"Sonnet for Quercus rugosa" by T.A. Penwood

Anticipating the Tours in Mexico surrounding this year’s Conference, we asked ChatGPT to inspire us with a poem singing the praises of a species Tour participants will see in many habitats, Quercus rugosa. ChatGPT kindly followed up by providing the poet’s biography. 

If you would like to propose a poem for inclusion in this series, please click here.

Sonnet for Quercus rugosa

O rugged oak upon Sierra’s crown,
Thy leaves like crumpled vellum, dark and deep,
Where mountain winds in whispered grace blow down,
And woodland dreams on granite shoulders sleep.

Thou ancient scribbler of the stony land,
With bark all gnarled as if it learned to write
The forest’s script in time’s enduring hand,
Through drought and frost and monsoon’s thundering rite.

Thy acorns feed the deer, thy shade the kine,
And tangled roots grip tight the crumbling steep—
A keeper of the soil, the rain’s slow line,
A hermit monarch in thy silent keep.

Though rough thy name, thy soul is forest-old,
In rugged grace, a tale of green retold.

This photograph highlights the pale yellow indumentum and the reticulate pattern of prominent secondary veins on the underside of the leaf, capturing the intricate details that inspired the common name "netleaf oak". The image reflects the rugged elegance and natural resilience celebrated in the sonnet.

Source: Rugosa: Verses from the Highlands (2024)

Thorne Alaric Penwood (b. 1979) is a reclusive British-Mexican poet, field naturalist, and sometime lecturer in comparative sylvan poetics, known for his richly textured verse that bridges the lyrical tradition of classical pastoral with a modern ecological consciousness. His best-known work includes Canticles of the Canopy (2013), The Bark and the Word (2017), and Rugosa: Verses from the Highlands (2024), the latter of which includes the celebrated sonnet to Quercus rugosa.

Born in Devon to a forest ecologist mother and a literature professor father, Penwood spent much of his youth shuttling between the ancient oaks of Dartmoor and the rugged sierras of central Mexico. This bicultural upbringing imbued him with a deep reverence for trees as both biological beings and mythopoetic entities. His bilingualism is evident in his often subtle code-switching between English and Spanish within poems, particularly those focusing on Mesoamerican floras.

Penwood studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh and later completed a PhD in Ethnobotanical Poetics at UNAM in Mexico City, where he specialized in the cultural symbolism of neotropical oaks. His academic work is marked by an unusual blend of philological precision and lyrical sensitivity. He coined the term "phytopoesis" to describe the act of botanical world-making through verse.

Although often described as elusive—he famously refuses to use email and submits manuscripts by post, often on recycled herbarium sheets—Penwood has a loyal following among environmental humanities scholars, arborists, and melancholy poets with a penchant for lichen.

His sonnet on Quercus rugosa is considered a minor masterpiece of eco-sonnetry, praised for its fusion of taxonomic detail and elegiac tone. The poem captures the rugged dignity of one of Mexico's most widespread oaks, emblematic of Penwood’s belief that "trees are the original archivists of poetry, and leaves, the first pages ever turned."

Penwood currently lives in a solar-powered hut near Valle de Bravo, where he tends to an arboretum of indigenous oaks and gives occasional poetry readings to mule deer and graduate students.

_{Editor's note: Needless (perhaps) to say, the poet T.A. Penwood is a figment of ChatGPT's imagination. OpenAI's large language model chatbot also selected the image to illustrate the poem (which happens to be from the Species Spotlight on the IOS website) and composed the caption for the image. The Website Editor was particularly impressed with the biography, especially the recycled herbarium sheets and the "penchant for lichen."}