Arbor Day Verse Beyond Joyce Kilmer

School Children plant a tree in 1909 in Nebraska, the state where Arbor Day originated.

Before Earth Day, Arbor Day was the primary environmental celebration and a semi-holiday in the United States.  And for a while it was a very big deal with tens of thousands of volunteers across the country planting and tending trees.  The results were breath taking.  Arbor Day is often credited with re-foresting American cities and towns. 

Old 19th Century photographs reveal that many were barren urban wastelands long denuded of foliage with buildings jammed together and coming right up to streets and crude sidewalks.  In Chicago, for instance, Daniel Burnham’s famous network of grand boulevards which radiated from the downtown core piercing the neighborhoods with trees was influenced by the Arbor Day movement.  Later the smaller boulevards—the local name for the strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street—were planted with trees, many by the CCC during the Great Depression.  Not only did all of those trees greatly improve the look of the city, they helped dramatically clean the air and provided much needed shade that helped cool city folk through sweltering summers.  Some sociologists even noted reduction in crime in neighborhoods with trees.

Tree planting festivals have been traced by to the Spanish village of Villanueva de la Sierra in 1805 where a local Priest organized a three day fiesta around planting hundreds of trees.  The custom spread to neighboring villages and towns.

In America Arbor Day was founded in 1872 by Democratic politician and later Secretary of Agriculture Julius Sterling Morton at Nebraska City, Nebraska.  That first year 10,000 trees were planted in and around the community.  Anyone who has ever visited Nebraska can attest to the crying need for trees on its vast High Plains.  Morton’s son, Joy Morton, the founder of the Morton Salt Company in Chicago, shared his father’s enthusiasm and founded the Morton Arboretum in suburban Lyle centered on the ground of his estate.

The first observance drew national attention and soon other towns were emulating it.  By 1883 the American Forestry Association officially endorsed Arbor Day and named Birdseye Northrop of Connecticut as Chairman of a committee to make the day an official national celebration.  Birdseye, who liked to travel, also introduced the idea to Japan, Australia, Canada, and back to Europe.

In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States.  It became an annual tradition.  Eventually Congress designated the final Friday of April for the observance and several states make it a holiday.  

The Post Office celebrated the 50th anniversary of Arbor Day.

In the early years the Boy Scouts were heavily mobilized for tree planting and many troops continue that tradition.  As observed the CCC and the WPA in conjunction with National Forest Service were employed during the Depression.

Tree plantings continue, but the spotlight seldom shines on Arbor Day anymore.

But we can celebrate with poetry, naturally.  Poets probably have been versifying about trees since the first bard plucked his lyre.  Yet most of us can only recall Joyce Kilmer’s Trees.  With apologies to Kilmer who was killed in the trenches of World War I just as his hymn to trees was becoming famous, it is a pretty bad poem filled with mixed and conflicting metaphors.  We can do better.

A Young William Carlos Williams.

Take Dr. Williams, for instance.  The great poetic innovator of Patterson, New Jersey paused to take in the barren trees of winter.  Ever creative note his charming coining of a word in the third line.

Winter Trees

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold

—William Carlos Williams

H.D.--Hilda Doolittle.

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who moved to England in 1911 when she was 25 years old.  Writing as simply H.D. she became a close associate of Ezra Pound and a central figure in the avant garde imagist movement that revolutionized 20th Century Poetry.  After being nearly forgotten, she was rediscovered by the women’s studies movement in academia. 

Pear Tree

Silver dust  

lifted from the earth,  

higher than my arms reach,  

you have mounted.  

O silver,

higher than my arms reach  

you front us with great mass;  

  

no flower ever opened  

so staunch a white leaf,  

no flower ever parted silver

from such rare silver;  

  

O white pear,  

your flower-tufts,  

thick on the branch,  

bring summer and ripe fruits

in their purple hearts.

—H.D.

Wendell Berry.

O.K, show of hands.  Who is surprised that farmer/activist/poet Wendell Berry, appreciates trees?

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

—Wendell Berry

 

The tree planting janitor of Briargate School, 2004

For twenty years this poet was a school custodian in McHenry County, Illinois.  Among his many duties was occasionally planting trees on the grounds.  At least once the job got inside his head.  The result, this poem from the 2004 Skinner House collection We Build Temples in the Heart.

The Janitor’s Epiphany

In the mist of a late, cool spring,

            a common workman’s callused boot

            impelled the spade

            which sliced the velvet lawn

            and turned the Black Forest cake earth.

And in time he filled the hole casually,

            as if it were any other job,

            with a young tree yanked rudely

            from its old place and flung down here

            before the school.

Satisfied and ready to turn away,

            he stopped short and looked again—

this is a Great Thing, he thought,

and cries to heaven for ceremony,

for some note that life has happened here.

            Yet civic virtue stilled his lips,

                        lest his sectarian prayer rend a fragile peace,

                        and his own reason mocked an active ear

                        waiting on the supplicant’s plea

                        to do something, anything.

            But the rhythms of the season echoed here,

                        the shade of generations turned

                        with the spade and loam—

a Great Thing has happened

and cries out to heaven for ceremony,

for some note that life has happened here.

—Patrick Murfin

Jennifer K. Sweeney

Jennifer K. Sweeney is a rising poet born in 1973 in Connecticut.  She is the author of two prize winning collections, Salt Memory in 2006 and How to Live on Bread and Music in 2009.  She currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney.  If the previous poet learned from planting a tree, she and that husband were enlightened by trying to remove one.

 

How to Uproot a Tree

Stupidity helps.
Naiveté that your hands will undo
what does perfectly without you.
My husband and I made the decision
not to stop until the task was done,
the small anemic tree made room

for something prettier.
We’d pulled before, pale hand over wide hand,
a marriage of pulling toward us what we wanted,
pushing away what we did not.
We had a shovel which was mostly for show.
It was mostly our fingers tunneling the dirt
toward a tangle of false beginnings.
The roots were branched and bearded,
some had spurs
and one of them was wholly reptilian.
They had been where we had not
and held a knit gravity
that was not in their will to let go.
We bent the trunk to the ground and sat on it,
twisted from all angles.
How like ropes it was,
the sickly thing asserting its will
only now at the end,
blind but beyond
the idea of leaving the earth.

—Jennifer K. Sweeney

Negative Space by Heather Banks

Heather Banks

I received an e-mail appreciating my old poem What Unitarian Universalists Should Give Up for Lent if They Observe It, Which They Don’t, Most of Them.  It is always nice to get the old ego stroked from time to time.  Heather Banks described herself this way:

I am a recent UU, having wandered thru being a preacher’s kid (United Church of Christ), Episcopalian (twice), Presbyterian (twice), and Methodist (twice).  As some might say, what took me so long???

I too have a poem, Negative Space, from my second chapbook, Split Rail Fence (2014), that I have heard is being read at funerals, although I wrote it about leaving a townhouse I had lived in for 26 years (in suburban Maryland) and the park behind the house my son and I had visited all his life.  But the Shenandoah Valley (Harrisonburg) has its wonderful places, too!

A little internet digging turned up this brief bio from a 2013 Virginia writers’ symposium:

Born in Nebraska, Heather Banks began writing poems after reading Emily Dickinson. She moved to the Boston area at age 11 and published her first poem soon after. At Oberlin College, she majored in English and art; she also holds masters degrees in each. She taught high school English in Massachusetts and college English in Taiwan, Maryland, and at Howard University. “The other half” of her career was writing/editing for nonprofits, professional societies, the Smithsonian, National Institutes of Health, and government contractors, primarily in education and health fields. Her poems have appeared in small magazines such as Burnt Star, Dryad, and Sun & Moon as well two DC area anthologies. A featured regional poet at the South Central Modern Language Association in 1999, she has read at many venues in DC, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. She published a chapbook, Still Life Without Pomegranate, in 2008. Now retired and living in Harrisonburg, VA, she is busier than ever.

I greatly admired her poem and am proud to share it here!

Negative Space 

Beneath the bushes,

a trail—

first a chipmunk,

then a snake,

turtle and cottontail, perhaps

have passed this way,

left a tunnel

big enough by now

a deer or person could pass by—

or not. 

When I’m gone,

I wonder

what shape I’ll leave
broken through the world’s branches

for others to see

or try to make

their own way through.

—Heather Banks

Forrest Gander—Pulitzer Prize Poet of 2019

Forrest Gander photo by Gage Skidmore.

Every year the cultural mavens who hand out Pulitzer Prizes reveal their list of honorees in April.  That gives me guaranteed fodder for a post on the winner of the Poetry Prize.  But I have an embarrassing admission to make—most years the winners, no matter how celebrated in poetry circles, not only take me by surprise but I have never even heard of them.  Despite enjoying reading and writing verse, I am not in the loop—outside of both academia and hipper poetry slam culture.  I don’t subscribe to or read the little literary magazines or even venerated Poetry which would surely enlighten me.  

I stumble on most of the contemporary poets I post about in this  National Poetry Month series on the internet or am tipped off by folks much more knowledgeable than me.  You can plainly see that I am something of a fraud and blowhard. 

This year’s Pulitzer poet, Forrest Gander was typically unknown to me.  Ever useful Wikipedia informs me that... 

He was born in the Mojave Desert in 1956 as James Forrest Cockerille III, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia where he and his two sisters were raised by their single mother, an elementary school teacher. The four shared a two-room apartment in Annandale.  His estranged father ran The Mod Scene, a bar on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. With his mother and sisters, Gander began to travel extensively on summer road trips around the United States. The traveling, which never stopped, came to inform his interest in landscapes, languages, and cultures.  Forrest and his two sisters, Karin and Lisa, were adopted by Walter J. Gander soon after his  marriage to their mother, the former Ruth Clare Cockerille.

Gander earned college degrees in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays, and in English literature. His work has been linked to Ecopoetics and ecology.  A writer in multiple genres, Gander is noted for his many collaborations with other artists. 

He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets.

He taught at Providence College and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Gander's late wife, the poet C.D. Wright/

Gander was married to the late poet C.D. Wright. Together they raised a son, the artist-craftsman Brecht Wright Gander. He lives now in Petaluma, California with ceramic artist Ashwini Bhat.

He has written books of highly praised poetry including Be With, for which he was honored with the Pulitzer.  He has also written two novels, numerous essays, been a translator if works in Spanish, French, and Japanese, edited anthologies, and collaborated on special projects with fine artists and crafts persons.  

So I’m impressed—he seems to be mix of a latter day roving Beat like Jack Kerouac, and a modern Eco poet with a dose of multi-cultural influences thrown in.

Gander is so hip that he co-authored a poem with Beyoncé about her daughter Blue Ivy and God called Bey the Light.

The Moment When Your Name is Pronounced

This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet
when we finish the wine.
While you were a living man
how many pictures were done
of you. Serious as an angel,
lacing up your boots. Ice
blows into my fields.

—Forrest Gander

From Rush to the Lake, 1988

The Iteration

From the grooved highway at sixty-five,
a hum rises. Except intimacy

there is nada. That
was a scissortail the woman says.

The boy in the back seat stops
blowing his Coke bottle

as they pass
the mowing machines. Spiked

lobelia, crown vetch, trumpet vine
under the blades of the Ditch-witch tremble.

What is the true jelly of an animal?
asks the boy, tonguing his tooth

on its last string. The woman
turns her face smiling.

The skyline jumps over the moon.
The man drives with his finger

inside her. Years
of together. The theories

were unfit to live on.
Only dust was given duration.

They know that
they are naked. 

—Forrest Gander

Gander's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Be With, W.W. Norton & Co., 2018

The Sounding

What closes and then
luminous? What opens
and then dark? And into
what do you stumble
but this violet
extinction? With
froth on your lips.
8:16 a.m. The morning’s
sleepy face

rolls its million
eyes. Migrating flocks
of your likesame species
incandesce
into transparency.
A birdwatcher lifts

her binoculars. The con-
tinuous with or without
your words
situates you here
(here (here)) even while
you knuckle your eyes
in disbelief. Those

voices you love (human
and not), can you
hear their echoes
hissing away like
fiery scale
from an ingot hammered
on some
blacksmith’s anvil?
And behind those
voices, what is that
blowing
the valves of your ears open
as black rain,
not in torrents, but
ceaselessly comes
unchecked out of everywhere
with nothing
to slacken it.

—Forrest Gander
From Be With, 2018

Tree of Life UU Presents a Night of Music with Forrest and Cassandra

Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry,  will present a unique Night of Music with Forrest and Cassandra on Saturday, April 27 from 7 to 10 pm.

Forrest Ransburg, the Musical Director at Tree of Life, will perform a selection of flute works ranging from the Baroque era on instruments of the time to modern works involving unexpected sounds generated by a variety of electronic media.

Cassandra Vohs-Demann, singer/songwriter, popular performer in McHenry County venues, and Woodstock Community Choir Director, will perform a set of her original compositions and share the personal experiences that inspired them.

Admission donation for this unique musical event are $10 at the door and includes appetizers and beverages.

For more information call Tree of Life at 815 332-2464 or e-mail office@treeoflifeuu.org.

Now for Something Completely Different—Limericks!

We’ve been doing some heavy lifting the past few days in the annual National Poetry Month series—grim history, heavy current events, serious religion, and a doleful look at the planet’s futue.  Time to lighten things up! and what could be lighter than limericks.

Like Japanese haiku,  limericks are very short form poems with strict form.  Unlike haiku they are not ethereal, spiritual, or calming.  On the contrary they are bawdy—often lewd—disrespectful, rude, and sassy.  Even “clean” limericks for children are often rowdy, rebellious, and mischievous.

A limerick must consist of five lines. The first, second, and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables while rhyming and having the same verbal rhythm. The third and fourth lines only have to have five to seven syllables, and have to rhyme with each other and have the same rhythm.  That’s an a-a-b-b-a rhyme scheme for those of you keeping score at home.

The form appeared in England in the early 18th Century and was  popularized by Edward Lear, an artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense  in the 19th Century.  As a form of folk verse its origins may be much older. Gershon Legman compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene to which literary heavy weights Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw concurred. Lear described the clean limerick as a “periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity”.

The connection between the limerick and the Irish County of the same name are satisfactorily obscure but may derive from an earlier form of a nonsense verse parlor game that traditionally included a refrain that included “Will [or won’t] you come (up) to Limerick?”  But perhaps it was simply because a little Old Sod poteen, loosened the tongue and inhibitions for ribald play.

The most famous limerick of all was considered so obscene that it seldom saw print, although it was recited in many a bar room.

There was a young man from Nantucket
Whose dick was so long he could suck it.
He said with a grin
As he wiped off his chin,
“If my ear was a cunt I would fuck it.

Edward Lear, 1866.

Despite his opinion that limericks were generally obscene, the ones Edward Lear wrote and published in his 1875 Book of Nonsense did not offend Victorian morality.  But these two seem to include a sly double entendres.

There was an Old Man who said, “Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!
When they said, “Is it small?”
He replied, “Not at all!
t is four times as big as the bush!”

—Edward Lear

There was a Young Lady of Dorking,
Who bought a large bonnet for walking;
But its colour and size,
So bedazzled her eyes,
That she very soon went back to Dorking.

—Edward Lear

One from America’s comic poet.

Here is a more modern example of the old fashion filthy absolutely guaranteed to offend.

The lass I brought home was a prize,
With an alluring set of bright eyes,
Her breasts, so well kept,
Were what I’d expect,
But her penis was quite a surprise!

Limericks are frequently used as political satire—usually scurrilous and—you should pardon the expression—below the belt employed by partisans of the Right and the Left with equal zest. 

The President’s loud protestation
On his fall to his intern’s temptation:
“This affair is still moral
As long as it’s oral
Straight screwing I save for the nation.

A president famed for his spite*
Tweeted “I am outstandingly bright.
I’d be perfectly able
To muck out any stable
Because I am a genius at shite!

―Jim McLeod

* Note: The limerick above won the fifth annual Bring your Limericks to Limerick contest, sponsored by the Limerick Writers’ Centre. We found the name of the winning limerick writer ironic, since Trump’s mother was a MacLeod from Scotland’s Outer Hebrides!

Dear Donald, when out on the stump
Please don’t lunge at our flag and then hump.
Such an act’s unbecoming
And vulgar — mind-numbing.
What’s your next flag-act? Taking a dump?

You get the idea.  Your efforts welcome in the [edited] comments.

Melancholy Earth Day

Three years before the first Earth Day underground cartoonist R. Cobb invented the omega symbol for the burgeoning ecology movement in 1967.

Today is Earth Day.  It seemed like a very big deal when it was introduced in 1970.  The Environmental Movement as we know it was still in its relative infancy having grown out the earlier Conservation Movement that emphasized the husbanding of natural resources for human use.  It seems in those early years when hundreds of thousands responded to calls to march or participate in some way that real change was possible.

And, of course, much was accomplished—the EPA and increased regulation of pollution, the hands-on movement to re-cycle and re-use, the on-going involvement of children which critics charge has now become a virtual secular religion.  But despite it all, the Planet is in more desperate shape today than it was then.  The Cassandra warnings about climate change have come true in spades, faster than anyone really expected.  

Yet resistance to real change to address the root causes has never been fiercer—or more successful—as it is fueled by billionaire exploiters and exploited by rabid right wing movements.  If liberals love the Planet, conservatives MUST attack it wrapping themselves in an ideology of unfettered capitalism  and apocalyptic Evangelical claims that the End of Days is at hand so humans can and should squeeze every ounce of value from the Earth that will be thrown away anyway. on the other.

All of that enabled by the Wrecker-in-Chief who has thrown hand grenades at international environmental cooperation, dismantled every Federal environmental regulation he can find including those that successfully cleaned American water and largely scrubbed the skies of pollution.  And in the face of incontrovertible evidence of looming irreversible disaster actively promotes increase carbon emissions from dirty coal and petroleum while attacking renewable energy like those cancer causing windmills.

R. Cobb always had a macabre side.  He always envisioned the destruction of the Earth by human greed and stupidity whether from nuclear war or environmental catastrophe.  That dark side captures the concerns of many today better than the sunny we-can-fix-it optimism of 1970.

Most of the early optimism of Earth Day has faded.  The environmental collapse predicted by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 is coming true faster than the most alarmed Cassandras of science predicted.  Most think the tipping point has come and gone.  Mass extinctions loom, violent weather disaster not only become routine but intensify year by year. Ocean temperatures and sea levels rise drowning polar bears and threatening low lying land across the globe.  Scorching heat and deforestation create deserts at a galloping pace.  Famine  stalks the world as changing climate destroys agriculture.  Some say a total collapse is inevitable now within 100 years—or less.

The Apocalypse may indeed be at hand—but not the one that will rapture believers and leave behind a ruined earth.  It may be the one that dooms the doubters and the increasingly frantic alarmists as well.

So today’s Earth Day poetry collections are not the rapturous odes to nature of nearly 50 years ago. 

The alarm is shared with a last desperate appeal in the perhaps naïve appeal by an obscure poet to an on-line poetry page.

Save Environment 

Earth comes to an end,
Save it my friends!

Pollution is going on,
In every city, village and town.

Stop this ghost of pollution,
There are many solutions.

Do not pollute; water and air,
Don’t throw garbage, here and there.

You can do something now, or never,
Let’s save Our Earth forever!

—Shiangi Gupta

The Environmental Movement rose in tandem with neo-paganism or Earth centered spirituality.  The goddess Gaia—Mother Nature embodied as the Earth—is now herself threatened.

Gaia, a sculpture by Lorenzo Quinn.

Gaia’s Demise

Mother Gaia, what have we done?
You birthed us from your benevolent womb.
You feed and clothe us, protect us;

gave us life but, we are left wanting when it,

comes to gratitude.

We have shredded and poisoned your land and seas;
over fished, over hunted; slaughtering even
the forests and for...greed.
Human ego is the genuine...Devil.

Existing to gain; loving money more than family;
a species of doom is the human being;

lacking...humanity.
When it comes to our siblings, animal and plant;

to our mother, we exhibit indifference.

We have lowered our species to a level beneath the cockroach;

all we’ve touched has been destroyed.
We blame the cows for Global Warming

but, we humans are the guilty,

the depraved and mangled minds, who are to blame.

Forgive us, Mother, we do know what we’ve done to you.
What we don’t collectively realize is that,

what we’ve done to you, we do to ourselves, in the end.

William was right when he penned, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

The fools of the universe;

our great shame is that, we don’t work together enough to save you.

—M.L. Kiser

This poet grieves, but offers faint hope.

Once the World Was Perfect

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

—Joy Harjo

But perhaps Shelly had the clearest vision of all more than 200 years ago.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley