TREES:
RESEARCH PROJECTS

• To know what it is like to be a tree, wear a nest of robins in your hair for a day. At the end of this experiment, record whether or not you feel like a poem.

• Find a tall, stately tree with firm, solid bark, and carve Kilmer’s poem into it.

• Arrange a class visit to a local tree nursery. While there, take note of which trees seem to be looking at you and/or planning their escape. Find out the nursery’s policy about rogue trees: if they say they don’t have one, they might be too scared to talk, in which case you’ll have to communicate with Morse Code blinking. To help stay focused, remember Joyce Kilmer’s ominous warning about their “hungry mouths.”

• Read some biographical material about Joyce Kilmer and explain how you think he would have responded to the artificial Christmas tree market: would he have conceded that, after all, a “fool like him” can indeed make a tree? Would he abandoned his religious faith and gone on a hedonistic bender?

• Poetry, where this poem was originally published in 1913,  is a legendary magazine that also published works by real writers, such as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, William Butler Yates and William Carlos Williams. Read some back issues of Poetry, then explain whether or not you think “Trees” would have been better suited for publication in Highlights for Children.