‘Dear future’
This was the invitation that was given to us at a workshop hosted by Kin’d and Kin’d (Kay Syrad and Clare Whistler) a couple of weekends ago. They had created an experiential poetry workshop based around Jorie Graham’s latest collection of poems, To 2040.
I had bought the book a few months ago on reading one of the poems, because it spoke directly to listening to trees. The poem ‘Can You’ begins:
CAN YOU
hear yourself
breathe. Can you help
me. Can you
hear the fly. Can youhear the tree. No
I don’t mean wind,
I mean the breathing of
the tree throughbark….
You can hear Jorie Graham reading some of her poems on her website, including ‘Can You.’ Hearing her read the poems is a full body experience - and maybe the best way in to her work. As we discussed the poems, Kin’d and Kin’d gave the advice not to focus on the meaning of the words, but where we felt them in our bodies. Having sat at home and tried to make sense of them intellectually and given up, this way of understanding of the poems provided a way into beginning to grasp their meaning. As with poems, so with trees…
Researching this piece, I come across this quote:
“I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion,” she [Jorie Graham] told the Paris Review. “Its syntax wants to pass something on to an other in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader ‘agree.’ They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community—could one even say ceremony—might ‘save’ the world.”
It helped to make sense of the sense-making that we were able to experience together as a group in exploring the poems, body to body.
Jorie Graham wrote ‘To 2040’ while she was having chemotherapy. And while this is not necessary to know, knowing this provides an additional way in and level of meaning to the poems.
Learning this, I thought of music that I had come across recently which was composed to listen to while having chemotherapy - and is based on plants. Helen Anahita Wilson was inspired by her own experience of receiving treatment for cancer. She says:
Learning about the natural sources of some of the chemotherapy drugs helped to demystify the treatment process and helped me come to terms with what was happening.
Helen describes the process on her website:
This work was created by taking unique, natural bioelectricity readings from petals, leaves, trunks and branches of plants in the oncology section of the Chelsea Physic Garden, London. These plant signals were then converted into musical data.
Each of the 28 plant recordings express their own special patterns of pitch and rhythm: the petal recordings are very active with a variety of different notes and rhythms whilst the branch and trunk recordings are slow moving, with drone-like textures.
She then assigned an instrument to each of these parts. The plants she made recordings of included the Japanese Plum Yew, English Yew, Pacific Yew and Chinese Happy Tree. One chemotherapy drug was originally made from the needles of the English Yew, another from the bark of the Pacific Yew.
You can listen to the music on Helen’s Bandcamp site for free or for a donation which goes to Maggie’s Cancer Care. I am listening to it now and it is profound and beautiful and calming. The bark of the English yew tree is played by a viola, and there are also field recordings of bird song and rainstorms. The piece is called linea naturalis (we are all bioelectrical beings).
This brings me back to ‘body to body’. We can listen to the trees directly with our bodies and see what effect this has on us. We can translate this experience into poetry or music to share with other bodies. And who knows what the ripples of this will be? Maybe it will bring healing into someone’s life.
Dear future, can we have a future where the healing power of trees and plants is truly recognised?
National Tree Week
In the UK, it is National Tree Week, starting on 25 November. It marks the start of the tree planting season. The theme for this year is ‘Plant a Tree in 23’ to mark 50 years since ‘Plant a Tree in 73’. There are a number of online events as well as details of tree planting events. I’m going to be taking part in a tree-planting event on Sunday - I’ll let you know how it goes. And I’d love to hear if you are doing any tree planting! Of course, planting a tree is a way to say ‘Dear future’.
Finally, welcome to the new subscribers - it is great to have you here and I really appreciate your interest in these writings and in trees.
Happy National Tree Week!
Thanks so much for sharing this, Olivia. I deeply recognise the ‘body to body’; my native tongue. Hearing voices human, tree, ocean, wind, avian, cetacean - anyOne really - is direct transmission. Of love. Of all that is essential and coherent. This language is of course also visual; my body knows this as a photographer. This language is also inherent within the body, as movement. Syntax, phrasing, the emergent score of an improvisational movement practice - particularly in communion with sand-water-seagrass-tree-avian-stingray-atmos - takes me to a deep place of healing as I navigate my own body’s experience of serious illness.