. I thought about this a lot and wondered if the growing season in Portland would sustain a healthy and vital rapport with weather so I could have enough avocados that my breakfast burritos would never linger too long on the ledge of loneliness. My assurances remained vague so I decided against the avocado tree. I have bought and planted a Japanese maple, a dogwood, and an apple tree. I am no longer in Portland, but found myself back there a summer or so ago and checked on the trees. They all looked tall and healthy. When I think about trees, I think about those trees and I am pleased.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Once I wrote a line in a poem where it said something to the effect that there was a tree stretching back into youth. Which is to say, I remember my sister being little and I littler still and playing with maple tree seeds, you know the ones you throw into the sky and they look like helicopters coming down, this was on probably on Windrum Ave. in Philly where there wasn’t much else to do. Later, in South Jersey, both of us a bit larger there was this tire tied to a rope tied to a tree branch, and we called this a swing. My sister would spin the tire with me on top (and clutching the rope) as fast as she could. This was fun, until the time she lost her grip and I face-planted into the side of a tree. That sucked.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Interestingly, after viewing an art exhibit by Matt Bollinger I began to think about trees or going into the woods as kids and teenagers and thinking about all the shadows and darkness and foreboding. How trees are such a menacing trope in horror films or even in shows like Twin Peaks or the first few episodes of The Killing. This sort of quiet looming terror frequently arises in some of my poems. Blame it on the trees. Or perhaps the poet, Tada Chimako said it best in her poem, “The Town of Mirrors, or Forest of Eyes”*

The town is nothing but mirrors

The mirrors are nothing but eyes

This town is a dense forest of eyes

In which leafy veins spread out wide

The trees join arms and weave a code of laws

Shadows and trembling drops of naked water

Get caught in the net of branches that spread

Like the proud antlers of deer

Within the silent sprouts growing from the stumps

Are clusters of eyes already lined with glorious lashes

* Forest of Eyes, Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, trans. Jeffrey Angles, University of California Press, 2010

_________

Steven Karl is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, Don’t Try This On Your Piano or am i standing here with my hair down, a collaborative with Angela Veronica Wong (Lame House Press, 2012). He is an editor for Coldfront Magazine and Sink Review and currently lives in New York.

Go Green and read a Steven Karl poem: http://www.wix.com/poetries/esque1#!issue1-oetry/viewstack1=page-8

TREE INTERVIEW WITH JONO TOSCH Do you ever think about trees?I...

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:58:00 -0400

TREE INTERVIEW WITH JONO TOSCH

Do you ever think about trees?

I used to park my car under a big, dead maple tree. I thought about that tree a lot.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I’m a big gardener. Last Halloween a snow storm knocked down tons of trees here in western Massachusetts. There were trees on the ground everywhere you looked. For a month, you could hear chainsaws everywhere. I went out one afternoon with a hand saw and collected an enormous amount of garden stakes, enough for several years. I was thrilled.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

A personal favorite poem of mine (unpublished) ends with these lines:

If I said to some people
You look better behind a tree
I probably meant what I said
I’m a great lover of trees.

END

Jono Tosch lives in Massachusetts where he does odd jobs and teaches fermentation workshops. You can follow what he eats for lunch at www.oilchanges.blogspot.com.

GO GREEN AND READ A JONO TOSCH POEM: http://ndrmag.org/poetry/2011/12/ding/