Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book, Noctis Terrores.
America, it’s time for my most controversial poem. Today, you’ll hear “The Classification of Trees”, and we’ll talk about how poems make the cut. Here’s…
The Classification of Trees
Fort Myers, Florida
All my life they stood around saying nothing.
In the backyard humming in the wind,
getting a little fatter every year,
like anyone we love, until I couldn’t fit
my arms around them. Quiet in the winter,
but those summer hymns? Spitfire cicadas.
Then I moved south so far the oaks gave up.
Salt flats sprout egret feathers.
Mangroves drink black coffee water.
Developers cut the rest.
Nothing here whispers hundred-year secrets.
Nothing remembers wagon wheels,
horses’ hooves, those Cherokee letters
cut in the bark to mark a graveyard
at my grandmother’s house. I keep
listening, but a palm tree is just tall grass.
Discuss:
How do we know which poems make the cut? What are the criteria to decide if a poem should make it into the collection? I’m looking for a poem that does a few things:
- Everything in the poem is consistent, from its imagery to the movement of thoughts to the feeling or emotional tone. The poem knows what it’s doing. It’s not still finding itself on the page.
- It has to do something interesting with language. That’s at least 50% of what poetry is.
- The poem has to be bigger than me. It can’t be full of self pity or expected emotions or the easiest way to say things. I have to work for it. And the poem has to feel like it’s substantial, like it can move out of my own life and into yours.
- The poem has to match the tone or overall direction of the other poems in the collection, so it’s good enough on its own and they play well together.
For Noctis Terrores, this poetry collection, some poems did not make the cut because they just didn’t match the composite speaker–this blend of the speakers of all these different poems, if we imagine him as one guy–how he sees the world, what he’s interested in, what resolution or grace he seems to need; or those poems just didn’t match the overall emotional tone of the whole collection.
A few other poems didn’t have themselves figured out yet. I couldn’t find the beating heart of those poems. We’ll talk in a future episode about finding the heart of a poem. “The Classification of Trees”, my most controversial poem, believe it or not, was honestly on the fence. It’s a simple poem, but it’s got a few things going for it that helped it make the cut:
- It’s got that line about the trees getting a little fatter every year, like anyone we love. There’s a tenderness there. There’s a watching-the-people-we-love-age feeling that just feels true. Trees seem to be this speaker’s family.
- There’s some nice language stuff going on with “salt flats, sprout, egret feathers”.Those “s” and “f” sounds stack up nicely together. If I’m going to diss on the whole landscape here, I want to at least make it pretty through the language. I want to earn that slightly critical statement about the ecology of Southwest Florida with some deliberate use of language.
- I love that line, “Mangroves drink black coffee water”, because there’s local knowledge in it. The water in this part of Florida is full of tannic acid, and it looks like weak coffee. It’s one of the distinguishing characteristics of our rivers and estuaries.
- I like that I found a way to include that true family history. “Nothing remembers wagon wheels, horses’ hooves, those Cherokee letters cut in the bark to mark a graveyard at my grandmother’s house.” When my mom was a kid, a man came walking up out of her grandmother’s backyard, following what he said was one of the branches of the Trail of Tears, which is the path followed by Eastern Native Americans when they were forcibly removed, and the man pointed out a carved symbol on an oak tree in the front yard that suggested there was a graveyard under my great-grandmother’s house. I like finally finding a home for that in a poem.
- I’m a big fan of that last line, “I keep listening, but a palm tree is just tall grass.” Right now on the internet, people from arborists to science nerds will disagree on whether or not a palm tree should be classified as grass. It’s a strong declarative statement to kind of diss the local trees as a closing line, and here’s where the controversy comes in. My local friends strongly disagree with this poem. When I read it to them, they started listing individual old trees–the banyan in downtown Fort Myers, the Mysore fig tree in Estero–and that kind of proves my point. If you have to dig up two or three individual trees, it proves my point that the rest of them got cut down.
So controversy with decorum makes for a good poem and maybe even a good democracy. Let’s hear “The Classification of Trees” one more time. What do you think–should it have made the cut?
The Classification of Trees
Fort Myers, Florida
All my life they stood around saying nothing.
In the backyard humming in the wind,
getting a little fatter every year,
like anyone we love, until I couldn’t fit
my arms around them. Quiet in the winter,
but those summer hymns? Spitfire cicadas.
Then I moved south so far the oaks gave up.
Salt flats sprout egret feathers.
Mangroves drink black coffee water.
Developers cut the rest.
Nothing here whispers hundred-year secrets.
Nothing remembers wagon wheels,
horses’ hooves, those Cherokee letters
cut in the bark to mark a graveyard
at my grandmother’s house. I keep
listening, but a palm tree is just tall grass.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, pick up one you’re not sure about. Maybe it’s not strong enough, or it just doesn’t fit where you’re at now–either in the collection you’re building or at this point of your writing life and writing interests. You’re still making your mind up about it. Apply those standards that I set or some of your own. Mine are:
- Everything in the poem is consistent. It knows what it’s doing.
- It does something interesting with language.
- It’s bigger than you and can’t be full of self-pity or expected emotions or the easiest way to say things. You have to work for it, and the poem has to feel like it’s substantial.
- If you are working on a collection–a chap book, or a poetry book, or something like that– the poem has to match the tone or overall direction of the other poems.
If it’s almost there, if after you apply those standards or your own, you still can hear somewhere in it the beating heart of this poem, see if you can nudge it with revision.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season I’m reading poems from my book, Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.