Leaf Meets Cerebral Cortex

Your life in nature

It is still poetry month and it is still spring so I decided to combine the two in my prompt this week. And where better to start but with William Carlos Williams’ “The Locust Tree in Flower”?

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung —

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweets
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

William Carlos Williams, I told the group, was both a poet and a doctor residing in New Jersey, my former stomping grounds. L. added that Williams had considered himself more a poet than a doctor. He was of Puerto Rican heritage (his mother was born in Mayagüez, PR) and, added H., a former college professor, Williams was a modernist.

After T. read the poem out loud in a slow, deliberate cadence—perfect, I thought, for this minimalist gem—I asked the group to give their impressions of the piece. “It’s like the person is sitting watching the tree,” commented R. Yes, observation, the cornerstone of all poetry. Phil pointed out that there were no driving verbs at the end which bestowed a sense of stillness. The alliteration, said Virginia. I pointed out the preponderance of single-syllable words. My husband, who had suggested the poem as a prompt, felt that the verse, which was first published in 1933, when Williams was 50 years old, that creativity continues at any point in our lives. “Even though Williams is an ‘old branch,’ he can still produce spring flowers.”

The Prompt

And so I asked the group to use nature images to describe times of their lives. For the matter of technique, I borrowed one suggestion from Phil’s earlier comment: Try to minimize your use of verbs.

I was, as usual, stunned by the writing which came out of the group. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of the poems adopted Williams’ minimalist style, single-word lines, white space, and a really interesting convergence of human and natural (as if you could separate the two). Here is Virginia’s piece, called “Compost.” Notice the one-word descriptions, the simple nouns, the Spinoza and cerebral cortex along banana peels and black earth.

The compost is sweet smelling now.
     Rich
     Black 
     Crumbly
Shot through with eggshell bits like stars in the firmament.
Thoughts scrambled for a long time.
     Banana peels
     Coffee grinds
     Spinoza
     And Cello Greene singing crazy.

The compost is sweet smelling now.
True speech comes freely from the pearlescent
Grey matter of the prefrontal cerebral cortex:
     Flecked with eggshells

Try your own!