Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
— Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”, 1913
Do you remember driving down the Garden State Parkway years ago and there were all those ugly cellphone towers? Then a few years later there were all those ugly fake trees instead?
Well, today’s more modern fake trees have a name, and it’s clever and perfect and I think a credit to the English language. I found out about all this when I read about actor Richard Gere angering his neighbors in rural Bedford, NY by donating a piece of his land to erect a cell tower that would improve the town’s emergency vehicle response times. In a classic example of NIMBY, some of Gere’s wealthy and famous neighbors object to the tower because it would spoil their views of the Bedford countryside.
That cool new name for a fake tree is monopine. If you google “monopine”, wrapped up in double quotes just like that, you’ll see some good examples of cell towers that are not quite as ugly as they used to be.
The above lines from Trees make me think of my 7th-grade teacher Miss Barnett, who loved poetry and taught us kids how to love it too. Beyond Joyce Kilmer, she favored plainspoken, left-leaning poets like Carl Sandburg, but didn’t try to indoctrinate us, letting the words speak for themselves. She treated every one of us as though we were smart.