poetstouchingtrees

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Nate Logan 

Do you ever think about trees? I do. I have lived some significant portions of my life in places where there were little, dead, or no trees (North Dakota, Texas) and I found I did miss them when they weren’t around. In the backyard of my parents’ house is a crabapple tree that’s always been popular with bees and deer. What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees? My most vivid and significant memory involving trees involves where my photo was taken. The last vacation I went on was in California where for a few days a friend and I visited the northern part of the state. This photo was taken in Arcata where there are gorgeous forests and at least one banana slug. We also explored the Avenue of the Giants where we parked our rental car and walked in the forest, no other souls in sight. The smell of those forests is something I hope stays with me. Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?  Trees are involved in my writing insofar as they populate many of my poems—pine trees especially. My “extremely radical” worldview includes the ideas of planting and protecting more trees because we more-than-kind-of need them. I’m also for opposing that the villain from FernGully head the EPA because that seems antithetical. He wasn’t a fan of trees. Not at all.

Nate Logan is from Indianapolis, Indiana. He edits and publishes Spooky Girlfriend Press. You can find him on the Internet at: nateglogan.tumblr.com.

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Sean Patrick Hill

Photo Credit & Location: Hill’s daughter, Teagan Hill, aged 7, in front of a Sugar Maple tree in Louisville, Kentucky

Do you ever think about trees? I think, read, and talk about trees all the time. In fact, I have made it a new point of learning to distinguish all the native trees in Kentucky. Most often, I go into the forests to the south of the city of Louisville in a region known as The Knobs. It is an amazing experience to identify a tree, and not merely to know its scientific nomenclature, though that helps me hold the tree, as it were, in mind. Rather, to name a tree is to remember it like an old friend. I note which tree grows in which soil, whether that soil is alkaline or acidic; whether it grows on limestone, or in eroded sandstone, or clay, or chert outcrops; which tree grows at what elevation: sycamores and yellow poplars down low by the creeks, chestnut oaks and pignut hickory high on the ridges. I walk among these trees as often as I can, even after the workday in whatever light remains in the winter. They are peaceful. I could sit and watch them sway and creak in the wind all day. I note the difference of that sound when they are in leaf or bare, a pine or a persimmon. I also thought how much my life mirrors the growth of the tree. Robert Bly said the trees are, in effect, sleeping, rooted down in the darkness. The leaves are what shows their light. In this way, the sugar maple--which my daughter and I carefully identified by leaves, twigs, seeds, and bark--is a kind of totem, which sings in the wind and shelters squirrels and cardinals and ants.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees? I cannot resist telling of two memories. I once went to find a medicine wheel in the hills of New York, above the valley where I grew up. I had to trespass on water board property to do so. I was stopped by a man in a guard house in the woods. He was rather gruff, and asked me where I thought I was going. When I told him I was looking for the medicine wheel, his composure changed immediately. He smiled, rubbing his hands together. "I can show you the medicine wheel," he said. He took me down an old path to a circle of moss, where the Seneca had built a stone circle around this incredibly energetic spot. In line with the precise directions of the circle, to the east I believe, was a large oak tree. He told me to put my hands on it. I laid my palms on its bark and it felt as if I was being electrocuted. He laughed and laughed. Since that day, I lay my hands on the big trees. I can still feel their pulse, but nothing approximating that oak. The man's name, by the way, was "Treewalker." The Seneca named him that. Another story: I once wrote for a small weekly paper in Bend, Oregon, and I went to a stand of old-growth trees--Douglas-fir, western cedar, western hemlock--where some protestors had climbed into the crowns and built a series of tree houses. It was a timber sale in the Cascade Mountains. The trees were all strung together by a heavy cord; the implication was that if you cut one they would all fall, with the protesters in them. It really was incredible to see. To interview them, it was made clear they could not come down. I would have to go up. And so they fitted me with a harness and fixed me to a climbing rope. Doing what's called an "A-climb," I inched my way up that rope 160 feet to the crown of a Douglas-fir to talk to one of the men. I'd never done anything like it. The man made me lunch in the tree, after he had climbed up into the uppermost crown--175 feet from the earth--to adjust his tarp roofing. I rappelled down, which was somewhat terrifying. Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview? Trees are of course a part of my worldview, and so a part of my writing. When I came home from college, after getting my Bachelor's degree, I lived at my parents' house for a year-and-a-half. I walked in the woods along the Chemung River daily, before I would go to work at a factory I was temping at, second shift. I was reading Emerson, Thoreau. I could consider all the trees: cottonwoods, maples, ash, pine, birch. I used to look out at an island in the river where there grew an enormous maple and several towering sycamores. Finally, I waded into the rapids, crossed, and went to touch those trees. Sadly, most of those trees have since died and collapsed. When I went west to live in Oregon, I made a point of going to see the forests, the big trees. I was reading Gary Snyder, all of his work, repeatedly. I emulated his life, and I even went to work in the woods for myself for a time. I cut down my first trees there. I remember thinning projects, cutting lodgepole pines along the shore of Crescent Lake to create more sunlight for a single Shasta red fir, for example. We'd cut logs to build trail bridges. I treated those trees with respect. So it's no wonder, since the beginning, that trees have populated my poems. I love the names of trees: quaking aspen, Ponderosa pine, Pacific madrone, Sitka spruce, shagbark hickory, black locust. They are as beautiful as their needles and leaves, their scaly or smooth bark. I wish to defend them. I'm currently writing a nonfiction book about Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky, part of the Appalachians. Pine Mountain is clothed in what's known as a mixed mesophytic forest, the most diverse forest in eastern North America. It is millions of years old, and after the Ice Age, its trees spread into the enormous northern areas razed by the glaciers. Pine Mountain is a kind of "cradle of civilization" for forests in the northeast. I've seen striped maple, pitch pines, and the eastern hemlock, which is threatened by an invasive species, the wooly adelgid. It is said that the eastern hemlock will be destroyed as the American chestnut was--made extinct. I feel it is my duty to help bring attention to this tree, this forest, this place. My worldview could not exist without trees.

Sean Patrick Hill is the author of three books of poems. He'll spend March 2017 at the Vermont Studio Center working on a book about the trees, geology, animals and people of eastern Kentucky's Pine Mountain. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

[poetstouchingtrees]

TREE INTERVIEW WITH Michelle Menting     Location: Hope, Maine

Do you ever think about trees?

Yes, probably daily. Possibly hourly. OK, maybe all the time during my waking hours (during my dreamtime, too). I might be exaggerating, of course, but if I'm not thinking about trees, my mind is in some way preoccupied with subjects branching (ha ha) from trees. I would say I'm a bit obsessed if I didn't think it were completely natural to think about trees so often. Trees provide shelter, clean air, food, and beauty; they provide direction by serving as landscape markers and they improve water quality and help control erosion and flooding; and, for me, they provide a sense of peace, of safety--a sense of home.

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

Since I grew up in the woods, near the border of a national forest, most of my childhood memories are filled with trees. One memory: one day when I was probably about five or so, I was outside with my older sisters. I thought I would be sneaky and run ahead of them on the trail just outside our home. My plan was to climb up into the tree house my brothers built—an elaborate though highly unsafe Jenga puzzle of pine and maple branches—and surprise my sisters who would surely be terrified below. I wanted to do this because I finally was able to climb the rickety ladder (or death trap) to get up into the fort. This required upper arm strength, something I must not have had before the age of five. Well, I ran with gusto toward that fort, running far ahead of my sisters. I was giggling mad, I tell you. I made it nearly up the entire ladder before slipping or losing strength somehow and falling, crashing to the ground and knocking the air out of my lungs. I couldn't breathe. This was the first time I ever had that experience—getting the wind knocked out of me. I was splayed out on the path, and I could hear my sisters approaching. For a minute I thought they would walk right past me. (I'm pretty sure one of them said something like, oh no, Michelle died!, thinking I was playing dead.) It was a moment before I started gulping for air and they realized I wasn't breathing (and that I wasn't intentionally holding my breath). Between that moment and breathing again, I remember the circle of sisters' faces looking down at me, for sure, but I remember better how peaceful the framing tops of the pine trees and oaks were—how the fir branches appeared to be gazing down at me with interest and how the oak limbs laced intricate nets I could have fallen into, had I fallen up and not down. Those trees were so beautiful. Such guardians. And then I started gagging and one sister was smacking my back as if I needed to cough something up. (She meant well.)

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Yes. And though trees might not always be the specific focus of my poems, they sometimes frame my work. If I don't use the image of a tree somewhere in a group of poems, there is most likely some connecting image to trees: a root, a leaf, a pine cone or needle. Lately, I've been thinking about and writing poems where the inhabitants of trees are more the focus. What fellow earth creatures make their homes upon or beneath the bark? I don't just mean birds or mammals, but what insects, what moss, or what various folds of lichen? Our relationship with trees should be more symbiotic. They do so much for us. We should do more for them.

Michelle Menting is originally from the upper Great Lakes region where she grew up the youngest of 12 siblings in a small cabin in the woods. She is the author of the chapbooks Myth of Solitude (Imaginary Friend Press, 2013) and Residence Time (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Offing, The Southeast Review, The Hopper, Harpur Palate, and Green Briar Review, among other places. She lives in mid-coast Maine.

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Cassandra Cleghorn  

Location: Santa Barbara, California

Do you ever think about trees?

Trees are my home-base. I lean against them, hiding my eyes, counting while the world hides and waits for me to seek. Then again, I stare at them and through them, finding in them a record of the precarious world.

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

I recently came across a packet of old black and white prints. Thumbing through the images, I was startled into memory. Heading north on California’s Highway 101 from Santa Barbara toward Salinas, a friend and I had turned onto one of the two-lane roads that heads into the hills. It was tee-shirt weather, late spring or summer. The light was squinting bright. We were the only ones around for miles.

Before me now are a dozen over-exposed, 3 1/2" x 5" prints of road, grove, hillsides, and my own 18-year old form.  A few photos stand out. We came to a huge fallen oak, 30 feet or so in length, a forked trunk with jagged ends. We could not tell how long it had lain there. It was mottled, partially rotted, barkless and smooth at some places, heavily notched elsewhere. This dead tree was a world unto itself—somehow sunk into the ground and also perching upon it.

My response to the tree was visceral. I lay myself on it, trying to match its curves and lines with my own. But I could not get it nearer to me. I took off my clothes and approached again. I bristled at first touch of skin to bark, testing the pressure points, until I could lean back against the tree without straining. I turned over, draping my arms around the trunk, turning my face to rest on it, aligning each leg along one of the two main branches, crotch against crotch. In the few nude shots from the roll, I can see the effort it took to moor myself to the tree. I can almost feel the dry and rough warmth along my back body, and against my stomach and breasts.

I know this sounds strange. For that hour or two, I turned naturist, mad for contact with wood that seemed alien and yet inviting. Placing myself up against the oak seemed the best way to be with it. I never did fully relax. Even as I tried to conform to it, longing for something like kinship, I feel my difference from the tree.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I've written many poems about trees. Right now I'm working on a poem about a grove of red pines I visited near my house in southern Vermont--planted by Robert Frost and his grown son, Carol, almost exactly 100 years ago. "I want to be with trees./I want trees to rid me of the lives of the poets. . ."

But mostly I'm writing a book-length essay about trees in poetry and sculpture, working title, "Poet/Tree." I'm looking at art that engages what philosopher Michael Marder calls "plant thinking"--"a way of thinking that is not only about plants, but with them." What we need, Marder says, is to cultivate an intimacy grounded in difference, an intimacy that happens in the dark, respectful of the obscurity of vegetal life." I'd love to hear from anyone who wants to talk with me about this project.

Cassandra Cleghorn is the author of Four Weathercocks (Marick Press, 2016), and was most recently a poetry finalist for the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize at the Missouri Review. Educated at University of California, Santa Cruz and Yale University, Cleghorn has had work in journals including Paris Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, The Common, Narrative and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press.

Go Green and visit her website here:  www.cassandracleghorn.com

[poetstouchingtrees]

TREE INTERVIEW WITH JENNA BUTLER

Do you ever think about trees?

All the time. The farm I run with my husband up in the bush in northern Alberta is mainly untouched forest with just a tiny corner taken for our market garden and cabin. The forest there is the southernmost edge of the huge boreal expanse that runs north through the Swan Hills and up toward the Arctic – it’s akin to a huge animal, this great organism draped across the upper half of the country. An incredible patchwork of muskeg spruce and white spruce, tamarack and paper birch. It draws the birds seasonally with a peculiar magnetism. We are very aware of it at all times on the farm, its seasons and moods. There are times of day when humans can walk in the old-growth forest and times of night when they really ought not to. The energy near an old forest is almost tangible.

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

We were working on the farm one summer a few years back during a bad July storm. Alberta summer days often start sunny and end cool or stormy when the heat brings on the rainclouds, and we’d just relocated from the open garden into the toolshed to finish our work in the dry and in relative safety (the storm had begun spitting thunder and lightning). Not five minutes after we’d gone into the shed, a huge bolt of lightning hit a great balsam poplar nearby, the tallest tree at that end of the land. The strike corkscrewed down the trunk and into the roots, blowing the bark right off in a sound like cannonfire. We emerged from the shed a short time later after we figured it was safe, deaf for the next few hours from the sound of the strike, and in awe of the giant tree that had taken the hit. In many ways, we felt as though the tree had absorbed the strike for us: the next likely thing to have attracted the lightning was our metal camp trailer just four feet away from the tool shed. The poplar tree died a couple of summers later, but we’ve made a point of planting many other trees all over that land since.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I’m hard-pressed not to include trees in my writing; they are vital to my way of understanding and hearing the world. We even named our farm after the Siberian larches (tamarack) that grow in the deep woods all over that land: Larch Grove Farm.

Jenna Butler is the author of three books of poetry. A new book of essays about her farm, A Profession of Hope, is coming out with Wolsak and Wynn in Fall 2015.

GO GREEN AND CHECK OUT JENNA BUTLER’S SITE : http://www.jennabutler.com

[poetstouchingtrees]

TREE INTERVIEW WITH Vicki Hudson

Do you ever think about trees?

I notice trees quite often, so I’d answer that to say I am aware of trees. I day dream or remember trees. I have favorite trees and old friend trees.

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

When I was in grammar school, there was a Banyan tree in the school yard, quite old with a huge canopy. After school, my best friend Robin and I would climb that tree and hang out waiting for our moms to finish school (they were teachers) and take us home. There was one big growth up in the tree with a tail of root from one end. The shape of the burl reminded me of Eeyore, and we named that place on the tree Eeyore’s Tail. We’d climb that tree and seat on Eeyore for hours.

Another huge Banyan was along the route from my bus stop when I was in high school, to home. On days I didn’t quite want to get home just yet, I’d climb up and sit in that tree and think about whatever a high school kid thinks about. Sometimes I’d think of poems up in the tree, or day dream the future.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

When I see trees gone, I’m often sad. When trees that have stood for generations are taken down, whatever the reason, I feel like there has been a trespass. There are trees outside my kitchen door that I often find inspiration from and often photograph. They are tall, birch like and in the dusk or full moon, create beautiful images. Over the time I’ve lived here, they’ve slowly died and I hate the thought of taking them down as I find them beautifully eerie.

Trees are something that I often photograph, and from photographs, I often create writing.

When my daughter was born, I planted a tree, which was a walnut grown from a walnut that had been buried in a pot transplanted from the old house to the new house. Both the planting and the birthing were close together. My daughter is now almost 6, as is the tree. My photo for this project was me sitting in the crux of the walnut.

TO CONNECT :::

  www.vickihudson.com

https://twitter.com/vickigeist

https://www.facebook.com/VickiHudsonWordsmith

[poetstouchingtrees]

TREE INTERVIEW WITH SARAH A. CHAVEZ   

TREE LOCATION: HUNTINGTON, WV

Do you ever think about trees?

Frequently! In fact, it was thinking about trees and wanting to be around them that helped me decide to go to graduate school. Not because I wanted to study them, but because I liked having the opportunity to sit against them. In the neighborhood I’m from, there weren’t many trees or much grass, mostly a lot of black asphalt and cement. But on CSU Fresno’s campus, trees where everywhere. One day, sitting on a low brick wall in between classes, intermittently reading poetry and looking out at the tree-lined quad, I thought, “I always want this to be life.”

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

In college, I took a mixed media art class in which we were told to go find something out in the world with which to make art. Thinking about the assignment, sitting against a tree & kind of scratching my back on the bark, a limb – about an inch and a half diameter, two feet long, and craggily – fell off and hit me on the head. Luckily it didn’t hurt, only scratched my shoulder a bit, but it felt like the tree was trying to help. Like it said, “here you go.” So I took the branch home with me and began painting with it. I can still, so many years later, feel the textured knobs of its bark rough in my hand as I dragged it through acrylics.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Definitely. When I graduated with my MA in creative writing, I commemorated it by getting a tree of life tattoo on my back. Trees as symbols have always appealed to me: their sturdy trunks, the deepness of their roots, their reciprocal relationship with other plants and animals. That interconnectedness is something I try to always keep in mind. Our actions, including our words, ripple through our environment, in ways we can’t always anticipate. The more we remember that, the more compassionate we can be. I guess you could say trees are kind of like my role models.

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking published by Dancing Girl Press (2014). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Luna Luna Magazine, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. www.sarahachavez.com

Go green and read some of Sarah’s poems here 

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Whit Griffin                 photo by Shannon Tharp

Do you ever think about trees?

I think about trees quite a bit.  I spend a lot of time in the Nantahala Forrest.  Walking in the woods and being with trees helps keep me grounded and relieves the anxiety and chaos that can result from a life that tends to be lived in the head.  I've taken tree identification classes with the Audubon Society, and collect various tree field guides.  But nothing is better than exploring wooded places and finding trees with which you can build individual relationships.

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

An early memory involves a magnificent magnolia tree in front of my grandparent's house in Mississippi.  It's branches were so low to the ground that even as a small child I could easily climb up into it.  My family has a farm in the Mississippi Delta, and on their land there is an oak tree that could easily be three hundred years old.  Every time I see it I'm humbled by it's grace.  The cypress swamps of the Mississippi Delta are magical places.  Sometimes I'll kayak the Quiver River and spend the day rubbing cypress knees.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Trees have been here over 300 million years.  They have a lot to teach us.  The idea that the natural world exists to serve human beings is absurd.  Books like Sandra Kynes' Whispers from the Woods are really helpful in allowing one to see trees as living beings.  My work brings together elements of history, myth and the esoteric.  And trees play a big factor in all of that.

Whit Griffin has two books with Skysill Press.  His third, A Far-Shining Crystal, was published by Cultural Society in 2013.  He lives in Memphis, but travels frequently for poetry and tree related activities.

Go green and read some of his recent poems: http://goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh18content/griffin.pdf And check out his Tumblr: http://brightpinkmosquito.tumblr.com

[poetstouchingtrees]

TREE INTERVIEW WITH PEARL PIRIE 

Do you ever think about trees?

They are like people so far as their absence or injury.  I’d rather have a community than a specimen.  When we were at Jardin des Plantes in Paris there were all kinds of trees hundreds of years old.  A Sophora japonica was planted there in 1747,  first flowered 1777 and it still flowers. It is a crazy-maker how people believe trees must be cut down once they reach any size as if humans can’t comprehend living things with a longer lifespan or are jealous of it.  At the same time my relationship with trees is made complex by the Manitoba Maple which apparently has its name because its runner go all the way to the prairie. It perhaps is all one organism.

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

As a kid I loved to climb trees.  The forest was freedom. It was a gym. It felt like my equal and like safety. There is no place more holy than a forest with no people. Back then the highway sounds didn’t reach the middle of the bush and I would track rabbit and deer, read the signs of droppings and snagged hair, watch the bush shift plants by season and by rain or drought, check my guidebooks for kinds of mushrooms. I once cut thru the forest and walked along the concession line road but a nice police officer thought I was a runaway. Once I convinced him I wasn't, he still insisted that I could help him to not worry if I would come back with him in the squad car. Being wakened at 3 am knock at the door, my dad greeted whoever it was, nonchalantly, with a baseball bat over his shoulder.

As a teen I often jumped from my bedroom window to the ground to avoid going across the squeaky floorboards of the kitchen to leave. That landing was hard on the ankles. Eventually I leaned a ladder below my window, but one night I came back and the ladder was no longer there. I risked the floorboard. Parents never said a word about it over breakfast. Once 2am headlights caught me as I sat up in a spruce to watch and listen to the night. Before I was awake, a neighbour reported to my parents that I was out at a bad hour.  Since I never dated, my mom hoped I was sneaking out to meet a boy.  Or even a girl. Me being up the tree, I think, rather disappointed her.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

If I search my poetry drafts, I find 526 uses of the word tree, 154 maple, 115 oak, 10 ironwood, 39 spruce, 178 cedar, 191 pine, 6 tamarck, 16 larch,  92 poplar, 134 elm…my head is most clear when I’ve had time in the woods. I have been told my most sensual writing is generally about trees.

Pearl Pirie has a new book coming out from BookThug, spring 2015, the pet radish, shrunken, and one of her poems is coming out in Best Canadian Poetry 2014. GO GREEN AND CHECK OUT PEARL PIRIE's SITE : http://www.pearlpirie.com/

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Tree Interview with rob mclennan

Do you ever think about trees?

  Given my rural upbringing, I am certainly aware of trees. I grew up on a farm surrounded by trees. Where we currently live has more than a couple of trees, which we are pretty pleased about. I really can’t imagine living in any space that doesn’t include a healthy amount of green.

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

  There are two trees in the yard at the homestead I have vivid memories of climbing when I was much younger. I spent a great deal of time in one of those trees, and was always disappointed that my father claimed neither tree were appropriate for treehouses. I sure would have liked a treehouse.

  And across from the homestead, sixty acres of bush.

  I remember hours of wandering the paths through the bush as a youngster. And the time my six year old sister and I were lost hours within, before we figured our way back to the road.

  Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

  I haven't much view of anything out my office window (save the side corner of our neighbour’s house), but the front and back window views include various trees. Our cat Lemonade has daily anxiety over the birds and squirrels that run across the length and breadth of our front yard maple. He chatters uselessly at them through the unopened window.

As far as worldview, I’ve always considered that my perspective on any “pastoral” I’ve attempted to write has included the belief in writing and living as being part of the world (including the natural world) as opposed to being separate from the world. My father, as a dairy farmer, is attuned to the seasons and weather in ways that most non-farmers might not comprehend. He knows the names of all of the trees, and the flowers. I may not know all the names, but attempt to live in the world fully, including trees, rocks, flowers and brush. Does that make sense?

For more on rob go green and check out his site: robmclennan.blogspot.com

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Tree Interview with kevin mcpherson eckhoff      

Tree Location: Armstrong, BC

Do you ever think about trees?

My brain has a slight trunk and taproot, planted in my soft tissues, while tresses heliotrope to photons. I do skull-soil of trees. I do body-aware of trees. Brainwaves as kind of foliage, seasonal. In BC, the trees narrate all the landscapes, domestic and feral. The ponderosa boast lapsed jigsaw skin with desert spirit. The red cedar, quite a quiet kerosene interceder until fire-life. The fir watch and imagine and match and wager, more rock than animal. They all know that a tree is not synonymous with lumber, yet so much of their guts or bones make up the inside of my daily living: picture frames, desk, bookshelves, floor, coat hangers, guitar, toothpicks, thread spools, paper… while these ghosts do not beg for empathy, they demand a current of gratitude.

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

Pine cones in synapses. A childhood as amateur squirrel monkey, 4-day run pretending as Druantia, an eternity as believer in the knots of Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. I’ve never met a tree I didn’t want to be, even though trees are tremendously susceptible to clichés (lover carvings, fruit of no ledge, silent falling, et cetera). In 1994ish, a lodge pole claimed my brother’s helicopter or boomerang or kite or idea, and, upon my rescue ascent, its bark slipped me, sticking a busted bough shiv into my ribs. Its lasting signature on my epidermis reminds me to remain open and forested.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Part rolled-up carpet, part snake molting, part peacock wing, part broken accordion in the wind. If writing at all resembles consciousness, then trees resemble ink or movement—that part of language writers rarely consider. Neither small for large, but a medium. The timbre and I reciprocate a taken-for-grantedness, which is a kind of inadvertent or hazardous accord.

Go Green for more on kevin mcpherson eckhoff:::

https://soundcloud.com/poetryisdead/ancestorge-by-kevin-mcpherson http://kevinmcphersoneckhoff.wordpress.com/their-biography/ http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/e800d0287d/inside-jokes

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Tree Interview with Lauren Ireland               location: Seattle, WA

Do you ever think about trees?

  I think about trees every day.

In my Seattle neighborhood, most of the trees are very large and old and covered in many flora and fauna—whole mossy worlds. I love to brush the soft mosses and look closely at the different colors and textures. I have favorite trees. I had never had favorite trees before.

The tree in the photo is my Very Favorite Tree, on E. Mercer St. in Capitol Hill, Seattle. I can’t pass it without touching it. Don’t want to, either.

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

  There was an ugly marsh pine tree in the front yard of the house I grew up in. It had low, thick, spreading branches that reached to the ground and it was easy to climb and hide in. I spent a lot of time there watching airplanes and wishing I could be on one, going somewhere else.

  Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

  In Seattle, I have become an incorrigible tree-toucher. I am not sure how to speak to my worldview (do I have one of those?), but this does have a lot to do with how I feel. There is something calming and affirming and not a little awe-inspiring about these mossy trees and their complicated micro-ecosystems.  There is a softness to them (like the fog, which also moves me) and a kind of happy quiet. I hope this is involved in my writing. Maybe one day.

Go Green and Check out her website: http://laurenireland.net/

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Sheniz Janmohamed  Tree Location: British Columbia 

Do you ever think about trees?

Yes. Trees have been on my mind lately- we recently had an ice storm in Toronto and all the tree branches were coated in ice and breaking from the pressure. It was hauntingly beautiful, but also incredibly sad. I walked out to the backyard one afternoon and all I could hear was the clinking of branches as they swayed in the wind. (Click here for my piece on the ice storm, and for photos: http://bit.ly/1gdXNrJ) 

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

One October evening, my boyfriend and I went for a walk around my neighbourhood. As we turned the corner, we stopped to admire a stunningly bright yellow tree. We stood there for a while in awe- and my boyfriend went up to the tree and put his hand on the trunk. It was the first time I had seen anyone touch a tree trunk with total respect and reverence. I learned so much about it him in that one moment. 

I recently visited Soysambu Conservancy in Kenya and my sister and I took a botanical walk with an expert from the region. He brought us to a whistling thorn acacia tree. The tree is called a whistling thorn because the large pod-like thorns have holes in them, which are created by stinging ants. When the wind blows through the thorns, it makes a whistling sound.

Are trees involved in your writing and/or your worldview?

Absolutely. I’ve been doing a lot of research on the folklore and natural uses of plants, trees and flowers. The very shape of a tree is inspiring to me- the roots, the trunk, the branches, the flowers/leaves. It mimics our own lives- if we don't have a strong foundation/deep roots, we can easily be swayed and uprooted. Our core has to be strong too, and then we have to let go and branch out- and be flexible. There is a time to blossom, and a time where we won't bear fruit. And the cycle continues…

Go Green and read some work by Sheniz: www.shenizjanmohamed.com 

Sheniz Janmohamed is an author, spoken word artist and freelance writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is the founder of Ignite Poets, a youth spoken word initiative with an emphasis on social awareness. Her first book of poems, Bleeding Light, was published in 2010.  Her work as been featured at the TedXYouth Conference (Toronto, 2010), Indian Summer Festival (Vancouver, 2012) and the Jaipur Literature Festival ( India, 2013). She has been published in a variety of journals including West Coast Line, Catamaran Literary Reader and SUFI Journal. 

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Tree Interview with Andrea Rexilius

Tree Location: Denver, Colorado

Do you ever think about trees?

I think about trees all the time. I’m pretty sure I was a tree in my past life.

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

The first time I took a hallucinogen I sat on the deck outside my bedroom in California devouring a grapefruit. I had grapefruit pulp and juice running down my face and hands when I ran outside to rescue the trees from the plastic bags and socks hanging in them. The narrative was that after living for centuries as a human, I had forgotten my past tree self. I had forgotten my life’s purpose, which was to protect and serve trees, to pull the metal out of their backs, to speak to them. But in that moment I remembered it. I came back inside the house with a magical painted gourd that had also gotten caught in one of the trees.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Yes, trees basically are my worldview. The next time I took a hallucinogen I climbed a 100 foot pine tree near the ocean in Bodega Bay. At the top of the tree, I stretched out hammock-like and starred at the sky. As I did this, I felt my limbs meld with the tree’s branches. But then my brown, Russian fur-hat fell off and I had to come out of the tree to find it. As I climbed down, long branches of the tree crashed down around me, moments after I stepped on them. This is because the tree was angry that I did not decide in that moment to return to it and to my tree-self. To this day, I remain human, but I am a tree on the inside.

You can find some poems of written at andrea.rexilius.com

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Chris Tonelli                Raleigh, North Carolina

Do you ever think about trees?

Yeah…you could say I think about trees. Like great art, trees make art seem utterly impossible and unnecessary, and at the same time they seem like the only things I want to make art for and about. And they compel me to do so. It’s an abusive relationship, and I like it. I’m like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary, and trees are like James Spader. It’ll work out in the end. For both of us.

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

I don’t know how significant they are, but the two memories I have about trees involve my dad. During a big storm he was knocked down in the shower when a tree in the backyard was struck by lightening. There was a corkscrew of shredded bark from top to bottom, and that tree slowly died as a result. The other one was when he had to get on a ladder and climb this tall tree (same backyard…different tree) in his snowmobile suit, motorcycle helmet, and huge-ass mittens on, carrying a laundry basket to try and rip our crazy cat off a high branch. That cat (Catherine) was from his first marriage and my mother hated it.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I have a book called The Trees Around and two of the sections in it are called Nostalgia Tree and Wide Tree (previously a Kitchen Press chapbook). So…

As for my worldview, trees are celebrities (http://www.wordforword.info/vol10/tonelli.html).                                   Bad poets are paparazzi, and good poets are real fans.

Here are links to some other tree poems:

http://salthilljournal.net/tonelli/

http://www.realpoetik.org/2006/03/chris-tonelli.html

http://www.gutcult.com/Site/litjourn5/html/CT1.html

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Tree Interview with Wendy Burk   photo: Tucson, AZ

  Do you ever think about trees?

Yes. I think trees are complex and effective beings. Two years ago we planted a mesquite tree in our yard. Now that it has grown, a dozen kinds of birds visit us that never did before. The tree with me in this photograph is a young Desert Ironwood. It is called “the tree of life” because, as it grows, it shelters hundreds of plant and animal species in its shade. As humans we frequently feel ineffective. We can do something useful by moving over and giving space to a tree.

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

Seeing animals in trees: a Red-Faced Warbler in a pine tree, a Hooded Oriole in a big mesquite, coatis in a cottonwood in Aravaipa Canyon. Once we saw a bear in a tree while hiking in the Santa Ritas.

  Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

From December 2009 to June 2011, I conducted a series of research interviews with Southern Arizona trees that I transcribed as poems. Trees are a part of my worldview. I would like to be closer to them and be useful to them; at the same time, I would like to leave them be.

  Wendy Burk is the author of two chapbooks, The Deer and The Place Names The Place Named, and the translator of Tedi López Mills’s While Light Is Built and Arcadia in Chacahua. You can find her work inVOLT, Trickhouse, Spiral Orb, and other journals.

  Go Green and read a Wendy Burk poem:http://spiralorb.net/two/burk.htm

[poetstouchingtrees]

Tree Interview with Ben Pease   photo: Northampton, MA

  Do you ever think about trees?

 I think trees are always in the back of my mind. That is, I don't have pictures of trees plastered above the bed or anything, but I was just in Vermont for a week, and god bless 'em! At this time of year,  you can just throw me under a tree, and I'll happily watch the leaves rustle around in the wind. I helped Guy Pettit plant some trees outside Flying Object, and besides how satisfying that whole process is, you can't argue with the positive action of planting a tree. On the other hand, at Bianca's grandmother's house in Goshen we are renovating ), this guy just came by and re-appraised the house. He pointed out a few trees that were touching the house and needed to be cut back if not taken out entirely. In those cases, I can't cut those trees down fast enough—to protect something that is so important to someone I love.

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

The backyard of my parents' house rolled down into what became the woods. It was for the most part unimpeded forest up until whoever owned it sold the land, and a developer turned it into a horseshoe street of new houses with only about 200 yards of trees separating the new houses from my street. That in and of itself was a personal Princess Mononoke lesson: some people will bulldoze anything in their path to get what they want, you understand why they do it, but you still can't completely forgive them for all that destruction. 

When I was somewhere around the end of elementary school/the beginning of middle school, I was given a pair of leather moccasin slippers. I loved wearing them around the house, and sometimes I would wear them to take the dog out. I was saving up my money to buy a bow my uncle had for sale at his gun shop. It was a decent Browning compound that he was selling to me for a good price, like $150 or so, but it took me a long time to save up that much money. I probably spent more time looking at bows in catalogs than anything, and at some point I decided I was going to make my own traditional bow and arrow. I didn't read up on how to make one or anything; I figured I could just sort of wing it, and it would all work out. My first step was to take one of the laces from my moccasin slippers, which were about two feet in length, and tie it to a tree in the woods behind my parents' house. My tween brain was convinced this would loosen and stretch out the leather shoelace and turn it into a perfect bowstring. I tied it to the branch of a tree no less than five feet from the property line and waited exactly one month before retrieving it. I never found it.

  Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

In the opening section of Chateau Wichman, trees play a pretty big part. It's been a couple years since I wrote that, and while I remember I had a very specific idea of what I meant by the leaves being "twice stilled [. . .] since the last gust of wind," it takes me a minute to figure it out again. In my new long poem, the psychic has a dream where he walks through a forest of sorts.

Ben Pease is the editor of Monk Books and a member of The Ruth Stone Foundation. He has degrees from Emerson College and Columbia University. A selection from CHATEAU WICHMAN appeared in chapbook form under the title WICHMAN COMETH. His work can be found online here.