CULTIVATING HOPE: Tess Taylor's Insight into Gardening, Poetry, and Environmental Action

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Tess Taylor shares the fascinating story behind her latest anthology, "Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them." Tess's work serves as a beacon, urging humanity towards diversity, unity, and restorative hope. In this episode, we delve into gardening from the perspective of food justice and community building.  Whether you're a gardening enthusiast, a fan of poetry, or someone seeking to make a difference in the world, this episode will inspire you to get your hands in the soil.

The anthology is available anywhere books are sold  BUT If you'd like a signed copy, contact Pegasus Books in Berkeley,  California (on Solano Street). Tess has generously offered to come into the store to personalize your copy.

About Tess Taylor:
Tess Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she raises artichokes on the sidewalk median strip, has four chickens in the backyard, and is working to restore a community orchard. Her work as a writer deals with place, ecology, memory, and cultural reckoning.  She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House,  Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work & Days, and Rift Zone.  She has also been the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times.  She is currently at work on two plays, one of which is a stage adaptation of her book of poems about American photographer Dorothea Lange, and later this fall, she’ll release a podcast called Intimate Addresses, about six extraordinary twentieth-century artists letters, with Anna Deveare Smith, and Getty. Her latest work, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, is a collection of contemporary gardening poems, for an era of climate crisis, which includes poems by some of the most luminary poets writing today. The word anthology means “bouquet or gathering of flowers,” and this bouquet does gather many incredible offerings of poetry. 

www.tesstaylor.com

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome.
I'm glad you're here.
Together, we will turn ourshared concern about the state
of our environment into a forcefor change.
It will require you toreimagine the role of your home
kitchen as more than a warehouseof food or a room where we cook
and gather to eat.
The time has come to enter yourkitchen with eyes open to the

(00:24):
transformative power itharnesses for the planet and you
.
The home kitchen has alwaysbeen ground zero for positive
environmental and social change.
Waiting for you to take yourposition as a kitchen activist
Now that you arrived, you willchange the world with what you

(00:45):
eat.
Welcome, I'm so glad you'rehere.

(01:12):
This is Floodans here, ramirez,I'm here with Tess Taylor.
Tess Taylor is a poet, aprofessor, an activist, a mother
and a friend.
She has a new book out.
She has actually five wonderfulbooks out, but her latest is a
poetry anthology which is calledLeaning Toward Light Poems for

(01:36):
Gardens and the Hands that Tendthem, and it's kind of like a
prayer to nature and gardening.
I really wanted to have thisconversation with you right now,
tess, because many of us arethinking what should we get
people who we love for Christmasor for the holidays, and I felt
this is absolutely a great ideato give this book that has

(02:03):
incredible art and words andjust energy to the people who
love gardening your life or whowant to garden.
Before we get into this bookand hopefully listen to a few of
the poems from the book, I washoping you can talk to us just

(02:24):
about what really is thatdriving force for you.
What is your heart's desireoverall with all this work that
you do in the world?

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, I just thank you so much for having me here.
It's so great to be talking andit really strikes me that I
believe very much that poetryand gardens are places where we
build our understanding ofdiversity, about how to bring
ourselves into conversation withone another and with the

(02:59):
non-human world as well.
And the garden is a place thatbuilds diversity from the soil
up, with microbes in the soil,inviting in weeds that sometimes
we want but don't want, thatare sometimes fortuitous, and
building in also likepollinators.
And then neighbors that stop byand are like what are you

(03:20):
growing?
Did you know that you couldgrow artichokes in the front
yard?
I never thought of that.
Or, wow, you know, you yourselfstart going out and saying
would you like to have some ofthese plums?
I have way too many.
And so there's this strangeforce that comes together in a
garden.
That's an inviting force ofinteraction, of density, of

(03:44):
sharing, of collective.
And the thing is actually inthe art world something like
that happens as well.
The NEA did a study that saysthat people that are engaged in
the arts longitudinally are morelikely to vote, more likely to
graduate from high school, morelikely to be leaders in their
community and more likely tohave friends across racial lines

(04:08):
.
Which is to say, artists arepollinators too.
They're indicators of a healthycivic community.
They're people who are workingactually to bind the world
together little by little.
I think we live in a time whenwe're really starved for images
of hope and of repair, and yetthere's actually huge

(04:29):
possibility that's out there,and I think that's what I want
to give people just a littlewhiff of in the work that I do.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
So what if you were to put that all in one line for
yourself, like what is yourheart's desire?
What is test is hearts desirerestorative hope.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
That's two words, but I'm gonna sneak it.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, that could be, it could be longer than two
words, but I love thatrestorative hope.
When I read the book it didfeel Restorative.
I know you talk the repair thatwe bring when we come to our
Gardens with that mindset rightthat we are part of repairing
our just little patch.

(05:14):
It could just be a few pots inour balcony or a little carved
out space.
It doesn't have to be thismassive space.
But when we put in that timeand effort and love Into
Anything right and it what, whatcomes back to us is we are
repairing.
But then there's the reward inthe connection.

(05:37):
But I wanted to go back alittle bit further as to the why
, the why you put this together,and the book itself is an
anthology of how many poets Didyou bring together?

Speaker 2 (05:49):
85 living and dead.
It goes all the way from Virgil, who has this beautiful line
about olives pleasing peace, thefat olive pleasing peace, and
then there's a little bit ofKeats and Walt Whitman of course
, but that's mostly contemporarypoets and that is really

(06:10):
something that felt important tome.
I was approached by an editorwho knew me from a time that I
worked on an organic farm in theBerkshires and she knew that I
was a lifelong gardener, that Iused to run a community garden
in Brooklyn, that I had workedwith a community garden here in
Berkeley that had providedvegetables to shape an east, and

(06:31):
she knew that I was kind ofVegetable obsessed.
And she called me during thepandemic and she said test, I
really think there's space for anew gardening anthology to be
in the world.
And we realized a lot of thegardening anthologies out there.
Take a bunch of 19th centurypoems that are in the public
domain and reprint them and sortof put a pink and lacy cover

(06:54):
over them with some roses, andthey have an image of a certain
sort of grandmotherly, preciousperson in mind.
But we realized that we gardenfor much more radical reasons.
We garden to feel ourconnection to the earth.
We garden to feel a sense offood justice.

(07:14):
We garden because we want tocompost.
We garden because we love rotand also because we believe that
there's a much more radical wayto make food in this country
and this world and that partlywe garden to connect ourselves
to those kinds of pieces of thefood movement, and None of that
had really been represented yetinside an anthology.

(07:37):
A lot of anthologies are alsoreally white and my anthology
was not going to be that way.
There are all kinds of voicesthat represent the spectrum of
people writing in English today.
It's mostly American, I have tosay.
That's one thing about it.
So I'm sure there's actuallyroom for a global gardening and
farming anthology, just in casesomebody has that hunger to make

(07:58):
it.
But but this really felt like away of pulling in the community
of people who are gardening nowand the reasons that we garden
now.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
You mentioned the pandemic when you were working
on this project, but you werealso working on a garden at the
same time and I want to hearabout that, about, about what
that meant for you during just avery Intense time, right, and
how and how that transpired.

(08:29):
Community for you.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
I was working on two gardens during the pandemic, one
in my front yard.
My front yard is what gets thesunshine.
Nobody was parked on the streetanymore and we didn't need to
park in the driveway.
I took over the driveway, whichwas a very sunny spot, and made
it a bed for potted tomatoesand blueberry plants.

(08:53):
I was out there basically allthe time.
What would happen is thatpeople in the community would
stop by and there was thisdropping off of fog-resistant
tomato or discussing howsomebody had made shiitakes grow
in their side yard.
Everybody was standing at adistance but sharing gardening

(09:16):
wisdom or dropping off plants,and there was this little hub in
the driveway.
I felt like our plants could befriends even when we couldn't.
That was really important.
But I also thought about theway that these plants need each
other and tendril toward eachother, that having a
neighborhood where everybody isgrowing tomatoes actually means
that all the tomatoes are goingto be better.

(09:37):
I did crazy things, likeoffering to garden other
people's front yards becausethey were so sunny.
I discovered some volunteerkale in my neighbor's house down
the block and showed her how toidentify it.
Then she cooked it and she waslike this is the most delicious
kale ever.
It was like there was thisinteresting way that in these

(10:01):
outdoors, slightly-distanceinteractions that were all about
plants, we built a communitytogether and rooted together.
I thought that was reallybeautiful.
At the same time I startedriding my bicycle a couple miles
north of here to Berkeley, tothe BYA community garden where I
had worked as a teenager.

(10:21):
Their situation had changed,but they had this orchard that's
tucked on a vacant lot behindtheir building.
It was in need of repair.
Somehow during the thick of thepandemic it had really gotten
over-weeded and it needed mulchand it needed pruning and it
needed gentle disentangling oflike apple tree signs that had

(10:45):
woven their way into the bark.
I would go there and kids wouldcome and youth would come and
we would learn about treepruning together, we would talk
about harvest together and thensome days there would be orange
trees or lemon trees inabundance and people would go
home with food.

(11:06):
It was a neighborhood wherethere's food security issues.
It's really incredible to justbe able to walk over to a garden
plot and send people home withthree bunches of kale and a bag
of oranges and know the earth isproviding what you're providing
, and just to have one place inthe world where there's a figure

(11:27):
, where we don't have to livewith this kind of scarcity and
where you can actually turn apiece of land in an urban area
into something that can helpfeed a community.
I think that is like some ofthe most meaningful work that we
can ever do.
It just it was wonderful to bethere, to be working with them.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
I wonder if you can read us right now.
Read us a poem, becauselistening to you just overall is
a poem and you can tell thatyou are a poet the way that you
just speak.
I can listen to you all day.
Actually, ted, I would love forus to hear one of the poems.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Thank you, florencia.
So there's so many great poetsin this book there's Cheslaw
Milo, there's Robert Hass,there's Brenda Hillman, there's
this wonderful poet named AlanCesaro, who has a beautiful poem
about urban gardening, but I'mjust, if it's permitted, I'll
read the poem that I offered tothe anthology by myself, and one

(12:27):
of the reasons that I wanted todo it is because there's
another mission that I had inmaking this book, which is I
really wanted to gather poetsand poems that are thinking
about the tenderness that wehave right now touching the
earth in all its fragility, aswe lose pieces of it in this

(12:51):
moment of climate crisis andclimate change.
And I mean one of the reasonsthat I garden is to just break
through my climate grief and myclimate numbness into a place
where I remember how much I lovethe world and how much I care
about it.
And even with that caring,sometimes you know that allows

(13:15):
you to be sad or happy or both,but it's like different than not
caring or different than tuningout.
There's poems about gardeningin the face of that change, and
this is one of them.
It's called green tomatoes infire season, and it used to be
only Californians that had knownwhat fire season was, but now

(13:37):
it's become an increasingly bigphenomenon.
And for those that aren'tnecessarily gardeners, green
tomatoes are what you get inlate fall, when yours haven't
ripened, and actually it's adelight to fry them or to make
them into chutney Green tomatoesin fire season.
There is smoke in the air.

(14:00):
When I go pick them, I godespite panic, also because
inside I'll make chutney For anhour or so.
I unlatch them.
It is late fall.
They will not ripen.
Firm, pale green skins findcoated in ash.
Our fire season goes all autumn.
Now, though today's fire is notyet near to us.

(14:23):
But the green tomatoes, I lovetheir pale lobes.
Tonight, god willing, we willfry some with cornmeal and fish
Inside the air purifier.
Worse, I will boil them withmolasses and raisin, jar them
for friends and for the winterDisaster.

(14:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Beautiful and you absolutely hit on something.
When we have that respect forthe natural world, how do you
not?
You take that with youthroughout your day and all your
actions.
I know for myself it feelsempowering to have to be part of
the solution.

(15:27):
Even if it's just a few pots infront of your house that you're
cultivating, you're part ofthat repair and you're part of
rewriting the story like abeautiful poem.
I thank you so much for sharingthat with us and also just
bringing this poem, this book ofpoetry, out in the world, and
it is a very special gift tosomeone and the artwork alone is

(15:53):
just brilliant and I absolutelyrecommend to give this as a
gift.
Where can we find this book,tess, and where can we learn
more about the work that you'redoing?

Speaker 2 (16:07):
You can order the book, apparently at Amazon or
even at Walmart.
But if you're listening and youwant to drop a line to Pegasus
Books in Berkeley, you canactually ask me to sign it for
you and I'll just go into mylocal bookstore.
They're really kind and I thinkthe email address that you need
to use isinfoatpegasuscellanocom.

(16:31):
But literally Google up PegasusBooks Berkeley and it's the
Solano Avenue store or eitherstore.
Really, we'll just take yourorder and the cool thing about
it is there really is a personon the other line and they're
very thoughtful and careful andthey, like, are very delighted
to hear from you.
It's the absolute opposite ofso much of the kind of customer

(16:51):
service we get in the world,where there's no one to ask for
help.
Look for the book anywhereyou'd like to, but Pegasus Books
on Solano Avenue in Berkeleywould certainly have it and if
you tell them that you want itsigned, I'll sign it.
Go in into the store and signit myself.
But I also wanted to say I'm atwwwtesttaylorcom and at

(17:13):
Tessathon and I love to be inconversation with poets, but
also one of the joys has been tobe in conversation with
environmentalists and gardenersand to talk about this idea of
the reparative imagination andhow important that is.
Emily Dickinson said I dwell inpossibility, and I think if we

(17:33):
don't dwell a little bit inpossibility in our hopeful
visions of what should and couldbe, if we aren't turning
parking lots into gardens in ourminds, we've lost some of the
battle.
So I just really encouragepeople to think about gardening
and poetry also as figures forwhat could be and as restorative

(17:55):
spaces that you can go to for ashort time and come back with
more energy.
That's the beauty of a poem.
You read it, it's a few lineslong, but somehow there's this
chamber that holds your body andyour heart and then you go out
sort of renewed into the world.
So I hope to kind of share thatgift with people a little bit

(18:15):
this season.
And Florencia, it's really ajoy to talk to you.
It always is.
Shall we end one poem by CheslaMilosh.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
I love it yes, okay, gift.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Speaking of gifts, gift by Chesla Milosh.
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked inthe garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping overhoneysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth Iwanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envyinghim, whatever evil I had

(18:49):
suffered.
I forgot To think that once Iwas, the same man did not
embarrass me In my body.
I felt no pain.
When straightening up I saw theblue sea and sails.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Hmm, what a wonderful way to end.
Thank you so much, tess, andagain, thank you for bringing
this to us.
It is a gift.
It really is a gift.
Let's stay connected.
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