Some Trees

Number 45

I like sitting at the foot of an old tree, above its

teeming roots.

Number 44

Gary, who is fond of the poetry of the late George Oppen (1908-1984), brought me this--from a notice by critic High Kenner, written the year Oppen died.

"The things he sees," wrote Carl Rakosi [a poet-friend of Oppen's]

"feels like the gnarled bark of an oak tree. The tree is there, too. You can put your weight against it. It won't give,"

In an essay in The Crowning Privilege (1955), poet Robert Graves spends some time in praise of American modernist poet, e.e.cummings--an unlikely enthusiasm for Graves, the arch classicist and poetic mythologist. Amusingly, Graves praises cummings for being unabashed "to write, endite and publicly recite so intrinsically corny a sonnet as the one beginning":

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue dream of sky and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Number 42

In 1965, American art critic James Lord published a small book called A Giacometti Portrait. It was an account of his agreeing to sit for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti, a portrait the artist assured him would take only a couple of hours to complete. In fact, the work took weeks and weeks and was never really finished.

In 2018, actor/director Stanley Tucci made an intimate and exquisite film of Lord's book.

He cast Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti (the actor looks astonishingly like the artist) and Armie Hammer as James Lord.

In the course of one of their many walks--this time through a Paris cemetery--Giacometti, gazing at the trees overhead, asks Lord an important question:

Giacometti: Have you ever wanted to be a tree?

Lord: No.

Number 40

In Robert Lowell's Notebook (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), there is a poem called "Searchings" which contains the line "I like the trees, because I can never be at their eye-level...."

At first I knew what that meant. Right now I'm not so sure.

Number 39

In time a tree gains beauty along with its increasing vulnerability.

Number 38

Gary called me from his study yesterday afternoon. When I got there, he was typing with one hand and waving a book around--like a signal flag--with the other

"I think I've found you a tree poem," he said.

"That's nice. Where was it?"

"In a very unlikely place," he told me. "It's one of Ted Berrigan's sonnets!"

Ted Berrigan?

Ted Berrigan published his now famous suite of sonnets in 1964 to much acclaim, after which it virtually disappeared until this new Penguin edition from 2000, edited by his wife, poet Alice Notley. Berrigan (1934-1983) was one of those deliberately difficult poets, whose works, if you are in an ungenerous frame of mind, may seem off-puttingly opaque, even hopelessly incoherent. A Berrigan sonnet can contain lines like "The blue day! In the air the winds dance / Now our own children are strangled down in the bubbling quadrangle./ To thicken!" (Sonnet XXXll).

"Isn't Ted Berrigan a bit...um...demanding for the tree column?"

"Not this time," said Gary, full of missionary zeal.

And he was right. Here is Berrigan's Sonnet XVll (for Carol Clifford):

Each tree stands alone in stillness

After many years still nothing

The wind's wish is the tree's demand

The tree stands still

The wind walks up and down

Scanning the long selves of the shore

Her aimlessness is the pulse of the tree

It beats in tiny blots

It's patternless pattern of excitement

Letters birds beggars books

There is no such thing as a breakdown

The tree the ground the wind these are

Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits

Sensual, solid, still, swaying alone in the wind