Harold Rhenisch, The Tree Whisperer: How to Write Poetry by Living in the World

 Let’s start with this: in The Tree Whisperer, Harold Rhenisch has given his readers some of his clearest, most evocative writing yet about BC and about writing, and for a writer who’s built his career on communicating the nuances and echoes of place in/and language, that’s saying something.

Let’s also admit this, too, though: The Tree Whisperer contains passages, pages, maybe even whole sections that’ll baffle just about any of his readers.

Theresa Kishkan, characteristically, several years ago casually offered some deep wisdom about about Harold Rhenisch in a short, possibly offhand comment on my olde blog.

“The thing about Harold is that he doesn't write to a template, his books aren't manufactured to appeal to a particular publishing mode -- and those are the qualities that appeal to me most, I think. He doesn't tie up loose ends, his sense of narrative is organic and responds to weather and the idiosyncratic nudges of sunlight and starlight, so he's not necessarily easy to categorize or place. And thank goodness for that.”

And yeah, yes, right, that’s true, even if I’ve kept piling up words trying to articulate that sensibility as well as its value. It has been a few years since I blogged about him, but I’ve made the attempt several times, and I’ve kept reading Rhenisch even if I haven’t been blogging about him. (Or indeed blogged about anything: viz, the silence between April 2020 and May 2022, and between July 2022 and May 2023.)

Overall, Rhenisch isn’t an easy read, especially when you start reading him, and even more so if you inadvertently start with something that’ll never suit your reading. As well, he’s got his detractors amongst those one might expect to consider his potential audience, and my sense is that his books are written experimentally, to see how they’ll work out. If you’re unclear what parallels he sees between colonialism and how first-wave and second-wave colonial Canada are being transformed (rural —> urban, among other things), if you don’t know what side he’d choose in relation to a writer he’s discussing (if you’re not clear that there might be sides, or how many sides!), if you’re unfamiliar with the outlines of agricultural history in British Columbia, well, your reading may cost you some effort, my friend:

"Much of poetry is still compressed into books, with heavily pruned lines arranged to fit the requirements of machine printing. These corsets for verse are little different from planting an orchard to match the shape of a heavy, industrial tractor. That’s what been done to us. That’s what’s been done to trees." (p.16)

But.

Sometimes, as in whole sections of The Tree Whisperer (“Learning to See” being one such), I suddenly find shining in the sun or water what I take Rhenisch to be trying to articulate: “I was writing you into my valley and my valley into you” (p.122).

For complicated reasons, I can’t seem to write a full review/comment on this book, even though I want to, so if you want more, I’d suggest the generous, open-hearted reading by Adrienne Fitzpatrick in The BC Review. Like me, Fitzpatrick seems to have struggled with The Tree Whisperer, but in the end she found her way through by recognizing the sort of reciprocal koans at the book’s heart: “Trees shaped and continue to shape his life, education, and poetry. Trees are poetry, and Rhenisch is a tree. Once I got my head around it, I was there with him, following him through his orchard and the lands and rivers of his home in the North Okanagan.”

When I can be there with him, when I’m not bogged down or bound up in my internal conflicts sparked by reading him, I’m a very, very happy reader. With The Tree Whisperer, I found myself there often, and intensely so — even if this made me cranky when I couldn’t find a way to make the imaginative trip.

(Cross-posted from my Substack: long story.)