An essay by Australian poet and ecotheorist Stuart Cooke, from which I've already quoted twice before, has introduced me to a most wonderful book, Tree Talks: Southern Arizona by Wendy Burk (Delete Press, 2016). This work shares eight interviews Burk conducted with trees, each about 20-25 minutes long. With an assistant, Burk asked them various questions in our language, and she and the assistant recorded all they registered on a pad of paper, later transferring this to print. You should really get your own copy ($8 download here) but to whet your appetite, some tastes. If you give yourself to them - which means giving your lips to reproduce the sounds (and the non-sounds!) - it's transporting.
Here's the start of the first "tree talk", with a Freemont Cottonwood:
Around the tree you encounter a cricket, a moth, an owl and the wind, as well as the footsteps and voices of people, and a car passing by in the distance. And the tree itself, "S:," not quite mutely present.
The next chat is with a Ponderosa Pine; here are the first two pages.;
As a bird hops around you hear the wind blowing through high above, and the tree... creaking? Burk was close to the tree as she engaged it.
Next is the end of Burk's 30-minute comvo with a Goodding Willow at midday July 24th, 2010. You can probably read her notation by now, recognizing birds and cars (a carpenter bee shows up here, too, moving through the field). She's already asked the tree about its life by a creek in a wildlife preserve, and why it's known as a tree of refuge. But, like every good interviewer, she leaves time at the end...
And here's the start of a conversation with a Blue Palo Verde on the campus of the University of Arizona. The sound is punctuated by an air handler but this doesn't prevent a concerto of sounds, a mockingbird the all-engaging soloist.
Cooke's poet's description of Burk's achievement is illuminating:
Burk’s interviews produce a growing absence at the heart of the book, as it becomes increasingly apparent that, indeed, trees don’t talk – at least, not in any way that is familiar to us.
Crucially, however, rather than nullifying the trees’ presence in an imposed condition of speechlessness, Burk renders the possibility of their talking more likely. Her transcriptions account for all kinds of peripheral noise, human and otherwise, while the trees themselves remain tantalisingly on the edge of written language, their responses ren- dered non-alphabetically with different arrangements of diacritical marks such as slashes, open brackets, commas and colons. Burk’s typographical arrays are extremely open, too, producing a hybrid, audio-visual complex: pages are marked with horizontal and vertical repetitions of different sounds, and with clusters of differently sized fonts. ...
[C]entral to all such cacophony in Tree Talks is the ongoing fact of the trees’ silence but, as we move through the book, slowly this silence starts to acquire an ineluctable density: as Burk continues to ask questions, and as the trees continue to respond (or ignore) with non-semantic gestures, the poems form homes for what these gestures – these commas, open brackets and colons – might mean. That silent ‘void’ in each poem becomes, in the Nietzschean sense, productive: it is the catalyst for a reorientation of understanding. What the poems produce, in other words, is a field in which a conversation with trees becomes possible...