The Way Sound and Meaning Interact: A Conversation with Kendall Dunkelberg https://ift.tt/bsJ4K8x
Kendall Dunkelberg’s fourth collection of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong (Fernwood Press 2025) demonstrates how the same senses we use to understand the exterior world can help us map our interior self as well. The speaker notes in the poem “Passion Flower,” “No, this is not a crucifix / but a whorl of purple fragrance,” and we are reminded not to mistake what the world is for what it looks like. Like the title suggests, Tree Fall with Birdsong is full of the music of the natural world but the birds and trees are not ornament – they’re integral to how the poems think and feel. Inside and outside, the speaker’s world is changing, even as he finds himself inseparable from the world. Readers will no doubt note the cleanness of Kendall’s lines and an affinity for the image so concentrated it’s sometimes rendered without the speaker’s “I”: “The water in this stream / makes its own poem / without words.” Across the collection’s five sections, narrative threads and experiences entangle and metaphors aren’t taken for granted as the full scope of their possibility is tested and retested.
This interview was conducted over the span of a few days via email with a shared document.
Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South, has three previous poetry collections: Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, and the textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. His poems appear in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets.
Hey Kendall! Thanks so much for agreeing to speak with me about your latest collection of poems, Tree Fall with Birdsong. To start simply, I’d love to hear how you’re feeling now that the book is out in the world. I’m already seeing readers across communities connect with it, so tell me how that’s got you feeling.
It is super exciting to be able to bring Tree Fall with Birdsong to readers. Recently, we held a book launch at Friendly City Books in Columbus, Mississippi, which was my first opportunity to read these poems aloud from the physical book, to talk about the poems, and to hear people’s reactions. It was a fabulous evening, shared with Lauren Rhoades who was on a book launch tour with her memoir Split the Baby.
I feel a lot of continuity with the poems in Tree Fall with Birdsong, even though I have moved on to new poems, too. This is in part because I dedicated the collection to my mother and in particular, wrote a cycle of poems for her that were thinking about mortality. When I wrote them, she was turning ninety. She passed away this year at the age of ninety-seven and seven months, so these poems resonate very much. She was a big supporter of the book and would always ask when it was coming out. She did get to read advance copies, including the final copy that I sent to my publisher, so though she didn’t see the physical book or even get to see the cover, which she would have loved, she did read all the poems in their final state.
That’s great to hear! It feels like such a cosmic justice that your mother got to read the finished manuscript. I’m glad you mentioned the dedication, because reading your collection I was struck by how big the act of dedicating actually is, and the sort of rigor we as writers should bring to it. I’d love to hear you talk more about that process with this collection. When you were writing those poems, did you know early on they would be such an important part ofTree Fall with Birdsong’sidentity?
I knew they would be important poems and that they picked up on threads laid down in other poems in the collection that was beginning to coalesce. I had written poems, “Spiderwort” and “Cancer Root,” for my sister when she died of breast cancer, and I had written a long poem, “Breathe,” for my father-in-law when he was going through the late stages of ALS, so I knew that mortality was going to be a big part of the collection. The section “Tree Fall” was initially two poem cycles, written about a year apart. The first concerned two fruit trees my mother lost in her yard. When our maple tree lost two big limbs and my mother was turning ninety, the loss of a tree that had defined my childhood became immanent, even as my mother’s own approaching mortality was becoming more apparent, so naturally, these poems began to explore that through the metaphor of the tree. It was a way to come to terms with it myself, but also a way to communicate to my mother that I would be okay with it when she was ready.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote the final section of the book, which looks at grief and death from a much, much wider perspective of the collective grief of everyone trying to come out of lockdown and experiencing the loss of so many from the disease. This took me to myths of the underworld, trying to imagine a way out of our collective grief.
The poems in “Tree Fall” began to feel more central, whereas in the beginning they felt like a conclusion. I also realized they needed to be read together as one series and not two separate cycles the way they were originally conceived.
I sincerely hope you facilitate a masterclass on the tree as metaphor some day. I love how sturdy the metaphor you’ve built is. The maple in particular became such a presence as I was reading, because it’s so easy to recognize across a suite of poems; every poem meditating on its timeline begins with a variation of the phrase “Of course, we believe this tree has lived forever.” The archivist in me loves that the title of the collection actually contains an earlier version of itself as a kind of revision or artifact. But the title is Tree Fall with Birdsong, so I want to ask you about the other title poem in the collection, “Birdsong.” It’s the third poem readers encounter in the collection and I’m so curious to learn the origin of that poem!
One involves the structure of the poems about the big maple tree, which do involve a fair amount of repetition. I wanted to meditate on the loss of this tree, and kept coming back to certain phrases. As much as the image of the tree itself evolves from the tree I knew, to seeds, to sapling, to stump, to an absence and a memory, so does the idea of living forever, of mortality, and of belief evolve. I don’t mean to suggest that I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote the poems, only that they represent a series of confrontations with the realities of the tree as we faced its demise. I’ve gotten interested in recursive forms such as the ghazal and the pantoum and their use of repetition and variation. There is one of each form in the final section, and I was very happy to feel I had really been able to do something with those forms when I wrote them. In “Tree Fall,” I think I was working in that direction by writing a series of poems that are linked by repetition and echoes of language and image. You might also see a connection with the sonnet crown, though with much longer poems and a looser structure.
To me, “Tree Fall” represents the theme of loss and of mortality that runs throughout the book. I knew there were poems that dealt with other themes, but how to characterize them? If “Tree Fall” is loss — that things change, life ends, meaning is lost — what could represent the opposite qualities of birth, of creation, of fullness. An early poem gave me my answer with “Birdsong.” I like the fact that there is a word for this, and that it is one word, but there is no word for a tree falling, so I left it as two words: “Tree Fall” with its extra space represents emptiness and change, while “Birdsong” with no space represents fullness and presence.
I wouldn’t expect the average reader to pick up on that from the title alone, of course. That’s a little too subtle. It’s something I did for myself or an Easter egg that someone might find. But the principle of this interconnectedness runs throughout the collection, whether that is in a spring wildflower that reminds me of my sister’s death, the interconnected patterns in “Tesselations,” the haiku, or the linked poems of “Tree Fall.” There is a kind of balance in the title that is slightly off balance, and that is exciting and fulfilling to me.
I love the slightly off balance nature of the title like you mention. To me it’s got a wonderfully Petrarchan 8/6 structure to its two components: [Tree Fall with ] [Birdsong]. C.F. Johnson has a quote about sonnet form where he states they depend on asymmetry and “in this it resembles things of organic beauty.” Even as the collection contains the traditional fixed forms you mention, letting the arc of the collection’s thinking or machinery still be organic as opposed to geometric feels really special. For the sake of getting a window into your writing practice, is there a poem in the collection you’d be willing to share the process on?
I’m glad you brought us back to the slightly off-balance symmetry of the sonnet. In my Masters thesis, I translated a book of sonnets by the Dutch Modernist Martinus Nijhoff and went down a very deep rabbit hole about how the sonnet form worked with the harmonic ratio from Pythagorean mathematics.
I’m mostly a free verse poet, who has been fascinated by form. I’ve translated sonnets and other formal verse, and I’ve studied all manner of form when teaching world literature. There is a similar asymmetrical balance to the haiku when you take into consideration that the cut, a shift in perception that is not unlike the sonnet’s volta, should come at the end of the second, or sometimes the first, line. Either way, the haiku is made up of three lines in two parts: one line and two lines, ⅓ and ⅔. When writing free verse, I don’t count lines or syllables, but I do try to listen for the way sentences and lines interact, how the thought turns and lines fold over one another to reveal layers of meaning that I can never quite predict.
Choosing one poem from a collection is a challenge, almost like choosing who is your favorite child. Let me offer up “Eurydice.” This poem follows “Orpheus,” whose myth I hope readers are familiar with. I wanted to explore the part of his story where he goes to the underworld to retrieve “Eurydice,” imagining that he almost gets so comfortable there that he stays, but ultimately returns to the living with the premonition that he will turn to look at her too soon and lose her. “Eurydice” tells the story from her perspective and is perhaps one of my most sonnet-like poems in recent years. It doesn’t have a rhyme scheme and is sixteen lines, not fourteen, but it feels to me a bit like a sonnet that can’t quite be constrained within the form.
Eurydice
They always make noise, pounding on the hard earth
above with their myriad feet, those strange creatures
you vaguely recall, like ghosts of long-lost relatives.
Yet the man who has come for you claims it is the beating
of life-bringing rain and renewal, a distant memory
of flowers and spring in the relative silence that follows,
and sounds he calls birds. His pleading, musical voice
tugs at your heartstrings, at feelings so dormant
you thought them lost if you could remember at all.
Yours is no desire, no new stirring of life, no will
of your own, and yet as if hypnotized, you follow
those bony heels and the sound of his lyre, upward
through dark passageways most only ever descend.
You warm to the journey, nearly beginning to believe,
until, abruptly, he turns, and you see one final time
his beautiful eyes, his hair and beard glowing in sun.
Sincerely, thank you for this insight into Tree Fall with Birdsong.
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