This is the first of four conversations we are delighted to have with Tess Taylor - poet, gardener, and editor of Leaning Towards Light, a modern anthology of garden poetry.
Readers can get 20% their copy of Leaning Towards Light using the code GARDENWILD at checkout at The Hachette Book Group now through April 15th.
In Leaning Towards Light, the poems are presented seasonally - moving through planting and sprouting, to growing and weeding, to harvest, then winter's rest. Tess and I have agreed to meet once a season and meander through the poetry of that particular moment. We hope you enjoy our first interview, on the springtime poetry of Planting and Spouting.
Rosalie Bull: Today I am speaking with Tess Taylor about Leaning Towards Light, a modern anthology of poems about gardens and the hands that tend them. In addition to being the editor of this lovely book, Tess is herself a poet and gardener, having published five collections of poetry, including Rift Zone, The Forage House, and Work & Days, each with an ear to the heart of the living world. She has also served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR's All Things Considered for over a decade and teaches creative writing at Ashland University’s MFA program. Tess, would you please speak a bit about your intertwining vocations of gardening and…poetizing? What is the verb to poet?
Tess Taylor: Thank you for that gorgeous introduction. Well, “poem” actually comes from a Greek word which has to do with piling up - this idea of stones and making a pile of them. This fundamental base of the poem in constructing is poiesis from Greek. That play, in the the sandbox of the world, is the same thing that we do when we garden. There's never been a time in the garden that I haven't, you know, found a twig that I needed to use, or found myself rearranging some stones to frame a bed. You're kind of brushing away leaves, and maybe you're getting some hay from the backyard - it's that kind of building of the material of the world.
So: It's very true that alongside being a writer, I've been a gardener my whole life. My parents had a community garden plot in their student housing in Madison, Wisconsin when they were in graduate school and I was a child. I remember it all as a place of deep joy. Going and getting lost amid pumpkin vines and tendrils and smells and not wanting to come home. Finding every part miraculous - the seeding, the sprouting. Later in California, I ended up working at a community garden that was a template for Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard.
When I went to live in Brooklyn, I worked in a community garden there, on the site of two demolished brownstones that had been reclaimed as a community garden, the Warren Saint Marks community garden. It was just an incredible place. We grew a ton of food. I would often walk home giving away tomatoes or lettuce or something that I'd harvested that day and then still have an abundance to take to my house. One of the coolest things I learned while gardening there was that my community garden plot had 42 species of pollinators, and the surrounding city blocks had about three species of pollinator per block. So in this community garden had created this totally different, dense ecosystem that was totally unlike the rest of the city.
After that, I had a chance to work on a farm, and eventually I moved back to Berkeley. Now I'm the person who has edible plants all around their house in every direction. There's no lawn, just edible plants - and I’m looking at my plum tree right now and thinking about how each year I make plum jam. All of that happened alongside the life that I built as a writer of five books of poetry. What's cool about this anthology is that it's the first time that my poet self and my gardening self really got such permission to hang out in close space. It has harnessed all my joys.
Rosalie Bull: And it's so fun to know you now, through this book, fully as your poet and gardener self.
You mentioned in your introduction that when you came to this project, you came with a question in mind, and it's your own question, but I'd like to ask it to you now. What does it mean to garden in the early 21st century, in a deracinated, accelerating world, when the natural world is collapsing and where, despite enormous technological advances, we have not yet managed to cultivate widespread abundance, nourishment or peace?
Tess Taylor: Yeah, it's a big question. It was an animating question in thinking about gardens, what nourishment and guidance and wisdom they can give us for the challenges ahead. My friend Camille Dungey likes to say that her garden is a place that she needs to go to get the grace to do the work.
Part of the beauty of gardens is that in them we find figures for surprise, and for repair, and for noticing both that our stewardship of the world deeply matters and also that things have a life of their own and will surprise us and delight us, and that part of our work on this Earth is to be open to that surprise and delight.
I know that we're living in a world where some of the stories we're telling ourselves are truly terrifying, so terrifying, they make us numb. We don't necessarily have that flexibility and that space of growth to think what else might be possible - but gardens are also figures for possibility. They offer us new imagination of what already is and what could be with our attention and care.
One central thing about gardens: they are places where our collective diversity makes us abundant. The healthier the soil, the more the microbes. The more the microbes, the more the plants. The more the plants, the more the pollinators. The more all of this, the more the carbon sequestration of the healthy soil. So, gardens are spaces of invitation that allow us to imagine something much more possible - where we have enough food that we are able to give the food away. We're not living in a parched or starving economy, we're actually creating oases.
I think that when we think about gardens in all of this way - think about gardens as being able to build diversity; think about gardens as being able to support many kinds of species; when we think about gardens as being able to radically feed us in ways both spiritually and practically - they become such incredible figures for a reimagining of the possible–that notion of All We Can Save.
Poems are also spaces of the imagination and dense ecosystems of language; spaces that make us stop and look at beauty. Poems wish – they take the world that is and turn it just slightly to transform and wonder. We enter them and leave changed. There’s a congruence there.
Rosalie Bull: That is truly beautiful, and it makes me think about my mother and lots of gardeners that I know who don't only garden in the garden. Something really incredible about these spaces is that they are located in the physical world and they are always rooted in the real soil of experience, but they are also always kind of emanating beyond - like with the pollinators orbiting your Brooklyn garden.
I think we should cross the threshold into discussing the poems of this book with Ross Gay’s poem, “A Small, Needful Fact.” It is the only poem in the book that is presented outside of a section and it frames all the other content. In a sense it also answers that question that we were talking about earlier, about what it means to garden now in a time of particular brokenness.
Tess Taylor: What I'm thinking about in starting the book with this poem, which is such a great poem, is that it's a poem of one sentence. I'm gonna say it in one breath, and that may become important as we actually listen to the poem. And I wanted right away to let people know that we weren’t in a collection of Victorian poems that were in the public domain and were framed by doilies. I wanted people to think right away about this question: what does it mean to be a gardener and a citizen of the world, and how does a garden prepare you to be a citizen of the world? So, Ross Gay’s “A Small, Needful Fact.”
A Small, Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parks and Rec Horticultural Department, which means, perhaps, that with his very large hands, perhaps, in all likelihood, he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.
Rosalie Bull: Thank you. And thank you Ross Gay. What an incredible poem.
Something I've been thinking about recently at Garden for Wildlife is actually the title of our business - gardening for wildlife - and all of the different reasons that people garden. People garden for wildlife, people garden for nourishment and nutrition, people garden for family, for grandchildren - and people also garden for liberation, for community care, for survival even.
Could you tell me about the process of exploring different lineages of gardening from different communities, as well as different lineages of garden poetry, and bringing them together in a book that depends on and celebrates the diversity of all?
Tess Taylor: I mean, we are gardeners. Every culture has had to grow their food. Also: the poetry community is a diverse community. It's a beautifully diverse community. That's one of the joys in it.
I spoke about gardens building diversity but the arts do, too. Something important: the National Endowment for the Arts says that people with longitudinal engagements with the arts are more likely to graduate high school, more likely to be leaders in their community, more likely vote, and more likely to have friends across racial or ethnic lines. Artists are indicators of civic health. They are also pollinators of the good community and they are likely to be stewarding and having these conversations.
My own gardening experience is in a community garden where we were growing a lot of food for people who didn't have food in West Berkeley. We don't have to let anyone be hungry. We can all be nourished by growing food that is close to us. Food is not a luxury, and certainly not a luxury industry. I come from Berkeley, but the revolution is not expensive cheese. The revolution is so many plums in your yard, or garden plot, and the abundant chard, and greens and grits, and being able to share, and everyone being able to think well because they’ve eaten well. And the revolution is being able to be close to the earth and the beautiful things that are on it, and to have tenderness and intimacy with the non-human.
That was the ask and the energy that I brought to this project, but the people who responded are people for whom that is a fierce desire as well. Ross Gay, for example is a poet and a scholar of gardening and joy, and so he’s somebody I want to learn from! If you’re based in DC: Ross Gay and I are going to read at Busboys and Poets on the 22nd of March. I would be so delighted, if you love this conversation, if you would come out and see us together.
Rosalie Bull: I'll be there, no doubt about it. Just hearing you speak about this makes me so happy to be in the secret world of poets to the limited extent that I am.
I was also thinking, when you're speaking about the revolution, about a thinker that has really been a big guide for me in recent years, Bayo Akomolafe. He has a saying that was playing in my mind as you were speaking, which is, “The times are urgent, slow down.” He encourages people to respond to systemic crises by slowing down, by cultivating a relationship with the living world, by being curious about different forms of life that have been excluded from the Anthropocene. I think people can feel so lost with regard to how to grow roots and cultivate a new relationship with the Earth because we’re so deracinated as a culture. But gardening is just that, and it so deeply opens us. I’d love to carry this thought into Wendell Berry’s poem, “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer,” because it speaks so beautifully to how being a gardener makes you part of broader subjectivities.
Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer
Sowing the seed, My hand is one with the earth.
Wanting the seed to grow, My mind is one with the light.
Hoeing the crop, My hands are one with the rain.
Having cared for the plants, My mind is one with the air.
Hungry and trusting, My mind is one with the earth.
Eating the fruit, My body is one with the earth.
Tess Taylor: You know what? I wanted to read a poem about celery. One of the things that's fascinating about celery is that it will actually grow roots again from the base in a pot of water on your counter. Then you can take it out and put it in the ground and you can make your celery plant. It's so beautiful the way we have these cuttings, to know if we wanted we could save pieces of them. We could save pieces of onions that come from the store, potatoes potentially as well. It's really interesting, sometimes we get something from the store and we forget that it's alive and has a life, and that you could continue its life!
Food is our friend and companion. I learned recently that it's only been about 3,000 years since we finalized the human diet, and that actually since then we haven't added anything to it that's new from the natural world. All of the gathering that our ancestors did to find foods in the wild and bring them into our human diet was finalized about 3,000 years ago. We may process it differently. We’ve created colonial systems to trade food differently, but the actual items of food that we brought in from the wild garden into our human gardens so that we could tend them, the animals and plants on which we rely, those are very old relationships and they're very stable. They've been stable for 3,000 years at least.
If you're feeling terrified of the natural world, you can plant a tomato and know that people have been having a relationship with that plant and with that seed on this planet thousands of years one way or another. You can have faith in the travels of that seed to your hand and to your little bit of soil, faith that people behind you have had their own forms of really intelligent design - that the plant also has its own intelligent design and wants to lean in and talk to you about how to be a plant. We really do need to break through our intimidation and towards our joy. But anyways, “What Regenerates in a Household” by Laura Villarreal…
What Regenerates in a Household?
The base of a store-bought celery can grow more celery with enough water. In the plush light of our apartment window,
growth comes when no one is watching. It sprouts stalk & lace leaves while we are at your brother's wedding
in a place where palm trees aren't native but symbolic. Like you, I fumble in our kitchen drawers for the easy metaphor.
Liken a regenerating plant to myself. Cut cheese for crackers before dinner. You are hungry
wanting to know how to write about daily life. I tell you writing about sadness is easy. Joy comes
in explosions. I learn something new every day to break the line between repetition. It's so easy
finding wonder in the dust lining of baseboards when I zoom in. I find a single hair, long and mine.
You call them recuerdos when I apologize, ways to find me in our home when I'm not around.
What regenerates in a household is not as miraculous as celery, it doesn't grow unwatched either. But feels like a miracle anyways.
Tess Taylor: I put that one in partly because I wanted to remind people you can do a little gardening wherever you are. There are some poems in this book that are just to houseplants even. A houseplant is a beginning. It's an intention. It's a relationship. It's a tenderness. There's a beautiful poem by Andy Eaton where he has a tree on the deck of his house and that makes him long to go towards the ground. So, there's that too. I wanted poems that made us feel our longing a little bit.
Rosalie Bull: As the mother of only a snake plant I really appreciate that - to find a space for myself within this gardening book. I love this poem so much. Growth is so mysterious. As Laura says, growth happens when no one is watching, but growth never goes unwatched. Native plants will sleep, creep and then leap - so at the beginning they'll do all this growing that doesn't look like growing, because the growth is underground. We often have to explain to our customers that their plant may not look like it is growing, it may not even look alive in the winter, but it is very much alive underneath the soil. Alive in all these ways we can’t detect - alive to the cycles of the sun, and the moon, and the seasons, and the water - and very much capable of growth.
I think we are living through this moment of misalignment between our institutions and the human heart, between the speed of our world and the needs of the earth, and we are wondering whether or not our culture will develop the maturity needed to respond to the biodiversity and climate crisis. That is such a deep source of fear and grief for so many of us, because it's an unknowable equation. It's not unlike the farmer worrying over his harvest of corn, looking up at the sky and not seeing a cloud for months on end. Laura’s lines on growth, clandestine and fretted-over growth, really opened up for me how much of an act of faith gardening is - especially when thinking more broadly about gardening for wildlife, gardening for a living future. So I’d just like to close off this conversation by asking you to speak about the faith of the gardener and the promise of the garden - both in an individual's relationship with their plot of land and then more broadly as a culture facing crisis.
Tess Taylor: I'll say a few things, and then we can close with a really short poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. As we think in California about how to bring back salmon, or regrow the kelp forests, or manage entire hillsides so that we're using fire differently, and managing waterways differently, we have to get collective buy-in from people to share the responsibility of managing land together. That's not that different from gardening in a way, getting people to figure out how to manage our future. There's so many ways that we have to steward the land, the future and care for own little places. Trying to think about what is the right relationship between those is a life’s work, and also, as urgent as it is, and also the work that we leave to the future. Anyway, you and I are going to talk more, so I'll just leave us with a Planting and Sprouting poem. Thank you so much for having me.
Three Sunflower Seeds
Before I push the dark seeds into the dirt preparing the dirt
Waiting for a beginning roomfuls of gold.
Patience. I say to the empty vase, my heart.
Rosalie Bull: What a beautiful way to end this conversation. Thank you Rosemary and thank you Tess. Thank you so much. I really, deeply appreciate having the chance to speak with you today. It's been really exciting for me, and I look forward to carrying on this conversation as seasons turn.
Tess Taylor: Lovely to be here today. Have a beautiful spring.
Readers can get 20% their copy of Leaning Towards Light using the code GARDENWILD at checkout at The Hachette Book Group now through April 15th.
If you're in the DC area, come see Tess Taylor and Ross Gay read from Leaning Towards Light at Bus Boys and Poets on Friday, March 22.