To celebrate the official release of Tree Fall with Birdsong, I want to take a moment to look back with my readers on how this book came to be. It has been a long time in the making; I started writing poems for this collection even before I published my second book, Time Capsules. As I was nearing completion of that book, I realized there were poems that were heading in a new direction and wouldn’t really fit with the others. This happens anytime I’m sorting and ordering poems for a collection. It was also somewhat influenced by Paul Ruffin who had asked me to send him about 80 poems for Time Capsules. Some of the poems I had at the time just didn’t fit, and while I knew some of those might not end up in any collection, others could form the germ of something new. Most of these found their way into the first section of Tree Fall with Birdsong, including the title poem of that section, “Birdsong.” There were also a few other poems that initially got culled, but that I eventually went back to and reevaluated as I was making final decisions about Tree Fall with Birdsong.
I might have finished this collection sooner, but I had also started writing the first poems for Barrier Island Suite, and for a while I felt like I was in a competition between two collections to see which would become a book first. When I realized I needed to write about Walter Anderson’s life on shore, I saw the way to round out Barrier Island Suite, and thanks to the research and reading I had already done, that collection sprinted over the finish line while I was still steadily writing poems for my other project, the first working title of which was “Breathe and Other Poems,” since the poem “Breathe” was initially the title poem and organizing principle of the collection.
Time happened, as did a search of book titles on Amazon that revealed there are several, maybe hundreds, of poetry collections with the title Breathe or something similar. I was hardly surprised, but it had been a good working title for several years. By that point, I had written the poems that are now the penultimate section of the book, “Tree Fall.” Initially, this was two sections: “The Orchard” and “The Big Maple.” These became the new heart of the collection and eventually I saw the wisdom of combining them and making that section the title section of the book. Before my working title became “Tree Fall,” the collection had briefly been submitted with the title “A Necessary Lie,” though I quickly realized that there were nearly as many books with that title as “Breathe.” But that title led me to the title “Tree Fall” for which I could only find one other instance, which turned out to be a very cool statue by a California artist that came up in a search once, though I can’t find it anymore.
I wasn’t worried about any competition from an obscure statue, but I did wonder whether “Tree Fall” would be enough of a title and whether it truly encompassed the whole collection. For me, “Tree Fall” represents the idea of loss, whether that is in the poems dedicated to trees we have lost or to my sister who died of cancer, to my father-in-law who died of ALS, or to our neighbor who also died of cancer, or even the sense of transience and the cycle of the seasons moving into winter that was part of “Tombigbee River Haiku.” But the haiku juxtapose this sense of loss with a sense of presence, fall and winter with springtime and summer. Other poems were more about renewal, and though I had already started to include that in my book proposals, I didn’t know how to include it in the title.
By this point, Paul Ruffin at Texas Review Press had already passed away, and when I sent my manuscript to the interim director, she initially put me off until a new permanent director was in place, which took some time. Then the press told me they were more interested in going in a new direction, building up their own list of authors rather than sticking with past relationships. That’s when I started submitting the manuscript elsewhere in earnest. By then, I felt I had a full collection, and I still feel I would have had a very good book had it been published as it was. I garnered several quite positive rejections that essentially told me their press had already accepted all the poetry collections they could publish in the next couple of years. I even was accepted by a publisher, though once I read their description of terms, I realized they were not the kind of press I was looking for, and I turned them down.
Then COVID happened, and that led to the poems in the final section “Quarantine.” Though I didn’t want to write too directly about the pandemic (only a couple of poems mention it), it was also nearly impossible to avoid. For at least a couple of years, it was the main thing on everyone’s mind, and the poems in that section were ways I attempted to write myself, and to write the world, out of the collective grief we were all going through by delving into myths of the underworld and writing my way to a creation story.
The thing I have always known about the myths around Persephone, Iannana, Ishtar, Adonis, Osiris and others is that they are as much about fertility in springtime as they are about the death of the god or goddess. Yes, they are about mourning, but they are also about the hope of renewal. This reminded me that my own poems, as much as they had focused on the loss of loved ones and of the trees that fell in my mother’s yard (and implicitly about her mortality, since she was already in her nineties), they were also populated by many wildflowers and songbirds. This is what led me to add Birdsong to the title, even as the final section helped me to pull the whole collection together.
In the meantime, partly as a diversion to get myself out of the habit of writing about birds and flowers (not a bad habit to have, by the way), I started writing my “Intergalactic Traveler” poems. Once again, I knew they weren’t going to play well with the poems in Tree Fall with Birdsong, so I realized I had something new on my hands. At first I thought they might be a short series of poems, and I didn’t really know what to do with them. Now, I have more than twenty, and I’ve already moved on to write new myth poems, focusing on myths that are the names of galaxies or constellations. Will I have a chapbook and the start of a new collection or will they all play well together and form the backbone of a collection that is now about halfway to completion? Only time will tell.
But to turn back to Tree Fall with Birdsong. I couldn’t be happier with the way this book has turned out or happier with the publisher I landed with. Fernwood Press has been great to work with. The design of the cover and the interior is inspired. Eric Muhr and his team are fully behind my vision for the book, and they have been extremely conscientious and thorough in editing and marketing. I’m also thoroughly impressed with the rest of their list and already feel a kinship with their other writers, so I am very much looking forward to this next stage in my publishing journey.
I’ve already been fortunate to have an interview and featured poems in Rooted Magazine, and I have more good publicity in the works, now that review copies have gone out. I’m hoping for at least a couple more interviews, and hopefully a few book reviews over the next several weeks to months, and I will be on sabbatical in the fall, which will give me plenty of time to extend my book tour. My goal is to bring these poems to as many people and in as many ways as possible, whether that is through book sales or people coming to readings and just listening to a good poem. That’s what the writing is for, and now that Tree Fall with Birdsong is in the world that new life as a book can truly begin.
Kendall Dunkelberg 