susanne eules
NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 21, 2023
philo log by susanne eules appears on NationalPoetryMonth.ca on April 21, 2023
From susanne
The first week of March 2018, I took a personal retreat on a hillside above the Lamoille River in Johnson, Vermont. It was high time to escape the Florida environment I had to live in.
All I needed again was to wake up to a lingering time, a chalkboard announcing in handwriting the precise poetry of cold air.
Surrounded by a coniferous forest and deciduous trees, I was working on a manuscript which later was published as nivolog, contrived new artistic strategies, and did some drawings.
When I looked out of my small apartment under a sloping roof, I was surrounded by bare, wide vertical, somewhat slimmer diagonal and delicate horizontal lines.
Every day, I was lured to walk on the slippery ice-crust, a mélange of old snow and freezing rain, of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail into an arcane world. An interlacing of sprigs and boughs grew up, forming the inner ceiling of a most intricate lining, a net vault of a dome built by nature. Initially, the structure of bare undergrowth and treetops offered an insight into the architecture of that ligneous arching.
A few days and nights later everything was covered by a thick layer of snow. Tree trunks had been vested by snowdrifts and branches had gathered a thick lining of snow coat. The forest had stretched its winter trellis.
An additional layer had been built, a double landscape; awe absorbed me.
What first seemed to be the muting effect of sound insulation, emphasized by a street sign branching off before the tunnel, gave way to an intimate hall of natural sounds.
Animals left their distinctive tracks among dry blades of grass, which bent over and combined with leaves partially covered by nightly snowfall, creating abstract paintings.
The indent of braid branches mutated to nests of snow, wild white apples were added in bends of branches.
One tree stood out, partially shedding its skin, a trunk with two shades of bark was leaning towards the trail.
A shedding of the paper birch bark, Betula papyrifera, now my foundling served as my paper substitute, tried to be calligraphed: the walls/birch paper/a diary/pierced by words/eyeballed.
After it served its purpose, I had the urge to bring the bark back to its original tree, as a re-uniting sheltering gesture for the snow-covered mother's trunk.
The tree's epidermis had caught my attention as part of my regular inquiry, observation, and reflection on the surrounding area, of which I built a territory of interrelated writing, visual and sound cartography.
The underlying theme is the awareness of the present and past.
Auditive, tactile and other sensory responses are included in the geomatic, hydrographic and historic tracing of my position.
Reminiscent of the meticulous gestures of an archivist/collector, this practice focuses on found objects, fragments, and marginalia.
This kind of research and its contemplation found its expression in birchen. It is my poetic contribution to the sylvan libraries of birchbark manuscripts, writings, and scrolls, dating back many centuries and being part of various cultures, such as the tree alphabets of the Irish language's native writing system Ogham with its first letter of beithe, meaning "birch".
Part of the investigation is etymology, multi-linguistics as in [b]i[r]ch, containing the German subject pronoun of "ich", "I", as well as sound - "bark" as an animal cry - and visual associations of "[b]ark", which also hints to the first page as conceived by the scribe of the Book of Ballymote, containing a drawing of Noah's Ark.
My reading was also between the lines of the birch tree's multipurpose in biology and forestation as a pioneer species, its cultural importance in a variety of often indigenous handmade items such as boxes, containers, canoes etc., its importance in medicine, spiritual practices, cosmetics and nutrition for human and moose browse. Philo log is one of my poems expressing my love for language and neologisms interweaving it with the language of trees.
Later, back home, I worked on layering my experiences by overlapping photos, a photo of the trail as background, closing in with approaching my specific friend, the shedding birch, trying to read its language and double layered skin.
Relying on my field studies and my birch bark archive, I was able to create philo log, my map of reciprocal relationships between the meanwhile accumulated thesaurus of betulae crusteae - my treasure of birch bark -, and the log of words, dots and dashes of my sylvan manuscript of barked words.
Epi/log/ue: In March 2019, Camilla Nelson with her singing apple press created a letter press embossing of some of my birchen words on birch bark as contribution to the exhibition radical landscapes: innovation in landscape & language art she curated in Wiltshire, UK.
Note: The photos were taken during my Vermont Retreat in 2018.; the bark bossing by Camilla Nelson, singing apple press: radical landscapes: innovation in landscape & language art , Wiltshire, UK.
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