Return of the Feather-Footed Vole

The found poetry of Donald Trump.

The feather-footed bank vole.

When the news becomes too much to bear, trust The New York Times to write about trees. In 1983, at the height of the Cold War, the paper’s then-editor, Abe Rosenthal, wrote for The New York Times Magazine an essay titled “The Trees of Warsaw” that began:

When I returned to Warsaw, I saw the trees in leaf. I stared at them in wonderment and could not take them in. For when I was writing in Warsaw, I never saw the trees.

It seemed to me, just moments back in Warsaw and riding to the burial of the murdered boy, that when I was young in Warsaw, why, there were no trees to see.

In the next days, when Poles asked me how the city had changed in a quarter- century, and what it was that I saw returning for the first time, I said: ‘The trees; there are so many trees in Warsaw now.’

And so on.

Today the Times situates on Page One of its print edition (thankfully, below the fold) a prose poem by Dayrln Brewer Hoffstot about cutting down “the old sugar maple, my arboreal cathedral” and hiring a local craftsman to mill it into bowls that are “silky smooth, not rough like her bark…. The old maple had spoken.” I thought not only of Rosenthal’s magazine piece, which was much-mocked at the time, but of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, a nature writer sent mistakenly to cover a war in East Africa, whose unsuitability for the assignment Waugh demonstrates through Boot’s authorship of the sentence, “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” (If you haven’t read Scoop, you really should.)

But perhaps I shouldn’t scoff. Hoffstot is a better writer than William Boot, and if her piece appeared on the op-ed page I wouldn’t trouble to mock it. To show that I’m not entirely insensible to the Greek muse Erato, my latest New Republic piece teases out of the otherwise senile rantings of this year’s Republican presidential candidate Keats’s viewless wings of Poesy. Donald Trump calls this new poetic form “the Weave.” You can read my piece here.