POEMTREE

This installation expands on a Japanese tradition of hanging poem slips to celebrate changing seasons. Poems celebrating spring are attached to a blooming cherry tree, or poems celebrating autumn to a maple as its leaves change colour. This performance will transform the tradition by expanding and extending the participatory aspect of hanging the slips and by including a diversity of poems and materials. We invite participants to consider belonging, migration, exile, indigeneity, decolonization, and futurity as possible poetic themes that connect and overlap with the festival theme Nomadic Reciprocity. Bring a favourite poem in any language, or a poem you have written. Markers and blank slips will be available for visitors to prepare their own contributions—put your poem on a slip to hang in the POEMTREE’s branches. Or, choose a ready-made poem slip from baskets available at the site. Transform the tree, word by word.

Poetry is essentially oral/aural and ephemeral: when recited, it is briefly audible, then vanishes into memory. Writing poetry down transforms it, and makes language visible. A ritual of attaching written poems to something—a tree, a rock, a fence—enacts poetry’s promise: celebrating, questioning, or appraising something in and of the world. This gesture also echoes the tying of prayer flags to sacred objects, or fabric scraps to branches near a spring. With this repeated gesture, we invite this sense of blessing or gratitude into this installation. We look forward to a diversity of words and worldviews whispering together in the branches of the POEMTREE, palpably (re)connecting nature to culture, poetry to city, and languages to the world(s) they spring from.