Talking to Trees: A Conversation with Charity Coleman

The first time I went to New York, or maybe the second, I read for the Segue series in the Zinc Bar: low stage, red velvet curtains—a windowless sexual basement, a jazz bar. This was 2014, and the event was hosted by Charity Coleman, whose performance of “introduction” was art itself: wry, sharp, almost mystical. I can’t remember what she said; I won’t forget the music of her tone. I was reminded of Dame Edith Sitwell—an honest flamboyance, a seriousness about being alive. I understood that I was in the presence of a Real Poet. 

That summer, Charity wrote all July on an old typewriter. The next year the chapbook Julyiary (O’Clock Press), now out-of-print, got let into the world:

Excerpt from "Julyiary" by Charity Coleman (O'Clock Press, 2015).

I suppose some of us think the world—the sensual world—and what attending to it generates, is enough. My definition of a poem might be a report of beauty. Paying attention faithfully and humbly is loving: if done properly, poetry is a love act. How beautiful. It is that simple, I’m sorry. And if you keep going, if you meet the attention with commitment (yes, it’s sounding like marriage because hello!) the beauty will know itself as sad or funny or both. When even a lament is an exaltation—in the fact of things (I first wrote fat, fat of things, that too), then stuff gets funny. It’s like humor is the grace God gives us for gratitude. 

Charity writes art criticism now. The thing transforms as we are beings in the world—Charity, me, you—and we respond. If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, and, say, that tree is a person—and its fall is a rush of wonder, announced as phrase— did it make a song?

Charity and I spoke via Zoom and WhatsApp on a Monday morning. I sat beside the aisle of a train shuttling to Toronto from Montreal, and Charity at a desk in a stone dwelling on the Irish Sea. 

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When you are funny, what allows for that?

When I’m not funny, it’s usually because there’s nobody to be funny with or to. There’s just desolation that creeps in. I think that humor abhors a vacuum. 

Actually, yesterday I mentioned a poem to these two people who don’t read poetry. It was that poem about the plums, because I was eating their plums—no one else was eating plums. And I mentioned the poem, and they didn’t know what I was talking about because they’re British and also they don't read poetry. And the woman said to me, oh, I don’t know that poem: I’m not very learned.

I just thought it was weird that you had to be “learned” to know a poem. 

Well, that’s the problem with “poetry.”

That’s the problem right there. But here’s the thing. I clearly am existing in some distorted world where I think that poetry actually isn’t that elitist or inaccessible or something. I’m healing from 12 years of New York.

I thought there were too many poets, I can’t handle any more of this. And then, you know, you step out of that world and you casually mention a poem and people look at you like snakes are coming out of your face. It’s seriously so alienating. And then I realized that what I think is reality is actually not reality, but even the reality that I was in wasn’t even the reality. I didn’t even understand that reality as a reality. I’m failing in both worlds basically, is what I’m saying.

Is that the vacuum that you referred to earlier?

Yes. You’re alienated there, you’re isolated. Nobody gets you. If you say something that you think is really basic and someone just looks at you like you’re talking crazy. And so what you end up doing is talking to yourself a lot. Sometimes my best material only comes out when I’m alone, and then I immediately forget because no one is around. So in that sense, I think that humor is as close to enlightenment as... . Say you’re a lazy Buddhist, but you’re funny and you’re also kind of a recluse or an introvert. Then the enlightenment that you might dip a toe in is only really through how well you amuse yourself. And then there’s no audience. And so it ends up always going back to the abyss because there’s no one to absorb your gift. So you’re always right back where you started, which is the abyss, which isn’t necessarily a vacuum. I don’t think the abyss is negative space or whatever. I definitely think there’s substance there, but it’s not human.

I do think fundamentally that humor is a way we communicate our spirituality, and I think that what we find possible to joke about says a lot, or maybe everything about our perspective/position. (As in, what counts as sacred and also how might we treat the sacred or what is the task of this life, etc.?) That’s one thing. But this thing about your gifts not being absorbed or gone to waste because of the inadequacy of your company—that is the birth of poetry, as far as I understand it.

I think writing poetry can be a source of solace inasmuch as it posits a future, and not just a future, but a future friend—who, of course, might just be yourself. I was at a residency a couple months ago working on poetry. And by that I mean I was reading notebook entries from a few years ago, and I found myself unable to bear the sorrow. I was like, this is just crying! I’m crying all the time! I didn’t have the heart to bear it. And then I did, and I understood that I did. Or I went there with the idea, Oh, I’m going to be visited by angels--and I was afraid. I mean, I did buy a lot of mushrooms, but I couldn’t take a very serious amount. But anyways, I was expecting to be visited by angels. And then I realized that I was the angel there to visit my 2020 self through reading what I had written, and feeling it. 

Don’t you think there’s a certain purity and satisfaction to not writing things down, to letting your gifts be absorbed by the mist in the morning, to give it to the trees?

This is so interesting, yeah, that’s been really important for me. Talking to trees has been important because they’ve replaced people, and I think you’re onto something in terms of letting things disappear a little bit. 

I wanna know about spending enough time by yourself without listening to anything, and the humor that arises. Like in the pandemic I took a 3-day audio break (and I wasn’t smoking weed anymore, I hadn’t since 2017) but after 3 days of not listening to anything but birdsong and cityscape, I just started laughing at myself all the time, as if I were high. I was so deep in a world. Why do you think that being in your world is so funny?

Why do you think sensitive people such as you and I are funny? And why do people try to write poetry if they’re not sensitive? And why is it funny to tell the truth and to observe things? 

You said “there’s a satisfaction in not writing things down,” and I agree. I am silent a lot these days, especially on solo walks by the sea or in the hills and woods. I tore up a few years’ worth of diaries last summer. I kept thinking of that scene in Bridesmaids when she says to her roommate: “At first I did not know it was your diary. I thought it was a very sad, handwritten book.” It turns out that the destruction of diaries can be comedic even though it sounds like a tragic reflex. I happily tore them up for HOURS and threw them in garbage bags and then the rats chewed through the plastic bags which were coated in rat repellent and some of the tattered diary pieces blew down the street, haunting the whole neighborhood for days. But I was relieved. 

Reverie and reverence are really special when naturally occurring. You laugh at yourself probably because you’re actually funny. The angels gave you that grace to be funny. Are we thespians? Someone literally asked me if I was a thespian once. I was staring at the sky. It must have seemed like a dramatic pose. People are so serious. They want to be taken seriously but that's embarrassing, isn't it? Atheism and competitive culture and desensitization just constrict your life, constipate you, make your face weird, and give you indigestion. What’s the point? I want to be earnest! I hate small talk and bozos maybe because it's not funny stuff! Also I like to stretch out and give my internal organs a lot of kindness and space. I do talk to myself in a lot of voices that no one knows about, and have composed many hits for musicals even though I don't really like musicals. 

I went to a funeral last week and I saw this four-year-old child whom I was chummy with when she was three, and I was like “Do you remember me?” and she just shook her head no. Why fake it. So we started over and by the end of the day she didn’t want me to leave. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said. At least I knew she was sincere! When you’re alone you’re sincere, like a child, if you’re lucky. Then maybe you can write poems that aren’t a drag.