Among the 111 poems I composed that weekend were two addresses for the tree:
“Virgo Supercluster / Milky Way / Orion Arm / Solar System / Earth / North America / Canada / Manitoba / Winnipeg / Wolseley / 103 Sherbrook Street”
and
“Plantae / Angiosperms / Eudicots / Rosids / Rosales / Ulmaceae / Ulmus”
Taken together, readers can arrive at the geographical and botanical location of the poem, either in a mapping program or a field guide.
But what does it mean to write and publish something that is so tied up in place, in the flora and fauna and community of Winnipeg, and then to launch it in the “anyplace” of a Zoom event?
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It
will surprise no-one to hear that the coronavirus pandemic has made for changes
in the habits of poets and lovers-of-poetry.
Poetry books are still available in bookstores, yes, but I think people are converted to poetry one poem at a time, when they’ve been dragged to an event by a friend or comely stranger, when they’ve been walking through a bookstore and eavesdropped on an in-progress launch.
And then found themselves still there, twenty minutes later….
(Does that mean that poems are a virus? That poets and bookstores and journals are vectors?)
I love reading with writers sharing fiction or non-fiction and contaminating their audiences with poetry. And vice-versa, though fiction is probably the easiest lit-virus to catch…
I love saying terrible/funny things onstage. And I love reading to a room full of people, the feeling of being-in-community, of being shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are just-like-me.
For TreeTalk (https://atbaypress.com/books/detail/tree-talk), I asked people to address the boulevard elm, I got all kinds of responses: one-liners / meditations / haiku. But sometimes they had trouble coming up with something to say, so I told them to confide in the tree, to tell it a secret.
So here’s one of my own: sometimes, when I am feeling meh, I go to launches not only to celebrate other people’s books but also to collect hugs from writer-friends.
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They had three Winnipeg authors this season, so at the event I was meant to launch my third collection, Dennis Cooley his 30th (!), and Alex Passey his debut work of fiction.
I was tickled by the fact that ours was a book launch where you could ALSO buy veggies. (And honey and fancy gin and baking and homemade soap…)
But on September 24, the Province of Manitoba announced that they were changing the pandemic response level from Yellow: Caution to Orange: Restricted, effective on September 28 (https://www.gov.mb.ca/covid19/updates/index.html).
That means that masks will be mandatory in all indoor public places, but also that “all private and public gatherings will be restricted to 10 people both indoors and outdoors.”
We would all be Orange for a month at least, or two full incubation cycles of COVID19.
So instead of doing last-minute promotion for the event, we have switched to last-minute promotion of the fact that we’re postponing the event.
I’m okay but a little sad. Which seems to be the consistent mood of the pandemic.
For the in-person TreeTalk launch, I had planned to wear the knotted mass of string and paper like a feather boa. I had planned to swan around, rustling like a trembling aspen…I guess I’ll hold it up for the webcam. I’ll brandish it.
I have encouraged by the pictures friends have been posting of my book on their tables and bedspreads and front porches. It reassures me that my book is actually out in the world, that it exists IRL.
But I think I need to go visit the boulevard elm in front of The Tallest Poppy.
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In 2013 in Melbourne, Australia, municipal authorities assigned individual email addresses to street trees, thinking that it would help homeowners and businesses adjacent to them to write about maintenance issues.
But they started to receive love letters to the trees, poems, and other personal correspondence from Melburnians (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/).
Instead of email addresses and a city’s worth of trees, I picked one tree (chosen at midnight via Google streetview, of all things…) and chose to go completely analog, hanging poems from it with paper and string.
I got old green file folders from ArtsJunktion (https://www.artsjunktion.mb.ca/), an organization that recycles materials from homeowners and businesses, and cut them up, so that they resembled lo-res leaves.
I got half-balls of white and off-white yarn with which to hang the leaves from the tree. My favourite ArtsJunktion find was an unused mop-head whose strings were the perfect length, which meant less measuring-and-cutting for me.
It seems ironic that a project whose roots were virtual and surprising has had a similarly surprising outcome: TreeTalk will be launched virtually because of COVID19.
I mean, who thought they’d ever say: “I couldn’t do my book tour because there was a global pandemic.”
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Because of the restrictions on travel and gatherings and being-inside, my e-tour for TreeTalk will look and feel very different.
In October, for instance, I’ll be the featured reader at the Planet Earth Poetry series. I’ll be reciting from my messy bedroom, where I can see my boulevard elm from the window, instead of ogling Victoria’s Garry oaks with Yvonne Blomer.
Though there are many positive aspects to Zoom events, there are also some downsides.
The Zoom events I’ve attended so far felt like “real” launches. I could see the people I was reading with or had come to see, which was great, after not-seeing people and not being-seen myself for so many months.
But participating in the chat, where people sighed over particular lines and deployed applause emojis while also burbling away to each other, is what made it feel like I was in a room of people.
The downside? While organizers shared links and discount codes, clicking on a link is not the same as drifting by the book table after the reading and deciding to buy a book or even many books despite yourself…
So people attending these events won’t be able admire the beauty of TreeTalk as-a-book, the green boards and silver foil of the cover, and the off-white paper and brown ink of the interiors.
They won’t be able to say, “Oh, it’s a hardcover!” and have me smile and comment on the willingness of Matt Joudrey at At Bay Press to do almost anything to make a beautiful book.
And I won’t be able to sign books to people, to chat with them over launch-cake or post-launch beeeeeeeeeeer.
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What makes a poem site-specific?
To my mind, it is a poem that is coloured by the time and place it was composed in, that pays close attention to that time and place. Which is to say: it is a dropper of place-names, of weathers and flavours and idioms that are particular to that place.
For TreeTalk, I relied on the fact that I was addressing the tree, that I was stuck there for two days with nothing else to do but write and talk to people about how they might also write to the tree.
The final result is polyvocal, featuring hundreds of Winnipeg and Treaty 1 voices, but also 16 quotes from other sources.
I loved being able to pull in snippets from some of the texts I had used to learn about trees to provide context in the poem.
So that meant quoting Plants of the Western Boreal Forest & Aspen Parkland, a field guide I love so much that I keep it in my car so that I can consult it just after a hike.
My favourite element of the book is that it has a colour key for wildflowers, so if you saw “something pinky-purple” but can’t remember the shape of the petals, you can look it up by colour.
I aspire to write poems like that colour key, that help you remember shapes and textures, that lead you to places of more information, that are tools but also the equivalent of beautiful swathes of flowers.
I also referred to the website of Trees Winnipeg (http://treeswinnipeg.org/), an organization whose mandate is to help preserve the urban forest. Their FAQ includes practical questions about pruning and mulching but also: “Why do you fight to save the elms? Why bother? They are all going to die anyways.”
My answer? Because Winnipeg has the largest remaining population of elms in North America.
Because even though our urban forest is a monoculture of elms and ashes, threatened by Dutch Elm Disease and Emerald Ash Borer (or cottony ash psyllid, depending on who you ask…), they are old and beautiful. And they deserve as much care and attention as we can spare…
Because I think reading/writing, both at home AND electronically-abroad, is a rational response to a feverish world.
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Ariel is the featured reader at the Friday, October 9 edition of Planet Earth Poetry. Sign up for the open mic! More info here: http://planetearthpoetry.com/
