Volume 5, No. 2: Tree Talk

A glimpse into my Year of Trees

Greetings, book people! I’ve been reading a lot about trees this year. I’ve also been writing poems about trees, talking to friends about trees, talking to trees, walking among trees, thinking about trees, taking photos of trees, and wondering what it would be like to be a tree. Trees are on my mind, and I felt like writing a newsletter about it. I doubt I’ll have time to write weekly newsletters consistently, but doing this one was a big joy.

Two Books

The Book of the Tree: Trees in Art by Angus Hyland & Kendra Wilson (2021)

This was my first official read for my Year of Trees. It’s a collection of tree art, mostly paintings. In addition to the art, it includes short profiles of 21 artists, of which only 6 are women. As far as I can tell, there is not a single non-white artist in this book. I will add that not every artist whose work is featured gets a profile, and I did not go through and count how many additional artists are represented. I didn’t notice the work of any additional women artists as I read, though names only tell you so much.

I don’t actually think there’s something inherently wrong with a book about white male European painters. It’s probably not a book I’d choose to pick up, but I did love a lot of the art in this. The problem is the curatorial erasure. I know this happens all the time. I know it’s not new, and that I should expect it. But every time it happens, I am still surprised. Mostly, I cannot understand how any breathing human can make a book like this and not feel embarrassed. How do you make a book called The Book of the Tree: Trees in Art and not include a single (named) artist of color? Do people who are not white not make art about trees? Are there only six women painters good enough to be included in this (small) collection of tree art? It is racist, of course, and sexist, of course, and it is also absurd.

A few years ago I read an anthology of letters written by queer people throughout history. It included a letter from Lorraine Hansberry, and maybe one other letter from a Black queer person; the rest of the letters were all by white people. I had a similar feeling while reading it: I enjoyed a lot about the book, but I was appalled by the casual, unacknowledged erasure. There is a reason it is hard to find letters written by queer BIPOC people in the archive. There is a reason the authors of this tree book can get away with calling it Trees in Art without any kind of introduction that explains their expertise and interest in European and American art by white men.

I did enjoy looking at these paintings, many of which are quite beautiful. I love the various ways these artists portray the parts of trees—branches, leaves, roots—and the landscapes in which trees appear. But the context of this book is abysmal. My friend Charlott has written a lot in various reviews about editorial bias, and how editors of anthologies often do explain their methodologies, offer context about the scope and limitations of their projects, or speak to the structural organization of the work. I think about this all the time now.

The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai, and Ram Singh Urveti, tr. Susheela Varadarajan (2006)

When I decided to read a book about trees every month this year, I did a lot of internet searching, and came up with an extensive list of tree books. It became apparent pretty quickly that there are a lot of tree books written by white men. So I added every tree book I found not written by a white man to my list. I can’t remember where I found out about this one—it was on a list of tree books somewhere on the internet.

This book is hard to define or classify. It’s a collection of silkscreen art—gorgeous prints of trees—by three artists from the Gond tribe of central India. Accompanying these prints are short bits of text. Sometimes there’s just a sentence or two describing the tree or the scene. Sometimes there are short paragraphs retelling folktales, legends, and stories from Gond mythology. On one page a squirrel sits in a tree dreaming about what else they could be; they decide that it’s best to be a squirrel in a tree. Another page describes the thick bark of the Mahalain tree, used “from earliest times” to build houses. One poem-story, ‘The Peacock’ goes like this: “When the peacock dances in the forest, everything watches, and the trees change their form to turn into flaming feathers.”

I loved reading this. I found it delightful, beautiful, and poetic. It feels like a cross between an art book, a picture book for adults (what’s the difference?), and a book of illustrated poetry. The art is intricate, full of detailed patterns and textures. Often the trees are shown in the midst of transforming. Sometimes their flowers or fruit are something else—arrows, birds.

I don’t know anything about the Gond people (beyond what I learned on a simple search after reading this book). The book doesn’t include any context—there’s no introduction or afterward. Why were these particular pieces chosen? Did the artists make these prints for the book, specifically? At first I craved more information, but after sitting with it for a while, I wonder about this desire. Do we need to understand the context of a piece of art to be moved by it? I am an outsider and know little about the artistic and cultural lineages these pieces grew out of. Why should the book explain itself to me?

I really appreciate the questions about art, translation, cultural context, audience, and visibility this book raised for me. But on a much deeper and more bodily level, I loved the experience of flipping through the beautiful pages, sitting with the poem-stories, and experiencing the wonder and mystery of trees.

One Picture Book

Winter Trees by Carole Gerber (words) & Leslie Evans (art) (2008)

This book is a delight! A kid and their dog go on a walk through the winter woods, looking at trees. They identify trees by their shapes, their bark, and their buds. It’s so simple and such a joy. I love the illustrations of the winter trees, especially the ones of whole trees, with their shapes on display: the V of a birch with its long trunk, the pyramid-shaped white spruce, the egg shape of a maple’s branches. The text is poetic verse with lots of satisfying rhymes, and it beautifully matches the simple story. It’s not a grand or dramatic book, except that it is a book about the awe and majesty of winter trees, which makes it very grand indeed. It’s also wonderfully informative, with lots of information about the winter buds of yellow popular, bur oak, beech, and more.

A Long Poem

I’m currently slow rereading Carl Phillips’s book Then the War with my friend Surabhi (whose newsletter you should go subscribe to). It includes a long prose poem, ‘Among the Trees’, which I have read multiple times in the last week. It is one of my favorite poems. It is about what happens in the forest. It is about memory and bodies and language and queerness and fairytales and grammar and sex. It has permanently rewired my brain. I have been walking around with Carl Phillips’s syntax lodged in my body, thinking about poems becoming “treelike.” I listened to him read it (the link above includes audio) while walking among the trees on a cold snowy day. It was an unforgettable experience.

A Tangle

I am completely stuck on the idea of tree language and tree grammar, which Carl Phillips writes a lot about in ‘Among the Trees’:

What matters more, I think, is that in the language of trees there's no grammatical mood: questions, statements, commands—it's all song, stripped of anything like judgment, intention, or need. This makes translation especially difficult. Though I know parts of many of their songs, I've only three by heart: "Yes, you can tell me anything," and "No, even we can't help you," and "If I were you, I'd be the lostest, lostest boy I know."

I will never be done with this passage. I’ve been writing poems with and about it for a week now.

A Short Poem

breaklight

light keeps on breaking.
i keep knowing
the language of other nations.
i keep hearing
tree talk
water words
and i keep knowing what they mean.
and light just keeps on breaking.
last night
the fears of my mother came
knocking and when i
opened the door
they tried to explain themselves
and i understood
everything they said.

-Lucille Clifton

Some Words

Alongside Carl Phillips, I’m currently reading You are Here, a gorgeous anthology of nature poetry edited by Ada Limón. I needed these words from her introduction; maybe you do, too:

From where I sit now, I can see the magnolia, the three cypress trees, the hackberry, and the old mulberry tree that drapes its tired branches over everything like it wants to give up but won't. Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.

You might not know this, but poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there's a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living. W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem "Place": "On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree." I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I'd even write a poem about a tree?

And this, from Khadijah Queen’s poem ‘Tower’: “In the forest, grief lives a new life / as devotion.”

Which brings me back to Phillips (‘Among the Trees’ again). Here he’s writing about finding a new kind of space in the woods during high school, a space that made space for him, unlike so many of the other spaces in his life:

Among the trees loneliness could be itself, in the open-so could strangeness- even as both remained hidden from the rest of the world for the time it took me to pass through the woods to the bus stop.

A Book I’m Currently Reading

I just started reading The Long, Long Life of Trees by Fiona Stafford. She profiles seventeen different trees, which she writes about from various angles—history, art, science, religion, conservation, literature. I just read the chapter on yew trees, which are the longest-lived trees in Europe, though they are not native to the United States. I am thinking about tree time and how we age, how human aging is so different from tree aging, what it means to witness change. I also want to go visit all these ancient yew trees in the UK (like this one, which could be 4,000 years old…but it’s really hard to age yew trees). The book is pretty UK and Euro-centric so far, but I don’t really care, I’m enjoying it immensely.

Some Tree Art

I fell in love with these huge tree prints when I saw them last December. This series has also been haunting me for months. I discovered both of these artists via Anna Brones. I am also haunted by this song (and the whole album) by Dominique Fils-Aimé.

A Tree I Love

This is my favorite tree. I visit it almost every day. I feel wildly lucky to live so close to this being.

To Speak of Trees

I think about these words by Bertolt Brecht all the time; I first heard them in high school and they have haunted me ever since: “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”

The lines are from the poem ‘To Posterity’ which I did not read until I was an adult. It’s worth reading in full. It’s a poem about complicity, and about taking action anyway. It also contains these lines, which have not been living inside my chest for twenty-two years, but which I felt so acutely when I reread the poem today: “There was little I could do. But without me / The rulers would have been more secure. / This was my hope.”

I am never going to stop speaking of trees. But I will never stop acting, either. I’m trying to live a life in celebration of trees, worthy of trees. I’m trying to make the rulers less secure.

• I just became a supporter of Noname Book Club, and you can, too.

• My friend Patricia writes a fantastic newsletter in which she rounds up so many incredible resources for helping, learning, taking care of yourself and others, fucking up the system, finding joy. Here’s a recent example and here’s an older one. She is rad! You should subscribe (and pay her her if you can). I know I’ve shared her newsletter here before but I’m sharing it again because sometimes the question of “What do I do?” is really overwhelming and Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice is one of the places I go when I’m looking to answer it.

• I’ve found these daily emails from so many incredible writers so helpful these past few weeks. They create space for me to think and feel. They offer so many doorways into possibility. They are beautiful essays, full of deep thinking and true words, and they often include ways to reach out and do something.

Yesterday I drove to Brattleboro to pick up a book I’d ordered, and on the way home I stopped to walk with my pup. We saw these trees:

What outrageous luck. Wishing you all strength, and sweetness.