Tree, or Metaphor?

I was flipping through some old photos of mine, and found this one, taken in Wood Buffalo Park, Alberta, a couple of years ago (I think). It reminded me of a guy named Max (not Sam, actually a guy named Max). I met Max at Ryerson, when I was taking a CE class in Publishing. I was thinking of breaking into the publishing industry, and decided this was a great way to get my feet wet, to see if it was actually a good choice for me.

Max was an intense dude from the northern frontier of the GTA, solidly suburban. He was Captain Enthusiasm, and determined to start his own publishing house. He wanted me to help. I figured I'd go along for the ride, to see where this adventure was headed. I discovered that while Max was over-gifted in energy, he was under-gifted in good judgement.

Poetry was going to be our focus; only a select handful of our friends were seriously into writing poetry, so we didn't have many submissions to work with. Given that poetry publications are very small potatoes in Canada, and that there are a ton of small presses putting stuff out there, I was of the mind that something modern, and in the style of the time (1999), was most appropriate for the first publication of a new press. I had dug up some interesting work through a friend, and attempted to convince Max of the logic of this selection.

He was unconvinced. One of his good friends had produced an epic poem along the lines of T.S.Eliot's The Wasteland. This author = not Eliot. I was actually embarassed while reading the thing. It had the tone of a poem written by a 14-year old goth kid with a crush on Trent Reznor who played D&D far too often. Max got so excited about this thing, it was crazy. Not even a high-school yearbook committee would consider the poem appropriate for publication. All I could do was extricate myself from his ill-advised choice, and the project. I haven't talked to him since.

Part of Max's enthusiasm for this poem was in his choice of book cover. He wanted to have a grainy B&W photograph of a lonely tree on a hill that he found near his place, and wanted me to take the picture. That would have been the icing on the stereotype-cliche cake; I was mentally slapping my forehead when this gem of brilliance was offered. Sigh.