Context
I’m going to share the title poem from Withness, my book manuscript in progress. I see this book as part of a larger project of helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in the world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align their thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. Some of the related work that I’m doing includes a prairie divination performance project as a form of climate counseling and the Ad Astra Community Workshop Project, series of community workshops and reading events across Kansas in which participants explore poetry to engage and deepen connections to each other, their communities, and their ecosystem. In partnership with visiting poets, the Land Institute, the public library, and various place-based arts organizations, I’m developing workshops that will guide participants in building daily creative and reflective practices to help navigate uncertainty and change and find pathways toward a sustainable future in our common home.
In all of these projects, I’m working to combine more traditional interdisciplinary research and collaboration that I’ve done in the context of the academy—in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy—with other forms of knowledge and experience, specifically my work as a yoga teacher and at non-profit environmental organizations before entering academia, as well as my current practices of divination, yoga, and in the healing arts Some guiding texts and theoretical framework for this ongoing project include adrienne mariee brown’s emergent strategy, Donna Harraway’s Staying With the Trouble, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Michael Marder’s work on plant thinking and vegetal being, Octavia Butler’s earthseed books, as well as the poetry, essays, and thinking of my fellow panelists.
Withness
By exploring ideas of indeterminacy, rootedness, and resilience, my current book project, Withness, uses plant thinking as a model for response to our current moment and in thinking towards the future. Specifically, I’m interested in how research in plant cognition and plant communication can expanded our concepts of sentience, connectedness, and compassion — perhaps in thinking of fungal networks connecting trees to share information across the forest, the epigenetic inheritance of traits through subsequent generations of plants, and “kin recognition” amongst a variety of species. What neglected knowledge can plants share when we encounter them as subjects rather than as setting? In the five poems I’m about to read, I’ve started thinking with two trees in my own backyard: a craggy black locust and an ash, which is currently unafflicted by the emerald ash bores that have moved into town. Out of these kinds of direct encounters, and out of research in evolutionary biology, plant studies, and phenomenology, I’ve been exploring a poetics of vegetal life, specifically drawing on plants’ ability to thrive in the face of trauma and loss. The poems coming out of this project both attempt to enter into a world co-present with but other than our own and to see vegetal inhabitance as a model of unconditional generosity in the face of vulnerability.
Withness
what, love, are you
a fissure tonguing hillside
deepening dirt into limestone into answering
mother fictile in unquiet repose
each spring there is gratitude a nodding
symmetry of blossoms grazing tender stalks
the press of green into gray
stories we tell buried in tallgrass
what one may cure another may burn
mouth an aching expanse that cannot
say what it ought what could bring light
into this quiet room onto this no longer page
it is not pain just slowness into rocky soil
into clay (what remains after flood what remains
after passage out of sight what remains in
broken images in fever dreams)
what do you remember
toe-sink into damp soil
field patchy with bluestem with dropseed
a poultice of root applied to sores to sorrow
always returning borne in pairs a sequence
of exclamation across prairie
chest-flutter of spring afternoons
language rising through fingers through throat
making claim to a few minutes of eastern exposure
cup plant holding water waxen-lined verdant chalice
offering sea offering sky
with sun: abundance,
with radiating heat: a softer home
the wind farms the coal plants the Tyson chicken houses
( these too and I )
trafficway through wetlands over unmarked graves
a box that holds what my heart cannot
a table engulfed in smoke and flame
who water gathers
and what this gathering asks
geese flock north fields
answer early crops greening
an eye making home for many
blue buzz sweat-drunk
each sting a haunting
ancestral migration from ground
to body and back again
lakes and rivers remember
as does dirt under fingernails
each day’s toil an offering:
fertilizer, heartache, a song to guide us
who we leave behind
bark diamonded to touch
toothed leaflet and winged seed
( who do you love )
kin until it is no longer
left arm reaching out in dream
I try to stitch the pieces
into something pretty
a blanket to warm these still
cool nights everything that we
love will fade someday tell
untrue things to sleep lonely nights
never ready not quite whole
an island sinking beneath the sea
where we are situated
high in the tree canopy wind pushes branch into branch a
scrambling of touch one limb becoming another the morning
gray and bright sun pushing through cloud cars abating as the
commute softens into mid-morning blackbirds in the gnarled
black locust doves on rooftop squirrels chattering on and on
picture: a mammoth rubbing hide on bark the sharp prick of
thorns emerging as buffer
picture: seas and glaciers that once covered this place
picture: limestone erupting bison grazing tallgrass
picture: prairie grass pink orchid, wood betony, large-
flowered coreopsis, prairie phlox, funnel-form beard tongue,
pale purple coneflower, lead plant, prairie blazing star,
rattlesnake master, hoary puccoon, yellow wild indigo, and azure
aster all flowering to open my hands breaking to blossom
the fields the grasses the fields
