Tree Interview with Bianca Stone
Do you ever think about trees?
I have Important Trees of Eastern Forests on my desk. It’s a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service booklet from 1968. I’ve used it in a poem before.
I see now that the previous owner cut out a newspaper chart of “Plant Pests and Diseases” and left it in the book. One of the pests is the Japanese beetle. I remember those from my childhood. We’d pick them off the plants in the garden and the trees for grandma. She hated them. I’d put them in a tin can and throw in a leaf and slam it shut again. They’re hard to kill. They were huge and ravenous and shinny.
In this chart is says they have
Copper wings,
metallic blue
body
Plants and Damage
Tomatoes, eggplant, cu-
cumber, flowers.
Pepper leaves with
tiny holes
Control
0.75% rotenone dust
5% methoxychlor
dust, or 0.5%
lindane dust
Disease
Helminthospotium
blights and melting out
I love thinking about how Stephan Hawking said, while hypothesizing about alien life, that it might already be here…but they move so fast we seem like trees to them.
What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?
There’s two cottonwood trees in our yard at mom’s house. They snow fuzz every spring; sending out their little seeds. It’s beautiful and horrible.
I used to climb up the smaller one all the way to the top and carve thing into the trunk. It’s all still there, year after year. I LOVE SO-AND-SO or I HATE MY LIFE or 1998.
Also I was a tree in our school play. Twice. The Wizard of Oz and in The Lorax.
Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?
How could they not be?
We’re inextricably linked with them. And poets know that best.Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her collection of poetry “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” is forthcoming from Tin House/Octopus Books. She lives in Brooklyn.
Go Green and read some Bianca Stone Poets: http://bombsite.com/articles/7075
