You Are the Tree, You Are the Board, You Are the Sawmill Blade

I have some potential poets in classes where I might not expect to find them.  Yesterday, in my English 100 class (the pre-college writing class), we breezed through the material I had prepared.  I had this worksheet, along with a list of words that might inspire ways to fill in the blanks.

The tree sings __________________  at night. 

The tree yearns for ________________________. 

The tree misses __________________________. 

_________________________ misses the tree. 

 The tree contains a secret which is __________________. 

The tree’s favorite color is ___________________________. 

 The tree’s best friend is _________________________. 

The tree resembles this human made object. 

The tree wraps itself in a quilt made of ___________________. 

The tree goes _______________________ for vacation. 

The tree wishes you knew ____________________________. 

It was much too early to end class, so I had them do some free writing in response to prompts.  I designed it to be quick free writing, so if one prompt didn't work, another would be on the way soon.  They would write for 2-3 minutes without stopping.

After doing that, I told them that I wanted them to write 15 lines of writing, which might be like the poem we read (Joy Harjo's "Speaking Tree"), or it might be different--but it had to show them thinking creatively about a tree, not just descriptively.

As you might expect, the responses were varied.  But some made imaginative leaps that were delightful.  Between the free writing and the fill in the blank worksheet, some students came up with some truly creative ways to think about trees.

Here are the freewriting prompts:

--You wake up tomorrow morning, and you discover that you are a tree, outside there, on the quad of the campus.  Describe how you feel and what you see.

--The next morning, you wake up, and you are a single leaf on the tree.  Describe life from the viewpoint of that leaf.

--The next morning, you are soil, the dirt beneath the tree.

--The next morning, you are a bird.

--The next morning, you are the bird's nest.

--The next morning, you are this door, made of wood that was once a tree.

--The next morning, you are the blade of the saw mill that transformed the tree into wood for boards to make doors and furniture and lumber.

--The next morning, you are a saw mill.  Are you abandoned?  Transformed into something else?  Or are you still transforming trees into boards?

--It's a hundred years from now.  Write about life from the perspective of one of the above.

At some point, I should try this exercise myself.  It worked so well for my students that I'd like to see how it works for me.