“This Is a Love Poem to Trees”: Seven Questions for Hannah Marshall
Trees are perhaps one of the most consistent and prevalent things in our everyday lives, yet one of the most overlooked. Not many people notice the types of trees that they pass everyday or the specific trees that are part of significant moments. For poet Hannah Marshall, specific trees are connected in her mind to important memories and periods in her life. In Marshall’s poem, “This Is a Love Poem to Trees,” she appreciates the existence of these memorable trees. After reading Marshall’s poem, I was immediately curious as to why these trees held such a deep importance to her, and how the events mentioned in her poem flowed together. I knew that she was the poet who I wanted to interview.
Hannah Marshall grew up in the Driftless Area of the Midwest and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Marshall currently works at a public library and is a poetry editor for the South 85 Journal. She didn’t always know that she wanted to be a poet and was originally more inclined towards the visual arts, but during college she fell in love with poetry. Marshall graduated Converse College in 2020 with a MFA in creative writing and since then has produced many award-winning poems. “This Is a Love Poem to Trees” was selected by a former U.S poet Laureate to be in The Best American Poetry 2021, and her Manuscript The Shape Good Can Take was a finalist for the 2020 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2023 Converse Alumni Book Award. You can find Hannah Marshall’s poems in Poetry Daily, The New Ohio Review, The South Carolina Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
I read that you grew up in the Driftless Area of the Midwest; has growing up in a rural area impacted your relationship to nature? And how did your upbringing inspire “This Is a Love Poem to Trees?”
Yes! Growing up in a rural area meant that the wild land was always close by. I drove through the countryside to visit my grandparents or to get to my school, which was situated in between cornfields rather than in town. As a young person, I didn’t seek out nature, but I was soaking in it all the time without realizing it. The first time I really understood the depth of my love for the landscape of my rural home was when I left home for college in St. Paul, MN. Suddenly, I felt hemmed in. Even in neighborhoods, the houses crowded around me. The vistas of the Driftless Area had meant that no matter where I was in my hometown of Elizabeth, IL, population 700, I could see distant hills of maple and oak forests. I’ve learned that in cities, these spaces are rarer but still present. In St. Paul, I’d walk to one of the many lakes in the city just so that I could see the sky over the water. Now that I live in Grand Rapids, MI, I seek out natural places: trails and dunes, the Lake Michigan shore dotted with scrubby pines and cottonwoods, the forests of eastern hemlock and beech. “This Is a Love Poem to Trees” is a poem of longing. I wrote it when I was far from home, in residency for my MFA at Converse University in South Carolina. I was missing my family, and as I explored campus and came across trees that were unfamiliar to me, I connected the people of home with the many trees that have kept watch outside my homes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The water and willow oak in my poem are common trees on the Converse University campus. Many of the others are old friends.
How did you choose which tree related memories to include in your poem? Do they all share a specific emotion or do they follow a pattern?
The choices were made subconsciously/through free association. As I wrote, I followed the flow, the duende, from one tree to the next. Each one is inspired by a memory. But the memories don’t appear in chronological order. They follow one another through lyric leaps and emotional connections: pie/jam → water; holding me → being pregnant. The connections are loose. While some of my poems change drastically from the first draft to the final draft, I wrote this one in a creative burst that came from being soaked in words every day at residency. I changed it very little in subsequent edits. This was only possible because of the work I’d done writing the poems that didn’t come so easy on the days that I didn’t feel so inspired. I had the tools I needed to write this poem when I was struck by inspiration. Here’s the first draft of this poem so you can see what it looked like :
You Say This Is a Love Poem to Trees
To the sour cherry tree behind our apartment, that summer I made pie and jam.
To the water oak and willow oak the time you were home waiting, and I said, Just one more day.
To the silver maple that waved bare branches twisting gray, when I cried in my childhood bedroom. You and the tree, holding me.
To the linden the summer I was pregnant, and wouldn’t that have been a great name for a boy?
Remember that time a raccoon climbed the white pine and built a nest in our dormer, how we wished we could befriend her? The trap in the morning, the drive to the lake, her furry waddle into the woods.
To the woods.
To the tulip tree that wept in early summer, in the new town. The long afternoons I spent alone, drinking tea.
To branches of the old apple tree, alight in your parents’ fireplace.
To the weeping willow in Minnesota spring, when I would go for walks and come home, and find you there.
To the mangled green ash outside the window where I sat with our hungry infant. You changed her diapers, and we forgot to touch each other.
To our first southern magnolia. The one at the zoo, by the little train and the fountain and the ledge where we took a selfie.
To the bare hickories on our anniversary, ice cream in January, cool sheets and us, alone.
To the hackberry, Siberian elm, river birch, redbud, cottonwood, and aspen. I’ve loved them all.
To every year the trees grew before we stood below them.
In the last line of your poem, “To every year the trees grew without us noticing,” what emotion is it trying to convey? One of nostalgia, reflection, or something else?
Aha! So as you can see above, that last line is one of the things that changed later. The final line in the published poem was a collaboration with the editors of New Ohio Review, who first published the poem. Here’s a bit of my email with them as we workshopped the last line:
As for the ending, my intention was to leave readers pondering the brevity of love, as compared with the trees which loom ancient and patient over our daily lives—many of which were present long before us. However, I think your proposed revision (“to every year the trees grew without us noticing”) is also true to the poem and adds a layer of longing while also hinting at the slow-but-sure growth of trees.
Changing the line from “before we stood below them” to “without us noticing” allowed for my original intention—“the brevity of love, as compared with the trees which loom ancient and patient over our daily lives”—but was a nicer ending because it shifted the focus from “before” to the “now” of the previous stanzas.
What inspires you to write about trees? Have they always meant so much to you or did the idea to write about them just come to you one day?
Oh, I’ve always loved trees! In fact, I’ve written a whole book of tree poems that is coming out next spring, titled Leaf Collection. I made a leaf collection in 7th grade science class, and at the time I didn’t like learning tree names. Trees had always been my friends, but each was an individual. I especially remember an old hackberry from our front yard. When I was very small, I would pace its wide trunk with a hand trailing its pebbly bark as I sang little songs to myself. My parents had it cut down when I was still young, and I cried to see it go. It was hollowing out with rot, but what did I care for adult safety concerns? That hackberry was not a “hackberry” to my young mind. It was the friend in the front yard with the wide, wide trunk. But I’ve come around since then to loving the names of trees. I like the organization that naming brings. Still, I think of each of them as individuals! I remember pressing my ear to the bark of an oak on my undergraduate campus, listening to the branches in the wind reverberating through the trunk. I was quite lonely at the time, and the tree felt so solid. Its rootedness comforted me. That memory, that specific tree, is still important to me, even though I live far from it now.
What in your mind are the advantages and disadvantages of writing poetry in America today?
I think writing poetry in America today is really hard. I have found that without a strong community of support, it’s very easy to burn out on writing. For me, this is because publishing poetry is very difficult. Poetry is not a way to make money. Without monetary value, poetry is seen as unimportant. So for most who love it, poetry has to be a side endeavor. Many serious poets are also teachers. I work at the library. I have spent a lot of emotional energy and a lot of time to have some success in publishing poetry, but right now, I am choosing to move more inward, writing only to please myself, without sending out submissions or working toward another book. One of the biggest advantages of writing poetry in America today is that we have such amazing access to the poetry of other writers as well as to lots of tools to help us become better writers. Libraries, websites, and schools all have great resources to support poetry writing. And there are also a lot of ways to connect with other poets online! Like this email interview!
If you could have a conversation with any tree, which one would you choose and what would you ask?
Oaks seem to me to be the wisest of trees, so I would want to have a conversation with a very old oak tree. I think I’d find the oldest oak with a good view at Horseshoe Mound Preserve in Illinois. I would ask the oak for its advice about the future: how can humans find a better balance with nature? I think all of the “progress” it’s seen over its lifetime would look very different to a tree than it does to us humans.
When were you first exposed to poetry, and did you always know that you wanted to be a poet?
My mother, Laurel Eshelman, is also a poet and writer. Growing up, I listened to her give readings at local art venues. Our house was full of books. I remember reading a collection by Adrienne Rich at a young age. But I didn’t know I wanted to be a poet until I was in college. Initially, I was more drawn to visual art. I thought I might go into graphic design. But as I took classes in the liberal arts, I found myself gravitating toward the power of poetry: its ability to convey so much experience and emotion in such neat little packages. I love crafting with words, and this is what ultimately has kept me writing poetry.