I was reading through the submission guidelines of a literary journal recently and was struck by the disclaimer that it does not want poems about trees. And, I get it—there are a lot of poems about trees, about ‘nature,’ that ruminate in a sort of passive way while the action of the world is elsewhere. Poems about small things—things seemingly exhausted and/or saturated with cliché. But I couldn’t help but feel it seemed a bit of a dare—would they outright refuse a banger poem from someone like Joy Harjo with a tree in it? Isn’t that what metaphor is for—to transform something that seems simple and overdone and turn it to catch a new light?
Of course, part of why I got stuck thinking about it was because, ahem, I do have a few poems about trees. And I get that in a blazing world there are more prescient and needed social and political subjects in need of poems. It just feels so limiting, a gauntlet thrown. It presumes clichés, that the flood of one idea, one object, has been filled. Quota reached, nothing more to say here.
I’ve long struggled with concepts of ‘nature’ writing—especially up here, a place that is such a magnet for nature writing—starting with white men like John Muir, passionately extolling the virtues of the ‘wild,’ while advocating that the land’s people be removed. Written experiences of the expansive beauty, otherworld abundance of ‘nature.’ I know I’ve written about it before—of how reluctant I was to have Alaska’s ‘nature’ become part of my writing—because as a category it still presumes a separateness from the world and places we live in.
But it always seems to happen: when I sit down to write, I look out the window and it all feels so unignorable—this high latitude demanding attention to itself. The trees newly daring to test the air, the light inching a return for so many months until suddenly the land, the house, the world is seemingly flooded with light. It’s hard not to write a poem about trees when they have stood like closed umbrellas stuck in frozen ground for months on end and suddenly they have been tripped open and come to life.
It’s that part that feels reassuring today as I sat down to write and gazed out the window—that there is life happening. We’re flooded with so much information, endless doom scrolls always available, so much ranting, distraction, advertising, that it begins to censor and obscure that there is also life happening, persistently, alongside the death and destruction that we witness and mourn.
We are not immune or even separate from sylvan kin and their sudden transformation. I want to write about trees—to notice the unnoisy, the rooted, the not-only-human. To believe that there is something to gain in offering attention—Simone Weil’s definition of prayer—to what is taken for granted, overlooked, censored too often from our daily view. To spend time with the insignificant, the routine, the stationary, and most importantly, the land in which we live. We live within the lands, not separate from, not alongside, not parallel. How Jenny Odell writes
…to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.
There’s much to be said for the privilege of published ‘nature’ writers, a tradition that has been overwhelmingly white men and women. Trees have also been weaponized in the horrific history of lynchings, which brings yet another turning of the prism in what seems passive and overdone.
The ‘no tree poems’ may attempt to address the symptom, but not the cause. What the limitation does is presume that the poet is separate from a tree, that it has no part or connection to the human experience. I’m sure it’s not the intention—and I realize I have now harped on this for so long that the tree is at risk of becoming a mountain—but I kept thinking how that limit is presuming that trees are not life, not part of who we are despite so many traditions of world trees, trees of knowledge. It continues to divide us from place. In refuting tree poems, it is ironically making the same presumptions in so-called ‘nature’ writing that is so problematic: it romanticizes nature but it rarely includes the people who live there, or the problems and ugly truths of what has happened on those lands that are also a part of its story. It perpetuates the western belief in place as object to be observed, dividing it from humanity so that it can be conquered, explored and claimed as something separate that we are then encouraged to praise, admire from afar, go into and come out of, to conserve and protect—or recognize it as unendingly abundant, and so can never be harmed by extraction.
In the late 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, discoveries in science were changing how western society viewed its relationship to the land. The world became mechanistic, othered, no longer embodied. The human body was no longer a body but a machine, a composition of mind (spirit) and body (machine)—and as machines, bodies became individual factories capable of labor. These ideas began building as capitalism took a broader hold, and the writings of philosopher scientists like Francis Bacon and Descartes would lead to elevating those who could use reason (men) above those who could not (animals, the earth). While the birth of modern western science was leading to new discoveries and ways of understanding the world that brought much new knowledge, it also enabled the manufacture of new tools for wider extraction of metals and mining, of ways to utilize the earth’s resources. ‘Nature’ was exploited to build wealth, the project of constant growth, of capitalism.
The etymology of the word nature reflects this shift. First cited c. 1275, it referred to bodily processes, the restorative powers of the body. It then was used to infer an inherent creative power, from Latin nātura—birth, character, from nāsci, “to be born.” It was not until the 1660s that nature came to mean the material world, the “features and products of the earth: the material world beyond human civilization or society; an original, wild, undomesticated condition.” And lastly, especially in the idea of a state of nature, "the condition of man before organized society."
‘Nature’ became something disorderly and chaotic, to be subdued and controlled. ‘Culture’ was set above ‘nature’—and culture was associated overwhelmingly with white men. It is a tension that persists and was used to justify colonization and slavery; much early American literature is based on the premise of culture’s superiority over nature. The dualism of nature and culture as divergent categories is a distinction that is still widely accepted and employed today.
The bodies of those who were deemed closer to animals were thus also deemed unruly and in need of control: women, Indigenous peoples, African peoples. Women, because they reproduce and child rear, were deemed closer to nature, while Indigenous and African peoples were considered to be wild and therefore part of nature. The strict social mores, the etiquette, and obscure rules of the aristocracy and ‘cultured societies of England and Europe—all were ways to uphold and assert culture’s place over nature—and thus the hierarchies of race and gender.
Coinciding with these ideas of nature as separate was a population decline that had not been seen since the Black Death (1345-48). Disease had decimated the Indigenous bodies that colonizers had planned to exploit for production in the so-called new world, at the same time that a wave of plagues swept across Europe and England. Plagues—similar to what has happened in our own—affected primarily the poor. This coalescence of death, exploitation of bodies and lands, along with ideologies that centered labor in economic life—particularly the labor of bodies deemed below culture and in need of control—led to the development of severe penalties in the legal codes of Europe that punished women guilty of impeding their capacity to reproduce. The idea that the state was only as strong as its number of residents was something that had grown into a type of moral truth, and it became essential, with the rise of early capitalism, to increase the size of the army and workforce, in order to extract as much labor as possible. As Martin Luther wrote, a generation before the height of population decline of the 1620s and 30s,
whatever weaknesses, women possess one virtue that cancels them all: they have a womb and they can give birth.
Bodies became raw material, natural resources, workers, and breeders.
And so as we read Alito’s footnotes about “domestic supply of infants” and forced pregnancies, let’s put a fine point on it: these are sentiments and ideas that have been with us for centuries—when bodies became mechanistic, ‘nature’ became inert matter, and society became ‘culture’—the full bloom of that false binary that continues to exploit beyond what the earth can support. As Silva Federici writes:
But the main initiative that the state took to restore the desired population ratio was the launching of a true war against women clearly aimed at breaking the control they had exercised over their bodies and reproduction.
And so we have a witchhunt fever, where women were accused of sacrificing children to the devil, and any type of birth control, sexual promiscuity, and abortion were literally demonized. Federici again writes:
…more [women] were executed for infanticide in 16th and 17th-century Europe than for any other crime, except for witchcraft, a charge that also centered on the killing of children and other violations of reproductive norms.
Midwives were suspicious and thus often a target of witchcraft claims, arising from a fear of their knowledge of abortion, leading to the entrance of male doctors as the true professional. Women could not be trusted with their own bodies.
…wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.
And so: tree poems.
The more we continue to divide culture from nature, deny or make corny the place that ‘nature’ has in our lives—that we live within it, as part of it—we continue to perpetuate these myths that have led to colonization, slavery, climate change, and laws against abortion. It’s all one big throughline in a big red marker across the idea of “progress.”
What is happening right now with abortion bans, of neighbors being rewarded for turning to turn in anyone who assists a woman in need of an abortion, of Qanon claims of democrats eating babies, child trafficking, and being ‘groomers’—these are tired, tired tropes that have haunted western society for centuries. Dangerous tropes that continue to deny full humanity to women, people of color, and of caring for the lands on which we live with respect.
I know it’s a lot to go from a small quip in a lit mag that won’t accept “tree poems” to genocide, misogyny, and climate change all at once. But what scares me are the small quips, the accepted presumptions we have been living with for so long without interrogating the root, rather than just the stem. The etymological meaning of the word radical is of the root. To return to the root cause, the root origin. Because only then can we really understand and transform what systems and ideas are causing us harm.
Pliny, the Roman historian (AD 23-79), wrote of society’s zealotry for more, to use and exploit the earth, and warned against mining the depths1:
We trace out all the veins of the earth, and yet…are astonished that it should occasionally cleave asunder or tremble; as though, forsooth, these sacred signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent! We penetrate into her entrails, and seek for treasures…as though each spot we tread upon were not sufficiently bounteous and fertile for us!…” He goes on: “It is what is concealed from our view, what is sunk far beneath her surface, objects, in fact, of no rapid formation, that urge us to our ruin, that send us to the very depths of hell…when will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and to what point will avarice finally penetrate!
And nearly two thousand years on, his words remain unheeded.
We need to listen to the ghosts, the past lives of others, and not insist that the exploitation of others and of lands, that treats bodies as if they are machines for that purpose, is something that is justified by wealth.
I’m off to write a tree poem.
For readers of Tolkien, the dangers of digging too deep might sound familiar.
‘Culture’ was set above ‘nature’ - This phrase had impacted me deeply Freya. I have not read in a long time something as evocative and beautifully articulated as this article about the inseparable connection between human and nature. Your elegies and epiphanies on the beauty and treachery of your land beckon to my spirit. I find myself lost in admiration of your revelations and profound grief and anger about the oppressive past. When I named my newsletter Berkana, I wanted to evoke the blessings of mother birch to help me on my path to exorcise cultural traumas by connecting people to their native land. Or at least that was the intention. And now after reading this, I am realigned with that purpose. Thank you for being a light of guidance.
I'm here for tree poems.