Buggeryville

Following up on Kilmer, trees, and modernism! I'm reading George Lakoff's classic Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and it discusses this very issue, of the naming and categorizing of trees (pp. 31-38). In particular, it points to an article by J.W.D. Dougherty which finds that, while distinguishing between "maple" and "oak" might be "natural" for the Tzeltal Mayans, it is not so natural for urban Americans, who think of both as just "trees".

Dougherty says: "[T]here is a shift in the most salient taxonomic rank of a hierarchy toward increasingly more inclusive levels as the overall salience of the domain itself declines and the taxonomic structure devolves."

But we readers of poetry already knew this. So I want to point to Kilmer embracing this urban, modern unawareness of tree distinctions, an inability or disinclination to thinking of "oak" as a "natural" category -- to think of cats as "mammals" rather than "cats", perhaps? -- and also perhaps suggest this as part of the poem's popular appeal. It will not get bogged down in the distinctions of yesterday! He will strive to invent a cloying sentimality for the twentieth century, for the pre-World War I optimism of the future, today!

In 1913, Alfred Joyce Kilmer heralded a new era in poetry with a poem that began with the now-famous lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree

For centuries, poets had been expected (it was in the job description!) to know the names of different species of trees, and so they filled their poems with alders, baobabs, cherries, dogwoods, elders, firs, guelder-roses, hawthorns, ironwoods, junipers, kiawes, larches, maples, nutmegs, osiers, poplars, quaking aspens, rhododendrons, sycamores, tupelos, umbrella pines, verawoods, willows, crossbreeds, yews, and zelkovas. After Kilmer, poets were free to say, it's just a tree. It’s lovely, and it’s called a "tree".

Back in October I read at Borders. I read a piece about the etymologies of words relating to vegetables, sang a song on the ukulele about the erotics of writing, and ended with "abridging the freedom accusation", a process poem based on the Bill of Rights. There were also three shorter introductory pieces for each bit: etymologies, puns, and an interpretation of Alfred Joyce Kilmer as the father of modern poetics.

It all went over very well. You would have enjoyed being there, almost as much as the people who were there enjoyed being there.