>> Rob Casper: Thanks everyone
for being here
and celebrating poetry and gardening
in the closing session of this stage.
Thank you to all of
our wonderful poets.
We'll start with Tess talking
about the anthology and
reading a bit from the anthology,
and then we'll have
all three poets read their work,
but also selections
from the anthology, too.
And then we'll have a discussion.
So, Tess, please take it away.
>> Tess Taylor: So first of all,
it is apparently the best weather
it ever is in Washington, D.C.
[Laughter]
And so I want to thank you for
being inside a convention center
to think about gardening.
I wanted to read at Rob's
introduction, at Rob's invitation,
the introduction to this anthology.
Should I say it at the podium?
Or should I sit? What's better?
>> Rob Casper:
Whatever you want.
>> Tess Taylor: Okay, I'm just going
to sit because it's been a long day
and this essay that goes along
with this kind of gorgeous
illustration, which I did not produce.
It's called Gardening in Public.
Um, and it's it's a way of
describing a little bit about
how this anthology came to be.
"During the worst months of the
Covid 19 pandemic, when I'd
suffered several losses and
felt raw and isolated.
I spent a great deal of time in
our garden. At our bungalow,
where the light in the front is best.
This meant spending hours in our
postage stamp sized front yard.
I renewed beds,
fertilized fruit trees and
reclaimed the sunny, unused
concrete driveway for planters
of favas poll beans and tomatillos.
The labor steadied me and had
an additional benefit.
As I worked, I often fell into
conversation with passers by.
I was grateful to be growing
both kale and community,
and in a difficult time, I tended the
garden and the garden tended me back.
It isn't the first time
a garden has renewed me.
As a teenager who struggled with
disordered eating, seasons planting,
sowing and harvesting helped
me understand how both
the earth and I deserve and
need wise and gentle care.
After that time, I found a way
to garden pretty much everywhere
I went. I led a teen gardening
program at a youth center in
Berkeley, worked to build a
community garden in a formerly
vacant lot in Brooklyn, and worked
on a small farm in the Berkshires.
Each season rewarded me with
birdsong, soil craft and friendship.
I saw how gardens help us nourish
both the soil and one another.
Gardeners are, by their nature,
people who believe
in regeneration.
As the poet Laura
Villarreal points out,
they understand that the broken
world we inherit can also be
amended with compost,
worms and steady tending.
And they have seen that the
tended earth in turn, offers up
radical abundance not only
of food, but of insects, birds,
rhizomes and soil.
The garden surprises
us in unexpected ways.
Oregano Winter's over, Wild
miner's lettuce Spring's back,
a volunteer pumpkin luxuriates
near the compost bin.
And then suddenly met
with this abundance.
We beg people to come
harvest our plums.
We befriend a plot of Earth,
and it befriends us in return
and by some powerful force,
this friendship brings us into
a fuller, more just communion
with the human and
the non-human at once.
Of course, any garden plot is
small compared to the brokenness
of the wider world that can
seem beyond mending.
We live in a divided society.
We live inside climate change,
ecosystem loss, mass extinction,
and racial violence in a global
community gripped by famine,
hunger and war.
And the heaviest days are excruciating.
But sometimes, in the face of
this huge pain, the things of
the earth, hummingbird and
mockingbird, snail and earthworm
can help reroute any of us
toward faciation, and they can
reconnect us for just a moment with
the life energy that we need to go on.
Gardens also can remind us that
repair need not be so far off,
in daily ways, we can each build
our lives towards greater
diversity and abundance.
Nobody needs to be hungry.
When we work the right way,
everyone can be fed.
My life outside being a
gardener is being a poet.
When I was asked to craft an
anthology of new gardening
poems, my heart leapt in delight.
Poems and gardens share congruence.
Gardens distill nature, helping
us to see how to live inside
what we must wisely steward.
Poems distill language,
creating sculptural spaces that
illuminate the world around us,
allowing us to savour the
language through which
anything can be known.
Poems and gardens both sculpt
what the poet John Keats called
slow time, building up sites
from which we might apprehend
and savor our wider life.
And poems and gardens also
remind us, in the words of the
poet Gwendolyn Brooks, that
we are each other's harvest.
We are each other's business.
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
In gardens and poems,
we find figures for grief and
surprise, loss and regeneration.
Gardens and poems each
help us dwell and abide."
So that was kind of how this happened.
And on the day when a friend of
mine who'd known me on that farm
in the Berkshires, called me
and said, I have a project
I think you might like.
She'd conveniently become an
editor at this press.
[Laughter]
I took her phone call with dirt
under my fingernails, and I was
ready to imagine a gardening
anthology that celebrated, on a
deep level, our hunger for
repair and our hunger for
diversity, and the fact that,
we want poems that speak to
our need to touch and
feel and tend the earth now
even in this moment of climate
change and even in this
moment when we could
theoretically get everything
we need from a grocery store.
In theory, maybe.
So the book was born and
I didn't do an open call.
I just slowly wrote to people
that I thought would be wise and
read a lot of books of
gardening poetry and assembled
and assembled.
I do live in the Bay Area of
California, and it turns out
that a lot of the poets
there also are gardeners.
So I have to admit there is
a little cheating that way.
But many poems came to me
and I arranged them, and
this is the first. I'm going to
read this, and I think that
other people will read their
poems, and I'll read a few poems
and then we'll talk with Rob.
But...
Here we go.
This poem is by Ross Gay.
It's one sentence, which is a
unit of breath that may become
useful to know that.
And the title just rolls into the poem.
So this is called A Small Needful fact.
Thank you, Rob.
Thank you, Forrest.
Thank you, Ruben.
It's been an ecosystem building
experience, this anthology.
Wonderful people.
Ross Gay.
"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 and feed small
and necessary creatures like a
being pleasant to touch and
smell like converting sunlight
into food, like making it
easier for us to breathe."
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Ruben Quesada: Oh, sure.
So I'll read my contribution.
And I feel really lucky to
be part of this.
My mother was a gardener, and.
And so this poem is called,
My Mother Is a Garden.
"In the backyard,
my mother plants strands of
razzleberry fringe flowers.
Next door, the chartreuse
golden feather farewell.
Before I am born,
my mother is acquired
by the United States.
Coerced by some American zodiac
dream, she fled to Los Angeles.
And decades later, she still
withholds from speaking English.
And only the fertile names
of flowers have taken root.
She is luminous.
Her hair a blackish grey
against the philodendron,
long and parted in the center.
I lose her in the shade of
overgrown impatiens, hanging
onto the hillside behind the house.
The horizon waves in lines
of barberry and nettles.
Silver waves of wild deer grass.
I have not spoken to
my mother in years.
Today, I surprise her with a visit.
And in the windows glow,
I watch her work.
I have taken the shape of her hips."
[Applause]
Sure.
I'd like to read another poem.
And this his poem is by
Jacqueline Kolosov, who
surprisingly happens to be
my dissertation director.
[Laughing]
And this is about her pregnancy.
And this was about the time
that I actually met her.
And this is called quickening.
20 Weeks and Two Days is the epigraph.
"Amid the camaraderie of
starlings, morning ripens along
with the tomatoes on the vine.
A single twist at the stem and
summer falls into my hands.
Another garden's perfume of lemon
balm and sage between my fingertips.
My mother's kerchiefed face.
August ripens.
Tornadoes lavishing beside
Carranza's fairy tale orbs.
Always the robins and the sparrows
picnicked on the fattest
of the translucent fruit.
My mother, with sandy
cup fulls of sugar
simmered into jam,
I spread on toast.
Sitting barefoot and caramel kneed
beneath the patio's canopy of sun.
Butt tomatoes, we always
ate fresh and whole.
For weeks now, you and I have
been eating tomatoes as if the
harvests bounty will never cease.
My breasts, too, are tomato heavy.
The bowl of my belly dense
with the curve that will only
continue to deepen in the months ahead.
Lingering in bed this morning,
I lay my hands along the rise.
Palms and fingertips
listening for our daughter.
Quickening, the doctor called it.
The desire for the coming child.
Imagine, next August, we will
carry our daughter into the garden.
We will hold the fruit to her face.
We will teach her tomatoes."
[Applause]
I'd like to finish with a new poem
that's in my
forthcoming collection.
And this is called A New.
"Weave the elegance of hoary grass.
The magnolias grace, the
stamina of ocean and sky.
We sprout like sunflowers into
the air. Our lungs branching like
wild oaks or the deepening
fissure within glaciers.
Forgive the slug and the snail
for their patient attack.
They too must eat.
The radiation of life is constant,
and we all must submit
to its silent, unseen influence.
We grow old because we are old
as the sunflower that grows old
because it too must die.
There was a time
before and time after."
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Forrest Gander: Yeah.
Just listening to Ruben's poem,
thinking that a poem
can be a garden of sound.
And this lovely anthology
that Tess has put together,
she's seeded with such a wide
variety, aesthetically and every
kind of diversity of poems
and poets that it's really
fulfilling. It's like you can
find anything you want in this
garden of an anthology.
I'm going to read a
poem by C.D. Wright,
and if you don't know
her, you should.
She's certainly among the most
extraordinary and influential
poets of her and my generation.
And it's called Song of the Gourd.
[Inaudible]
>> Forrest Gander:
No. It's okay. You can join in too.
"In gardening, I continued
to sit on my side of the car
to drive whenever possible at
the usual level of distraction.
In gardening, I shat nails,
glass, contaminated dirt and
threw up on the new shoots.
In gardening, I learned to
praise things I had dreaded.
I pushed the hair out of my face.
I felt less responsible
for one man's death.
One woman's long term isolation.
My bones softened.
In gardening, I lost nickels
and ring settings.
I uncovered buttons and marbles.
I lay half the worm aside
and sort the rest.
I sort myself in the bucket and
wondered why I came into being
in the first place.
In gardening, I turned away
from the television and went
around smelling of offal, the
inedible parts of the chicken.
In gardening, I said excelsior.
In gardening, I required no company.
I had to forgive my own failure
to perceive how things were
between them since I was not
privileged. I went out bare legged
at dusk and dug and dug
and dug for a better understanding.
I hit rock, my ovaries softened.
In gardening, I was protean.
As in no other realm before or
since. I longed to torch my old
belongings and belch a little
flame of satisfaction.
In gardening, I longed to stroll
farther into soundlessness.
I could almost forget what happened
many swift years ago in Arkansas.
I felt like a god from down
under, chthonian. In gardening,
I thought this is it, body and soul.
I am home at last.
Excelsior praised the grass.
In gardening, I fled the
fold that supported the war.
Only in gardening
could I stop shrieking.
Stop! Stop the slaughter!
Only in gardening could I press
my ear to the ground
to hear my soul let
out an unyielding noise.
My lines softened.
I turned the water onto
the joy filled boy child.
Only in gardening did
I feel fit to partake
to go on trembling in the last light.
I confess the abject urge
to weed your beds
while the bittersweet
overwhelmed my daylilies.
I summoned the courage to grin.
I climbed the hill with my
bucket and slept like a dipper.
In the cool of your body,
besotted with growth.
Infected by green."
And I'm sorry. I'm--
Her work moves me so deeply.
This is a little poem by
Federico Garcia Lorca who you
all know is called Augusto.
And it's short, so I'll
read it in Spanish first.
[Speaking in Spanish]
And this translation is by the
wonderful poet James Wright.
August.
"The opposing of Peach and sugar
and the sun inside the afternoon.
Like the stone inside a fruit.
The ear of corn keeps its laughter
intact, yellow and firm.
August. The little boys eat
brown bread and delicious moon."
And I'll finish with a poem
from my own forthcoming book,
which is called Mojave Ghost.
"Stripped down.
What is there really between us?
Is there now?
Bees thrum in your eyes.
When the thumb is tucked to sleep,
the fingers open. The goal
was never knowledge, but
attentiveness. Take the horned
green head of this one eyed
sphinx caterpillar plucked from
a leaf of my tomato plant,
for instance, or the piston driven
respiration of these oak trees,
or even the shape of my body, is a
response to the world's importunity.
And how can I be separated out?
Am I ever just this?
Don't I continually outdo myself?"
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Tess Taylor: What I really love,
first of all, about making this
anthology was the chance to
build an ecosystem of
conversation among
contemporary poets and
both Ruben and Forrest have
been so kind to read poems of
their own and someone else's
from the anthology, and then
a poem that's not in the
anthology but is plant adjacent.
We can talk about that in a minute.
I'm going to do the same.
I'm going to read a poem, not
by me, a poem by me, both of
which are in the anthology, and
then a new poem, um, which is
not only plant adjacent,
but full throatedly to a plant.
You know, this book came
out about a year ago,
a little less than a year ago.
It's coming up on its year
anniversary, and it's been
so amazing to travel around with it.
I have met gardeners, and I've
gone to a seminary at Princeton
where you can get a full school
theological education while
working on a farm, which means
that you turn the compost and
then discuss the book of job.
I have met community gardeners
of all stripes, and it's really
been one of those experiences
where this book has brought me
closer to people I just love meeting.
Like, I feel like the book has
been an ambassador to the
hopeful people of the of this time.
And so there's been a lot of events.
And at one of them, somebody
asked maybe 12 poets were
reading from the book.
What line in the book
had moved them the most?
And so people have been reading from
this book and sharing poems a bit.
And this poem by the
Palestinian-American poet
Naomi Shihab Nye came up.
And, um, it felt as if quickly
in the way that a joyful
consensus can happen in a room
that people felt that this poem
had been moving them deeply all year.
So I'm going to read
this poem by Naomi.
If you don't know her work, you should.
She's also a poet, a really
skilled poet for children.
She's been an ambassador
for children's poetry.
But this is just one of
her many wonderful poems
for people of all ages.
And it's called Palestine Vine.
"Seeds wrapped tenderly in plastic.
One package said white, one red.
Hand-lettered, mailed
by friends I never met.
They grew instantly, strangely
confining themselves to
one corner of the metal container,
as if a metaphor.
I swear I planted them all over.
Leafy vines popped forth glory
and green lengthening overnight.
I didn't notice one had twined
around the rungs of the table.
Today moving the pot, the
biggest vine ripped out.
Broke off.
No. How could I have missed the
simple wrapping of the tendril
suggesting happiness
in that exact light?
Its roots remain a broken stem.
I wasn't evil, but I wasn't careful.
This is what happens in the world.
Now soaking the snipped vine in
a glass of water, feeling the hope
and weight of so many years."
I wasn't evil, but I wasn't careful.
Somehow that was a line that
people reading the book the
whole year kept with them.
As if care could be
the opposite of evil.
It's not that the opposite
of evil is good.
The opposite of evil would be care.
So y'all are southern
proximate enough
to know what to do with a green tomato.
I believe. This is the place
where, when I get this close to
the Mason-Dixon line, I order
pimento cheese because
they don't make it
very well in California.
Where I live in California,
there's a burst of heat that
takes us through November.
But right then we get late
October, we get green tomatoes.
And the other thing that you
may know, and I may not need to
explain this to you.
The other thing that we get
in late October is fire.
So this is my poem in the anthology
and it's called Green Tomatoes
in Fire Season.
"There is smoke in the air
when I go pick them.
I go despite panic also
because inside I'll make chutney.
For an hour or so, I unlatch them.
It is late fall.
They will not ripen.
Firm pale green skins
fine coated in ash.
Our fire season goes all autumn now.
Though, today's fire is
not yet near to us.
But the green tomatoes,
I love their pale lobes.
Tonight, God willing, we will
fry some with cornmeal and fish
inside the air purifier words.
I will boil them with molasses
and raisin, jar them for friends
and for the winter. Disaster,
we say meaning bad star.
These are good green stars.
This is also their season.
Mask on.
I bend and bend to the vine.
I bend and salvage what I can."
Who here grows collard greens?
Nobody. Oh thank you.
They're very easy.
They're like the most forgiving plant.
I would suggest it.
You can do it in a pot on your porch.
Anyway, in the midst of writing
all these food poems and editing
food poems, I found that I was
also writing more food poems,
and a lot of times
they came out as odes.
So I'm just going to read this
new poem, which is an ode to the
collard green, Brassica Oleracea.
Collard Ode.
"Leathery. Bitter to taste.
The one in my garden is tree collard
and towers half wilding to vine.
How many hands carried
a cutting or seed with what
little they had, and rooted and
tended and made it keep living.
Mine makes me keep living too.
Gives till November, then
veined purple leaves bleed again
in spring rain.
Buy soup.
Leaf by leaf.
My grandmother simmered
hers down with pork fat,
vinegar, mustard.
But hell.
They'll be delicious with
what you have to hand.
Your last clove of garlic,
your last drip of broth
On the stock or the ice box,
they are patient. They last.
They stay tough until
you turn them tender.
Tell me, do you know someone like that?
You bring salt.
They bring the iron they
drank from the earth."
[Applause]
>> Rob Casper: Well, thanks so
much to all three of you.
And Tess, thanks so much for,
uh, giving us the opportunity to
talk about this anthology. I did
ask Tess to begin with that
introduction, and I want to use
it as the basis for my first question
to Ruben and to Forrest,
and I'm not going to be able to resist.
I think the use of a gardening
metaphor or plant metaphor.
I'm curious how your lives
as poets intertwined with
your lives as gardeners.
Do you think of
yourselves as gardeners?
How does that work?
>> Ruben Quesada: I think that
my mother was a gardener, and, um,
she taught me the value and showed
me the beauty of what a garden
could manifest. And, uh,
I have tried. I have tried.
[Laughing]
Um, you know, the closest thing
that I think the most
successful thing that I've grown,
when I was a kid, I
grew a lot of sunflowers.
And now as an adult, I think
I'm deathly allergic to sunflowers.
>> Rob Casper: Wow. Does that
say something about
growing up that, you know, only
poetry can really encapsulate?
>> Ruben Quesada: I think so,
I mean, this is probably the
closest I'll probably be able
to get to those again.
But, you know, I've tried I've
tried growing orchids at home.
Every year I get a new orchid,
and, uh, those have lasted,
so I have a handful
of orchids that
return every year.
And, um, you know, I teach
online, and I had a student once
see the orchid behind
my shoulder before it had
rebloomed. And the student said,
you know, you should just
put an ice cube into the pot
because I was concerned about
not watering it enough.
And she said, you just put just
put an ice cube into the into
the pot and that'll be enough.
I don't know if that's true because.
Is it?
>> Forrest Gander: Yeah.
>> Ruben Quesada: Yeah, I
don't have a green thumb,
but I write a lot about
gardening and about plants.
And I think that's just my
mother's influence.
>> Rob Casper:
Forrest, what about you?
>> Forrest Gander:
It's interesting.
Our mothers, you know. My mother,
I grew up just south of here
in Annandale, Virginia.
And my mother had a big, a big
backyard and she was a gardener,
serious gardener.
And I was often enslaved
into working for her and
replanting the forsythia
or the azaleas or whatever.
But then I married a woman who
also loved to garden, feed you right.
And I ended up keeping an orchard
in Rhode Island where we moved.
And now I find that I'm a
serious gardener out in California.
And I live in an
unincorporated town in a
very rural place where my
neighbors are mostly wild
turkeys and bobcat, and
there's a mountain lion.
And I garden, and it's this
constant gentle war between
me and the gophers.
[Laughter]
And I've tried to accommodate
them because they're
part of the earth, too.
They do oxygenate the Earth,
even while they're eating
all the roots of my plants.
[Laughing]
But I do a lot of gardening.
One of my favorite poems is by a
New Jersey poet named William Bronk,
and he describes his father as an
old man who has stomach cancer.
And he spends all his time
in the garden.
And son, the poet asks him,
you know why he's doing that?
And because he can't eat
anything, he can't eat anything
that he gardens.
And he says, I just
love to see it grow.
>> Rob Casper: Well, I was thinking
a lot in reading through the anthology
about poems of gardening in
connection to poems of nature.
Our current poet laureate,
Ada Limon, who does feature
prominently in the anthology, has
undertaken the signature project,
"You Are Here: Poetry
in the Natural World"
And it's one thing to talk about
the beauty and wonder of
nature in the kind of
canonical, traditional way.
But gardening is a
different kind of talking
about it as a gardener, or in a
kind of gardening adjacent way
offers something
different a little bit.
And I wonder if you could talk
about the difference between
gardening poetry and
nature poetry writ large?
>> Tess Taylor: Well, I think it's
interesting because there's a place
that they blend. And in California,
one of the things that we're
realizing is that the native
people were stewards of the land
in terms of its fire and in
terms of its stream life, and
that they lived partly on the
coast and wandered up following
Salmon and game into the
mountains, probably also
following water,
which is unpredictable.
And spent summer in the
mountains and burned their way
down, also cultivating the
edges of the streams.
I mean, there's this really
fine line between wilderness and
stewardship, and I don't think
we always understand it in this
country. And then there's
something in gardening, which
is the opposite thing, which is
really carefully, carefully,
carefully, carefully
bringing in plants.
And then something totally
different happens, which is
a wildness that, um, you know,
I put this throwaway plant
I didn't really understand in a
corner where nothing grew, and
now I have this absurdly big
groundcherry that my husband
calls Audrey because it looks
like it's going to take over
the house. And then, you know,
in the same place where the
tomatoes were great last year.
They didn't do well this year.
And there's, you know but this
shiso plant I thought was dead
came back ten of them.
It seemed to be dead for a year.
And then now there's abundance.
And I think there's this
kind of balance between
the idea that things are,
that we will things and that
there's something beyond our
willing and that we steward things
and there's something that we
that we can participate in.
And I think that's also in the
life of creativity and
the life of life, you know, so it's
a great activity because it sort of
models other mysterious forces for you.
>> Ruben Quesada: As you were as
you were talking about that,
you know, I was thinking about the way
in which I'm terrible at gardening, but
how every plant is like
a different language.
And, you know, my plant
language is quite limited and so
I'm not sure how to communicate
with it to make them grow.
As you were talking
about the, the tomatoes
that grew well in one
place and not in another,
it just made me think about the
way in which, um, I've attempted
to do similar things with
plants, thinking all I needed to
do was give it a little bit of
sun, a little bit of water, but
sometimes it's so much more.
You have to take so much more care
with what it is you're trying to grow.
And it reminds me of
revising a poem and the way in
which you have to, you have to
know where to put certain things.
>> Tess Taylor: Or sometimes you
want something and you get something
totally different.
>> Rob Casper: Yeah.
>> Ruben Quesada:
Yeah, absolutely.
>> Rob Casper: Yeah. I was thinking
just about the contained space
of a garden and the obsessive and
intimate work of tending a garden,
and that sense of not being able
to actually control what's there,
but having this deeply, deeply
powerful personal stake in it,
you know, the hours of sweat,
the dirt in the fingernails and
how much that is like the
activity of creating a poem and
how poems can work and how you
don't know what a poem might be,
might bring you, and how
it can change in ways that are
that reveal the beauty of uncertainty.
And it require a kind
of faith, I think.
>> Tess Taylor: And how nature
and language are both really large
abstract forces, and we need small
spaces in which to apprehend and
savor them.
And I think that's partly what
poetry and gardens have in
common, that they allow us
space to notice these large
forces that are running through
our lives and in the case of
both poetry and language,
we participate in
but which will outlive us?
>> Forrest Gander: It's easy to see
how we've fallen into this, the most
exigent human crisis that
history records for us in this
ecological crisis that we're in
now, that it comes from a sense
of viewing the Earth as purely
something that we extract things
from and that we use and
that we're at the top of some
hierarchical chain where
everything is made to serve us.
And I think that if instead of,
I think, that contact with the
earth and the knowledge that
food comes from the earth, and
that we come from the earth,
and that the nematodes and the
bacteria in the earth are also in us.
They're behind her knee right now.
[Laughing]
>> Tess Taylor: There
is not a nematode there.
>> Forrest Gander: Not a nematode,
but there's bacteria
all over us, and there are
parasites running through our
stomach helping digest our
food.
And the notion that we're even a
singular species is an artificial one.
We are literally part of the earth.
And until we recognize that,
well, not recognizing that we've
gotten ourselves into this
horrific ecological crisis.
And I think that poets can,
you know, scientists have been
telling us this
for a really long time.
Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring,
you know, when I was a kid.
But the language of science
isn't always persuasive
emotionally, and I think that's
where poetry can come to play
a part that poetry can remind
us and give us a language for,
um, for the nuances of the
feelings of connection we have
to the earth and to each other.
>> Rob Casper: Speaking of food, I did
want to talk about the choice you made
in this anthology of including
prose pieces and recipes.
Tell us about that.
>> Tess Taylor: Okay. I want
to make a humble confession.
You know, I built this anthology.
I found the poems, I ordered
them, and the publisher liked
them, and that was cool.
And then they were like, we're
going to do hardcover and ribbon
bookmark and these
beautiful illustrations.
And I was like, wow, you must
like, awesome.
Like, how wonderful is that?
Oops. I'm sorry. I
don't mean to hit the--
So there's these sections and the
sections move through the year.
They're not just the
four normal seasons.
There's planting and sprouting,
weeding and wilding,
growing and tending, being and
waiting and then a season for
grieving and release, harvest and
feeding, wintering and turning again.
So in the book, there ended up
being seasons for reverie and grief,
which are also things I think
we go to gardens for.
So now I have this book, and
they start to punctuate it with
these gorgeous illustrations.
And one day my editor calls me
and she says, what about some
meditations with recipes
from the poets?
And I really, like
freaked out a little bit.
And I had this, like, mean,
serious martini drinking,
cigarette smoking Harvard critic
on my shoulder who was like,
the book is not serious
if it contains recipes.
And I had to, like, tell
that person to shut up.
And then I commissioned recipes
from Jane Hirshfield and Ellen Bass
and a wonderful Santa Cruz
poet named Danusia Lamorisse.
Um, you can make Jane
Hirshfield's fava beans.
And it turned out to be everybody's
favorite thing, including mine.
And one thing that was
fascinating was that a friend of
mine who got the book early was
reading it, and she was like,
I got to the recipe,
and it just felt like
the recipe was another kind of poem.
Another kind of like
tactile folk wisdom.
And of course, when we are
assembling a poem in our mind,
we might just have a few
things rattling around.
You know, the way that deer
looked, the sunset, the grief
about my sister, and suddenly this kind
of mash of language starts to form.
But it's not that different a
feeling than when we go to the
farmers market or even the
refrigerator and say, oh, okay,
well, I have garlic and
parmesan cheese and this much,
you know, kale and the little
red pepper flakes and lemon, and
suddenly you've got a meal.
And the meal is this kind of
assembly and that feeling that
art is this kind of creation of
the moment, of what's possible
in a season and a day.
I love that, um, and I was also
really grateful that the poets
I was working with had great recipes.
There's a really good one
for like oregano pasta.
I would, I would say like, you can cook
your way through this book of poems.
Did you know that you could
cook fava beans on the grill?
And Danusia Lamorisse, who
had written poems about grief
and has lost a child,
wrote a poem about--
Well, it wasn't a poem.
That's the point.
It was a meditation and a recipe.
She wrote a poem about
grieving, but she also wrote a
meditation on a recipe about grieving.
>> Rob Casper: Right.
>> Tess Taylor: You didn't
want me to read that, did you?
>> Rob Casper:
Go for it.
Grief. Why don't you read that--
Read the prose bit,
and then maybe--
>> Tess Taylor:
Maybe that poem.
>> Rob Casper: Forrest,
would you read the poem?
>> Tess Taylor: Would
you read the poem, one on 106?
Working In the Garden.
Grief and Sustenance.
"Why do we grieve in gardens?
The psychotherapist and former
monk Thomas Moore once suggested
that we each consider planting
a garden to Saturn,
the designated place to hold
our melancholy and grief.
I'm not sure what I would put
in mine, but I imagine it to be
mossy and secluded.
And come to think of it, I did
keep a small corner of a garden
at my former home to go
to when I needed to cry.
It was fairly unadorned, just a
pink camellia shrub against a
house and a stone lion's head which
hung from the tall wooden fence.
No one could see me there.
I could address my woes to the
lion, which stared on, impassive
and detached as I wished
I could have been.
I was a mother of a child who
would never walk or talk or speak.
A trinity of omissions that
felt back then almost unbearable.
And worse, he would not live long.
I buried his placenta under
a lemon tree in the backyard.
I watered too many hopes
for him. My only child.
And now, in some ways, his
memory waters me, grows me into
the unexpected self I keep becoming."
And then she tells us about
roasted root vegetables
and how to make them. And I'm not
going to read that part, but Ruben is
going to read the next poem.
>> Ruben Quesada: Sure.
It's titled, Working in the Garden.
"I think of my son, who is nothing
now but a few fistfuls of ash.
Not even that, since ash
dissolves and is taken into the
bodies of plants, or swept
into the air on the wind.
He's so very fine.
He slips undetected through
a whale's baleen or a beadle's gullet.
He can even rise through
a stalk of grass with
the upward pull of phlegm in
these first green days of spring.
He has no use now for the
soft black hair through
which I would run a slender comb,
nor for his oddly shaped thumbs,
nor anything in the in this world.
Though the things of the
world may have use of him,
his molecules filtering through them.
Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, a
whisper of hydrogen, the modest
building blocks of life quietly
and without announcement."
>> Tess Taylor: And I think, there's
something that happened when I
got this poem from Denisha.
I was collecting poems from
everyone, and I was dividing
them along the season of the
year that they belonged in.
Like, was it cherry season or
was it, you know, zucchini season?
And then I realized that
we do actually go to grieve
in gardens because gardens
enact transformation for us and
because they are enacting on
a different scale some of the
transformations that we
ourselves will go through.
And some of those are real and
some of those are metaphorical.
And so I got this poem and I
realized there's a whole section
for grieving, which of course,
we've been doing a lot of
even if there's joy on the news.
So, yeah, that's kind of
how that happened.
>> Rob Casper: Yeah. It also made
me think of listening to that poem,
the way in which poems are so
much about time, or so much about
breath, the experience
of a poem in time.
But they're about
that kind of slow time.
They speak almost outside of time.
And I feel like, yeah,
gardening is an act of very
direct engagement.
But for something that's far
larger and takes far longer than
we might even be able to
imagine, and that made me
appreciate what the poem and
what the place of the poem
here in the garden that
Denisha is talking about.
>> Tess Taylor:
We agreed to wait in the garden.
We really agreed to wait.
And in our lives these days,
we often have forgotten that we
should wait for anything.
You know, I mean,
we just kind of--
It's like point and click, you
know, and with a garden,
you agree to be uncertain and you agree
to wait and you agree to take time.
Absolutely. And time even
beyond your time, perhaps.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Rob Casper: The other poem that I
really loved, connected to a recipe was
January O'Neill's poem.
Where is that?
>> Tess Taylor:
It's in the Winter.
>> Rob Casper: It's
wintering and turning again.
Because it reminded me of
how, you know, plants are
uncontrollable. And I love that
she talks about basically
that she wasn't really a gardener
and that her ex-husband
was the gardener and that she
didn't want a garden after he left.
But there was this wild
oregano that kept on growing,
and sort of leads to her
giving a recipe,
lemon herb pasta with,
you know, a one quarter cup
freshly chopped herbs, which I'm
presuming she means from the
garden that you can't control.
And then she has this
beautiful poem too.
What page is that on?
I should have marked
it. About wild oregano.
Actually, I'm going to read this poem.
It's been a long time since I had a
chance to read while I'm on a stage.
>> Tess Taylor: Go for it.
>> Rob Casper:
Yes. Thank you.
Wild Oregano.
"Winter with its sky,
the color of ash,
and a fresh dusting of snow on
the windshields of New England.
And all I can think of is the
oregano we planted years ago
in our shitty garden.
It comes back year after year, now,
deeper and deeper into the lawn,
while my neighbor's lawn beyond
fences, through a cracked driveway
grows greener than clover with
a scent that reeks of summer.
Like an anarchist, the oregano
does its own thing.
Self-willed and tenacious.
Intense and free.
There is something in this grass
worth saving, I think to myself.
This one plant wrecking crew
encroaching on clover territory
in a shimmering wave of
language of green speak.
Manifest destiny of the suburban world.
How strange it feels?
Tending a happiness beyond memory.
In the cold, hard soil of January."
And what we haven't talked
about that this poem reminds me
of, is just all the ways in which these
poets are using the tools of poetry.
Like that last three line stanza
tercet ending with a rhyme.
And then, you know, talking
about January, which was of course,
not only a month, but
the name of the poet.
I thought a lot about, for instance,
with the C.D. Wright poem
The Power of Incantation,
you know, and what
poems can do with that kind of work.
And there's so much here that
poets are bringing to the table,
even just talking about and
reveling in the beauty of these
terms of, of the plants themselves.
>> Forrest Gander: Even the
line of the poem is, and a turn.
And it's from plowing.
>> Rob Casper:
Yep, yep, yep. Exactly.
So the more I thought
about it, the more I thought,
this makes sense.
Poetry and gardening.
>> Forrest Gander:
She's on to something.
>> Rob Casper: Yeah.
[Laughing]
>> Tess Taylor: Well, you know,
humans have lived in the
relation with the tomato
plant for 10,000 years.
The collard green,
probably 5000 years.
These are friends. These foods.
They are companions.
And, you know, we
may not feel divorced.
We may feel divorced from them.
But the thing is, honestly, a tomato
wants to teach you how to grow it.
Like it is leaning towards you as well.
It is not a deep, horrible mystery.
And the thing also is that,
I wanted this book to be
contemporary, and I didn't want it
to feel like your grandmother's
Victorian gardening book
that was all 19th century poems
in the public domain, covered in
like a sheath of roses and lace.
You know, that I wanted it
to feel legible to our,
the struggles of this moment
and the promise of diversity in this
moment. And but I also wanted
to remind us that this is the
substrate on which we grow.
And so I think it's probably
time to wrap up.
And I'm going to do
that with enthusiasm.
But by showing you that when
I was done editing the book,
I called my editor and snuck in
micro poems at the very end.
Like on the final page, I was like,
we can add one more poem, right?
She was so sweet.
She was like, sure.
I translated a little bit of an
old farm poem by Virgil called
The Georgics. This is five lines.
It has to do with olives.
I just want to end with a
question about how many
conflicts in this world that
we're calling war, or migration,
or something else. Or even
bad behavior could be called
hunger by another name.
Olives. Virgil. Georgics.
Book two.
"Olives, by contrast, need no care.
Don't call for machete or stubborn hoe.
Once they've clung to the fields
and bowed with the breezes,
the earth which the plowshare
exposed of herself
offers up moist, heavy fruit.
Oh, suckle the olive
fat pleasing to peace."
I'm just going to
stand up for this one.
It's been a wonderful year of
sharing this book and sharing it
with you, sharing it
across the country.
Forrest Gander was at the first
reading of this book and he made
a joke that I stole.
I'm going to repeat it now.
I've had the joy of writing
this poem in the year 1818
under the pseudonym John Keats.
On the Grasshopper and Cricket.
Thank you all for coming.
On the Grasshopper and Cricket.
"The poetry of earth is never dead.
When all the birds are
faint with the hot sun
and hide in cooling trees,
a voice will run
from hedge to hedge
about the new mown mead,
that is the grasshopper's,
he takes the lead
In summer luxury,
he has never done
With his delights, for
when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath
some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening when the frost
has wrought a silence
from the stove there shrills
The crickets song, in
warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in
drowsiness half lost.
The grasshopper's
among some grassy hills."
Thank you.
[Applause]
[Music]