Molly Tenenbaum, THE ARBORISTS

THE ARBORISTS, Molly Tenenbaum. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2023, 98 pages, $16.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Eleven days down on the Sealey Challenge, twenty days to go. My brain is bursting, and though I’m making notes for future blogposts, there’s a tendency for everything to begin blurring together. Then (honestly, almost every day), something stands out.

In Molly Tenenbaum’s The Arborists, for me, it’s sound. As she is also, besides a poet, a gifted musician, a teacher of the art of banjo, of course it is. Not always euphony, often cacophony, baskets of sizzling s’s, explosions of repetition—in “Banjo, Banjo on the Wall,” this stanza:

I have seen a cat’s ass banjo, Pleiades banjo,
banjo overgrown with vines.
Never no more lighthouse banjo, never
no more poppy, paintbrush,
coastal wildflower banjo.

You could study this book for how to make your poems jangle and twang (and sing). I’m pretty sure that Tenenbaum is one of those people who, when she walks into a room, you never know what will happen. And when she picks up a banjo? Well!

Well, She Died with Them Under Her Own Bed,

died with a thousand single-stroke circles
in a newsprint stack, died with ten pages
of not-quite ducks, their backs a press
with the fat of the brush, their bellies
bare eggshell paper. Died with two red-wattled
black and white chickens, their foreground,
gray chickenwire hints, a few yellow grasses—
a masterpiece mashed under stacks
of calligraphy grids, story of when she wailed
she never would get it, her teacher
cheerily, Don’t worry, do a hundred tonight,
bring me the best one tomorrow.
Which page was tomorrow’s? She died with the great
Western mountains on scrolls in the dark
in cardboard tubes, her foam bed
on a plywood plank above bleeding
magenta beets and fiercely gold-veined chard.
We will all die and pass our beds on, next person
lie dreaming on a flat in a frame
above our packets, starting up midnights
to label trees or animals in black marker
on the brown paper, returning
to slide between thin cottons and under
thick wools back to sleep.

—Molly Tenenbaum

To read more (and find banjo classes!) go to https://mollytenenbaum.com. To see a video of Tennenbaum reading with fellow MoonPath author Ronda Piszk Broatch, visit this page: http://moonpathpress.com/MollyTenenbaum.htm.