The Revisor: The Evolution of “Christmas Tree”
by Finn Bille, 2019-2020
CHRISTMAS TREE –“Final” version*
1 Sawed off and severed from its native wood
2 the pine tree oozed its sticky pitch like blood
3 of transubstantiated mountain dirt.
4 We found our evergreen within a grove
5 where sumac, sweet gum, poplar crowded round
6 to force the conifer to stretch for light
7 while one branch, broken, split and bent by ice
8 still grew and pointed green leaves earth-ward.
9 I grasped the scaly trunk and cleared away
10 loose sandy loam, leaf mould and spiderwebs,
11 breathed sweet soil and pungent dark decay.
12 Its green scent filled the house, to fade
13 as needles fell. Buried in the compost heap,
14 it rots, awaits rebirth as cabbages.
*I make no claim of exceptional quality for this poem, but my revision process might be instructive and helpful for other poets. — FB
This poem, “Christmas Tree,” has evolved from sparse notes to a draft of 49 lines of loosely structured free verse to this 14-line American sonnet. My worksheets for 15 versions of this poem, including annotations from members of the Chattanooga Writers Guild Poetry critique group, support the following account of the evolution of “Christmas Tree”:
I wrote the first notes for this poem in my journal on December 12, 2018. I wanted to read a poem at the Solstice celebration on December 16. My journal notes were a disconnected series of impressions from earlier years of cutting Christmas trees at our Lookout Mountain retreat in Georgia. I called my notes and the first draft “The Solstice Tree.”
I read the poem of 49 lines at the celebration, still fragmented and uncertain of its central theme, its title “Our Solstice Tree.” While the subject fit the occasion, the fragmented form bothered me. I was happy to read two other, more developed poems.
Shortening the title to “Solstice Tree,” I reduced the poem by 5 weak and misdirecting lines, including these: “No arcane formula/ or Druid incantation/ invoked the cutting of our tree.” Before striking these, I rationalized that the “formula” and “incantation” contributed to a vaguely mystical tone inspite of–or maybe even because of–the denial. But that tone did not seem to fit the poem. I also eliminated a “darling” line, “nacent mycelia of Chanterelles” for being too much, as though I was trying too hard to be poetic. Thus I killed my darling.
When I presented this poem of 35 lines to the Chattanooga Writers Guild (CWG) poetry group, I got various helpful comments, but none that addressed the poem’s still-amorphous structure. However, the helpful hints for revision included “use stronger verb,” “remove line,” a warning against “ending with a prepositional phrase,” and marking of repeated words for cutting or changing. I also got some encouraging comments, like “love this,” “good job,” “. . . wonderful: I see it exactly,” “three stars,” and “beautiful,” “great sensory detail,” and “language is strong.”
I read it to our Chritmas Eve dinner guests. I was not happy with it, and one friend thought it was too long. I could only agree. So I cut it down to 18 lines and combined short ones to form longer lines of roughly ten syllables to approximate blank verse. I wanted to cut it down to sonnet length, but did not see how. I also eliminated the repetition of the word “pine” by using “evergreen” and “conifer. The repetion of “its” in two adjacent lines became “this” and “the.” By now I had changed the title to “Christmas Tree,” maybe because of the holidays, and perhaps because I sensed an ironic twist.
To attempt the sonnet form, I counted the lines and the syllables in each line, marked the text and worked on equalizing the lines and strengthening the iambic rhythm.
Finally, I changed “planted” to “buried in the compost heap,” hinting at another “transubstantiation.”I was still uncertain about my use of this six-syllable word. I liked the theological implications as well as the biological accuracy of one substance made into another. Then I read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At the Fishhouses” in The New Yorker in which she uses the word “transmutation.” So why should I not use a word with only two more syllables?
I broke the strictly chronological narrative to introduce the pine tree in the first stanza containing this long word and announcing the environmental theme. I also found the rhyme, “wood,” and “blood” to introduce the poem and reverse the traditional place of a couplet in a sonnet.
I liked the line of all simple one-syllable words: “to stretch both up and out for light,” but it did not survive revision. And I liked the synesthesia of “Its green scent filled the house,” and the follow-up of “fade,” applying to both color and scent.
When I submitted this American sonnet to the CWG poetry critique group, some of the general comments startled me: “This has lost its magic,” and “This is sterile, no magic of the holidays.,” and “too drab and earthy” for a poem about Christmas, All these comments challenged me to answer the question, “what is this poem about?”
I resisted answering the question for fear of over-analyzing that could ruin the poem. Instead I tried to build on what I already had in an intuitive way. Suggestions for revision included pointing out that I had used “soil” three times. One “soil” became “sandy loam,” a scientific as well as euphonic alternative. My in-house critic–Jeanne, my wife–thought that the repetiion of “this” in lines 2 and 6 was awkward. I substituted the innocuous “the.”
I had ended lines 11 and 14 with the rather abstract and heavy “metamorphosis” and “resurrection.” They became the more concrete “dissolution,” and then the sensory “dark decay,” and “life” now concluded the poem that started with death.
KB writes that the ending in “soil” makes it sound like the city is soiled or dirty, and that the poem needs an up-lifting image of regeneration. I tried several ways to do that. It became ” rots, makes earth for future festivals.”
But I was not happy about using “festivals.” When I read it to the poetry and creative non-fiction group, and Sherry Poff said that it was too light for the poem, I agreed. Now it reads “Buried in the compost heap,/ it rots, awaits rebirth as cabbages.”
This from my Journal of 2019-01-19:
The comments of the poetry group are interesting and maybe provocative. First I must ask myself,
— a nod to Jim Pfitzer, my storytelling coach, who always asked the same question about a story.
Am I asking if it is about an idea or theme predetermined by me, or whether it is about something
that is revealed in the poem? How much can I rely on the integrity of my revision process?
Some say that “the magic” of the early version is gone.
Some seem to say that the spirit of Christmas is violated. Maybe this “violation” is what
the poem is about at its core.
But I remind myself to be careful about using too much logic, as it could kill the poem.
Re-reading the sonnet, I see that it is very earth-focussed. Is this the “simple earthiness” as opposed
to “churchiness” that I write about in my poem, “This Danish Church”? (The King’s Coin:
Danish-American Poems, 2020).
Has my poem evolved into a re-framing of Christmas in ecological and naturalistic terms,
making the title ironic?
It is possible that this poem has been excessively revised, or that it has suffered from revision of lines with insufficient attention to the whole. On the other hand, what it contains of positive quality is due to the support of my fellow poets and my determination to write honest, concrete imagery in the short sonnet form.
What is it about?
Earth.
During this revision process I consulted the dictionary and thesaurus: The Synomym Finder by J.I. Rodale, my Macbook’s word aid based on the Oxford Dictionary of English and the Oxford Thesaurus of English, as well as an old Webster’s New World Dictionary. I looked up tree species in Google, and consulted the soil analysis of our mountain property for “sandy loam.”
— Finn Bille, Chattanooga, November 12, 2020 (2020-11-12)