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A note about this week’s poem:
When I was in 4th grade, my classmates and I learned to recite Lewis Carroll’s marvelously quirky poem, “Jabberwocky.” The poemis made up of a slew of made-up words, which is one of the best reasons I can think of to memorize it. (I remember getting so excited to say “jub-jub bird” and “beamish” and “Bandersnatch.”) I can still remember much of it 45 years later. This piece below came out of an exercise inspired by my experience of memorizing learning “Jabberwocky” which I offered in recent writing workshop I led called “Jigsaw Poetry.” I invited participants to bring a list of 15-25 words related to an area of study they knew little to nothing about. (For me this was astrophysics, mushroom identification, or metalsmithing.) The objective of the exercise was to create a piece of writing that included someone else’s words without looking up the definitions of any words that were unfamiliar and, instead, to try and feel what the words might mean and create a piece around that feeling.
In this poem, I used words from a list a participant had assembled which were comprised of terms related to trees. (The words I used were “sheath,” “biofilm,” “glabrous,” “payload,” “lopper,” “leaf scorch,” “cambium,” “cocciodosis,” “hard-wire cloth,” “anvil,” “biosecurity,” “layer mesh,” “abscission,” “understory,” “callus,” “fuselage,” “squamose,” “alloy” and “taproot.” I did not know the meaning of more than half of these, which means that in the following poem I have likely used them incorrectly!
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