Leaning Toward Light
An Interview with Tess Taylor
When my mother inherited my grandmother’s house after her passing, I spent one afternoon sitting by the long patch of plants and flowers my grandmother would tend to when I was younger. On hot summer days, my grandmother would saunter to the front of the house, kneel as if she were about to pray, and spend the next few hours pulling weeds, cutting leaves, speaking to that tall and bright vegetation about her family drama and the newest gossip. I can’t claim with certainty that she was at her most peaceful then, but I can say that the plants and flowers thrived under her care. It was as if they lived for her, blooming even when the heat was relentless or when the cold was at its worst. When my mother moved into the house, her mind was occupied with so much grief that that patch of plants and flowers suffered, wilting under months of neglect. I watered a little that afternoon I visited, hoping to salvage what I could. As I read Leaning Toward Light, beautifully edited by Tess Taylor, I knew that my efforts, however, were not in vain. And when I read David Biespiel’s “Laurelhurst” and paused to think about acceptance, or when Danusha Laméris’ “Working in the Garden, I Think of My Son” made me put down the book and go for a walk to reflect on the ways loved ones live through us long after they have left the earth, I was reminded of my grandmother, of the way her plants would lean toward her frail and hunched over body, as though, to echo the quiet observations of Jason Myers’ “Closing In,” they were longing for “a song, a touch, just a little touch.”
Esteban Rodriguez: Tess, the last time I spoke to you at length was a few months ago via Zoom in a writing group we are a part of, and you talked a little bit about the process of assembling Leaning Toward Light (permissions, publication agreements, etc.). I don’t think a lot of readers truly understand the amount of work it takes to assemble an anthology of this caliber. Every poem here is purposeful and the cohesion between poems and sections celebrates this central idea of gardening in public. So, what did the labor look like when you began selecting poems that would, as you say in your introduction, “cultivate widespread abundance, nourishment, and peace”?
Tess Taylor: Thank you so much, Esteban. It was a lot of work, and yet it was work that really called me into its tending. I have always been a gardener. I began digging in my parents' big plot in their grad student housing at University of Wisconsin Madison. One of my earliest memories is the magic of rolling around in a mess of tomato vines and pumpkin patch. The garden felt like it had so many coves for the imagination, and was a space away from the world. I have always gardened. I led youth programming over the summers at a community garden in Berkeley for at risk youth, I gardened in Brooklyn on a community lot reclaimed from two torn down brownstones, I worked on a farm in the Berkshires. Finally when we came back to California I made a little garden in our tiny front yard. We raise plants even on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. Everyone is always walking by and asking – oh, do you need a lot of water for those artichokes? Or, what kind of flower is that? Can I pick some plums? I love that my yard demonstrates how much food a yard can grow. Also, it’s a joyful space.
So: during the pandemic, that garden was my solace. During the loneliest of those months– it was like we couldn’t touch but maybe we could share roots? Sometimes the only conversation you’d have with someone outside your family was about the tomatoes in the front yard. I was literally coming in from a conversation like that when Hannah Fries, an old friend who is an editor at Storey Press, called me up and said, hey! I have this idea and I thought of you. Would you like to edit this book? A new book of garden poems.
We sat then and a bunch of other times and we talked about it. We wanted to shake up the ye-olde garden anthology. We thought of it as stealth eco-food-justice poetry. Yes, we wanted something really nice that people would read in line at a gift or garden store. We wanted something that people would give their grandmothers. We wanted to make something beautiful, as gardens are. But we also wanted something that really spoke to what can be radical about gardening now– about the way it builds diversity in the soil, in plant communities, and in our lives– and about the fact that we who garden now do so in the face of an ever more precarious world, giving love to and getting love from a small piece of a planet we know is in peril. That shaped my looking.
I also wanted this to be an anthology that could meet anyone– in line at a supermarket, in a community center, for people who maybe aren’t in academia. I wanted this to feel like each poem was a point of entry to this world. And then I read a lot of poems. I wrote to people privately, I read anthologies, I dog-eared many things. I began arranging my big pile into seasons of a sort– planting and harvest, surely, but also sections about grief and reverie.
I tried to hear the music between the poems.
ER: I must admit, until a few years ago, I had always been indifferent to anthologies, primarily because they were presented to me in grad school in a way that made them seem very authoritative. Definitive even. Additionally, the lack of diverse writers put me off, but the approach to anthologies has changed significantly since then, and your presentation of Leaning Toward Light does a phenomenal job of not proclaiming authority, but of creating a space where readers are invited to connect with the world and imagine a new one. One of the ways I think this anthology does this is through the personal anecdotes and recipes you provide between each section. Here, readers not only get an insight into moments of your life, (note that I didn’t write the recipes but the poets did!) but we are graced with unique recipes, such as glazed carrots, braised fava beans, feta, tomato, and basil pie, and melon and cucumber gazpacho with basil oil, to name a few. How did this idea come about, and what do you believe these interludes, if you will, add to the poems then presented in each section?
TT: Hey, thank you. So: Lots of people seem crazy about the recipes. As it happens, I’m a cook, as well as a gardener, and I love the way both cooking and gardening weave a kind of responsiveness in them, to what’s available, what’s in season, what’s to hand. Food has an urgency, too– it’s alive! There’s a day you’d better pick your fava beans or they’ll get woody, a time when you’d best make jam with the plums, or at least freeze them. As for this responsiveness: Much of art or craft, is about looking at what’s to hand and seeing what can be assembled. It’s not creativity as an act of the great and solitary mind, but co-creation with the season, the moment, the light. Poems have a handiness about them. They are a way of weaving together the disparate ingredients of our lives. And sometimes the best poems, like the best recipes, help you imagine how you might adapt or remake them. In recipe terms: Maybe you love the idea of glazed carrots but you add cumin and maple syrup instead of cinnamon and honey.
Gathering is interpretive work. As Aimee Nezhukumatatil points out in her forward, the word anthology actually comes from “flower collection” or bouquet. Anthologies are acts of storytelling, full of unexpected blooms. They help us imagine the wider meadow that is poetry. Some anthologies need to establish schools or ways of hearing or seeing that may not have yet existed. In this case: I wanted to create something that helped people feel the vastness of poems that write in praise of gardens, particularly in this charged moment when we feel so precarious about our climate, about the very base of our life on the planet. How do we sing wonder and grief and joy and attentiveness now? Those questions companioned me as I gathered these blooms.
ER: I love this, the idea that anthologies are needed to establish schools or ways of hearing and seeing that did not exist before. And you do that here not only by listening to the voices of the present, but to those of the past. What did including poems by Lucille Clifton, Thom Gunn, Stanley Kunitz, and W.S. Merwin mean to you? To this book?
TT: Ah yes Lucille Clifton poem! I have loved it for so long. It’s the one that ends “i taste in my natural appetite/ the bond of live things everywhere.” And it’s so attentive – to color, texture, taste, cooking, savoring.
I included Whitman and some Keats. There’s even a few lines from Virgil which I translated myself. Also, there is Rumi, and a fabulous Japanese poet called Nanao Sakaki who would have been 100 this year! There is Wendell Berry! Without being exhaustive I wanted to summon up a loving chorus from across space and time. I wanted this to be a chorus of kind companions. I’m an omnivorous reader, I always have been. And I feel like that diversity in the present and across time really matters. Jane Hirshfield just wrote me after getting this collection: “ I adored stumbling into the small snippet of Virgil tucked in at the end--like finding one last plum on the picked over tree…..What a community we all are. So many friends, gathered together. Including Virgil.”
ER: One of my favorite poems in this anthology is “Fennel” by Thom Gunn. While the speaker contemplates scattered clumps of fennel, he pulls back from the observation to try to understand his place in this often uncertain world:
I stand here as if lost,
As if invisible on this broken cliff,
Invisible sky above.
And for a second I float free
Of personality, and die
Into my sense, into the unglossed
Unglossable
Sweet and transporting yet attaching smell
-The very agent that releases me
Holding me here, as well.
That which “releases” us also holds us in place. It gives us perspectives that we hadn’t seen before. What perspectives about your life and your writing did assembling this anthology give you?
TT: That poem is in a section called Weeding & Wilding, which celebrates the unplanted, the unplanned, what goes to seed– the way forces of time and wind take over a garden. Weeds do that for us, they assert themselves beside our willing, and sometimes they are actually wonderful additions, pleasant things, as well as bramble or thorn. Sometimes there’s a volunteer, which is a garden term for a plant you actually want to keep that shows up of its own volition. I had a pumpkin do that once, and I let it grow and it was absolutely beautiful in October. I think the unexpectedness of things and our willingness to work with them does take us outside the bounds of the self proper, or the self that proclaims any kind of perfect self-knowledge. There are always discoveries that seem to come on the winds, or on the breezes, and it’s the act of inhaling those breezes, savoring those discoveries, that keeps us curious, vital, alive.
In a way, this whole project was a volunteer of sorts. The pandemic was very hard on all of us, and I was in a place where being asked to cultivate something like this ended up becoming its own source of joy and sustenance. I have always had a gardening self and a poet self. But I haven’t always let them hang out together. And now they feel really deeply in dialog. Now I feel like my garden activist self and my poet self feel deeply intwined, and excited to do more projects together. How can poems and gardens each help us repollinate the world?
ER: While I’m not a “plant person,” my wife has undoubtedly made me appreciate the joy that can be found in caring for flowers and plants. Last year, we were given a young royal poinciana, and not long after we planted it in our backyard, a winter freeze hit our region. It rolled in in the middle of December, and there my wife and I were in the backyard that evening, quickly setting up a less than symmetrical structure (which consisted in plastic bags, two tarps, a canopy, lawn chairs, and lots of Velcro) in order to protect it from the strong winds and low temperatures. It thankfully survived, and in the months that followed, as it grew so tall, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of joy in knowing that it was flourishing, that we were sharing the same space together at this moment in time. I still look at it in awe, so I wanted to ask what natural landscape beyond your garden gives you that sense of wonder and reaffirms (or reanimates) your purpose in this world?
TT: Oh golly. First of all I want to affirm that particular joy that you described that comes from co-creating the world with plants. You put them out there and then you take care of them and they respond to your care. They tell you how to use them, what they need. My sunflower starts fell over before I planted them and then for a couple days they grew sideways. I just moved a cucumber because I could see it needed more sun. Gardens surprise you! And you are having this chance to participate in the acts of the earth. I think that feeling of participating, even a little, I love so much. I love making compost and knowing that each of the minerals in a food will rot and be soil. It feels so wonderful to be in a world where things do not get wasted.
In the wider landscape of our lives, I guess there are lots of things that inspire me. I’m in awe of the places that we can learn about how to encourage landscapes to more vital diverse existence, and where we can learn to more carefully and imaginatively co-exist with that diversity. I am an open water swimmer and I love swimming above eelgrass or kelp that are supporting ecosystems of fish. I love swimming out and seeing the world from the surface of the water and seeing landscapes where birds and fish come together, and tideflats, where all these life forms, from microbes on up, are exchanged. What I suppose I do want to say is that when you garden you start to understand that there’s not nature and not nature: there are richer and less fertile ecosystems, and how we chose to live is a part of that fertility. It’s a more radical kind of entwined belonging.
So much of what we need to do in our lives right now is restoration biology, is planting butterfly gardens, is planting native plants, is being in the stream of the resources around us– supporting a kind of stewarding that allows areas to rewild, that rebuilds habitat and wetland. This is tending on a different scale.
ER: All the poems in this anthology complement each other so beautifully. But was there a specific poem, or poems, that really made the collection come together during the selection process? If so, what did that “aha moment” reveal about how the book could move forward?
TT: Ah! One of them, really was Danusha Lameris’s wonderful poem about grief, about working in the garden and thinking of her 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…” That poem just makes you indraw sharply. It makes a stunning leap between the title and the first line. But it’s also a reminder that when we garden to see transformation, we are not only talking about the beauty of watching things grow, but about allowing in the transformation of loss, the transformation of grief, and the reassembly of bodies into other bodies, by the almost invisible-to-us processes of earth and soil. The miracle of breakdown. And Danusha reminded me that gardens, for this very reason, allow us both to grieve, and to heal. .
ER: Despite the past experiences I’ve had with anthologies (mentioned above), what I particularly like about them is that they capture a particular genre/category of writing up to a certain point in time. They are never meant to be the final book since decades down the road, another anthology will arrive that includes new work. What do you hope a future anthology about gardening includes and does for future generations of readers?
TT: I don’t know! I mean, sometimes we are tempted to imagine, right now, a very bleak future, but must it be so bleak? It is only bleak because we are not yet cultivating its beauty. Part of our work is believing in and working toward the renewal of growing things—soil and plant and insect. If the future is not bleak, it will be because there are many gardens in it. Virgil says that the olive is fat and pleasing to peace. May our gardens be like that, too. I think that the joy of gardens is always green. I hope whatever comes in the future is a testament to our love for gardens, and for one another.
Part of our work is believing in and working toward the renewal of growing things– soil and plant and insect. If the future is not bleak, it will be because there are many gardens in it. Virgil says that the olive is fat and pleasing to peace. May our gardens be like that, too. I think that the joy of gardens is always green. I hope whatever comes in the future is a testament to our love for gardens, and for one another.
