Resident Claims Kilmer Poem Proof

A Mahwah researcher who earlier this year founded the Joyce Kilmer Society says a book that was tucked away in a university library in Washington DC contains the answer to a century-long question about where the author’s most famous poem was written.

For the past 100 years, various locations across the country, including Mahwah, have claimed to be the birthplace, and inspiration behind “Trees.” Mahwah researcher and former reporter Alex Michelini announced in a release Friday that he found a notebook this week in the Special Collections Research Center of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University that proves that Kilmer wrote the poem in Mahwah, where he lived for five years during the early 1910’s.

Michelini said he found a frayed notebook in a collection donated to the library that contains Kilmer’s original “Trees,” as well as his handwritten original versions of 36 other poems.

“On one page of the black, frayed notebook appears the title, “Trees,” and the first two lines of the poem, and underneath are the words ‘Written February 2, 1913,’” Michelini said in a release.

“Elsewhere in the notebook is the full 12-line poem under the ‘Trees’ title.”

Also in the collection, Michelini said he found a handwritten letter from Kilmer’s widow that mentions that the poem was written in their Mahwah home.

According to Michelini, the letter - written in 1929 - reads, “The poem, I definitely remember, was written at home, in the afternoon, in the intervals of some writings. The desk was in an upstairs room, by a window looking down a wooded hill.”

According to the researcher, the notebook and piles of Kilmer’s documents were donated to the library in 2004 by Kilmer’s descendants, but had not been catalogued or organized.

The library find, Michelini said, ended his three-year search for definitive evidence of the poem’s origins.

“This is an exciting discovery because for years we have heard about the existence of the notebook, but it was surrounded by mystery because the notebook was never shown publicly and there were no known photos of it,” he said.

Michelini recently pushed for the township to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poem, and founded the Joyce Kilmer Society, which is planning a celebration of the poet and his work later this month.

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