When I was working on my PhD, I read a lot about social aesthetics/social practice/relational aesthetics. From what I learned, literary work that involves that kind of practice is relatively rare. I could be wrong, but I think that’s because the amount of skill and experience that’s required to write well, as I’ve been learning for 15 years or so, is pretty daunting.
That’s what makes Ariel Gordon’s TreeTalk project so fascinating. This book is the result of a 2017 relational aesthetics project in which people wrote poems and tied them to an elm tree on Sherbrook Street in Winnipeg. Some of the poems here are Gordon’s; others are contributions from passersby, who wrote on paper tags and tied them to the tree’s branches; others are found texts about Ulmus Americana–that’s the botanical name of the American elm species–mostly from Plants of the Western Boreal Forest & Aspen Parkland (a field guide that I really like). The book also includes sepia-toned illustrations by Natalie Baird. As an object, it’s quite lovely, and the poems are lovely, too. I particularly enjoyed the parodies of Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem that compares trees to poetry.
Elm trees are also lovely. I had never seen one–not that I knew of, although there are a few on Wellington Street in Ottawa, right near the Parliament Buildings, that have somehow escaped the scourge of Dutch elm disease, and I had walked by them without knowing what they were–until we stopped in Winnipeg on our trip west to Regina. Winnipeg (and I only know this from reading Gordon’s 2019 book of essays, Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests, which is another book worth checking out) has trouble keeping up with the number of elm trees affected, and infected, by DED, which is a serious problem, because when sick trees are not removed, the disease spreads to healthy trees. Regina is lucky, because our DED problem is manageable. We lose maybe half a dozen trees every year, but at that rate, the city is able to quickly deal with them. It’s still a shame, and elm trees are no longer being planted here because of fears that DED will lay waste to the entire population of trees. Still, in the neighbourhood where I live, the streets are lined with elms, which leads to mornings when I see this when I leave to walk to work:
In the summer, the streets become almost like tunnels of green leaves. I often think of these trees as memories of my parents’ childhoods in the 1930s and 1940s, before DED destroyed Ontario’s elms (or most of them).
Anyway, TreeTalk is wonderful–definitely worth reading. And, as a bonus, the publisher, At Bay Press, included a handwritten note to me on handmade paper. Pretty cool.