Matthew Battles

@mbattles on: “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” Judee Sill, and “Scavengers Reign” - today!

April 30th, the date of the Tree Studies Poetry Reading, is the last day of National Poetry Month. We’re also marking the one-year anniversary of my reading series (!!!), so please come out and celebrate with us. 🌳📚✨ Here’s another from Matthew Battles. He will be reading, along with K Prevallet and Elizabeth Marie Young. 🌳 April 30th The Square Root, Roslindale 8 PM / 📸: Arnold Arboretum, 2026 How long would it take this brave breeze to bury me in cherry petals? #squarerootreadings #poetryreading #poetryinboston #matthewbattles #violethammerslydetectiveagency

There are so many lyrical and lush passages in Matthew Battles’ TREES. This one, from the very beginning of the book, is one of my favorites. 🌳 See Matthew live — and share your poems at the open mic — on April 30th. The Square Root, Roslindale 8 PM / 📸: Arnold Arboretum, 2023 … trees clad the puddingstone hills that evoke Boston’s primordial topography; trees make shadow-heavy frames for greenswards and mazy plantings of lilac and rose; trees enfold bubbling brooks tasted by lapping dogs and soft tongues of sunlight. #squarerootreadings #poetryreading #poetryinboston #arnoldarboretum #violethammerslydetectiveagency

The tree of heaven, the apple tree. The arboretum, the forest, and cracks in city sidewalks. Matthew Battles’ TREE (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) “shows how trees — and perhaps more importantly our relationships with trees — are incredibly complicated. Even dappling — that wonderful light that comes through a tree’s leaves — is not as simple as it seems.” (Catherine Ramsdell, PopMatters) The book is part of the Object Lessons series, published jointly by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury Academic. 🌳 See Matthew read at @squarerootrozzie on Thu, April 30, with @kprevallet and @murmurqu . / 📸: Arnold Arboretum, April 2026 #squarerootreadings #poetryreading #poetryinboston #arnoldarboretum #violethammerslydetectiveagency

📚✍️ It’s time to introduce you to our fabulous featured readers for the Tree Studies poetry reading on April 30th at @squarerootrozzie . First up: Matthew Battles! Matthew Battles is the author of six books to date; his most recent book, TREE, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. His writing has appeared in such venues as the American Scholar, the Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times. With a far-flung network of collaborators, he has created films, installations, workshops, and music from Boston to Berlin. For Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, he edits Arnoldia, a magazine exploring tree-entangled science, history, and storytelling, and he is a lecturer in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. / #squarerootreadings #poetryreading #poetryinboston #arnoldarboretum #violethammerslydetectiveagency

St Julian of Norwich’s affirmation—“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”—resonates for me this morning in the face of all the enormities. I think of Thoreau’s declaration to his friend Harrison Blake: “I have heard no bad news.” Even in such times. Especially in such times.

📣🌳 Featured Reader Reveal! I am happy to announce the readers for the next Square Root reading: Matthew Battles K Prevallet Elizabeth Young 🎤 Join us on April 30th at 8 PM — and bring your poems for the open mic! The reading will support Women’s Lunch Place — your presence makes a difference. Suggested donation: $5. Tree [Studies], 1944 Victoria Chang .uk/poems/tree-studies-1944/ Once they picked a date, I knew something the / eucalyptus tree did not. Someone knows when the / earth will end. I think that person is a lumberjack. To / be alive is to accept perception but to use the / perceived. To know a tree has no bones but to paint / in bones. To know that we aren’t actually writing / poems but our own autopsies. That the earth is a / collage of the sky, the leaves, and its own grave. / Things stay alive by eluding our perception. The / same gaze that believes a tree is there for us to / draw. That its branches have tiny offices. That it can / fly away or be poured. The miracle is that the earth / holds the weight of the living, the dead, and our / imaginations, but it doesn’t sink. Picasso drew in a / branch collar, where a tree branch had been cut. As / if he knew that the whole drawing depended on it. 📸: Seattle, Chihuly Garden and Glass, 2014 #squarerootreadings #poetryreading #poetryinboston #roslindale violethammerslydetectiveagency

These wild early lines of Yeats: Sigh, O you little stars! O sigh and shake your blue apparel! The sad, sad thought has gone from me now wholly: Sing, O you little stars! O sing and raise your rapturous carol … he who made you many as the sands, And laid you on the gates of evening with his quiet hands.

Rough demo of a new song pulled from Thoreau’s journal entry for New Year’s Day 1854, likening a fresh covering of snow to the footprint of—of what? Vastness? Purity? Beauty? God? It’s not a blankness, Henry saying, but a presence, a trace of the wholeness and purity of which we’re a part. And there’s something in his “Great Hare” at the end that I find so delicious—fey and sublime like an image out of Kenneth Grahame. The snow is the great betrayer. It not only shows the tracks of mice, otters, etc., etc., which else we should rarely if ever see, but the tree sparrows are more plainly seen against its white ground, and they in turn are attracted by the dark weeds which it reveals. It also drives the crows and other birds out of the woods to the villages for food. We might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zoology takes cognizance.… Why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? Is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? And does not all this amount to the track of a higher life … a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us? Where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? No other trail but such as a dog can smell? Is there none which an angel can detect and follow? None to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? Is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? Is its trail too old? Have mortals lost the scent?… Did this great snow come to reveal the track merely of some timorous hare, or of the Great Hare, whose track no hunter has seen?

Models of a modern major hospital.

Remains of the (snow) day.