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
Click here for the free How to Eat Less Water CONDIMENT STORAGE TABLE. It is a printable list of popular condiments that belong in the pantry and those in the refrigerator that can be hung in your kitchen for easy reference.
Download the TEN TIPS to EAT LESS WATER SUMMER PARTY PLANNING GUIDE for all the tips, steps, and info on celebrating like a kitchen activist with your friends and family.
Find gifts designed to serve well-being at the Eat Less Water Shop.
Get a copy of the EAT LESS WATER book.
Reach me at info@eatlesswater.com
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
Click here for the free How to Eat Less Water CONDIMENT STORAGE TABLE. It is a printable list of popular condiments that belong in the pantry and those in the refrigerator that can be hung in your kitchen for easy reference.
Download the TEN TIPS to EAT LESS WATER SUMMER PARTY PLANNING GUIDE for all the tips, steps, and info on celebrating like a kitchen activist with your friends and family.
Find gifts designed to serve well-being at the Eat Less Water Shop.
Get a copy of the EAT LESS WATER book.
Reach me at info@eatlesswater.com
Welcome. I'm glad you're here. Together, we will turn our shared concern about the state of our environment into a force for change. It will require you to reimagine the role of your home kitchen as more than a warehouse of food or a room where we cook and gather to eat. The time has come to enter your kitchen with eyes open to the transformative power it harnesses for the planet and you. The home kitchen has always been ground zero for positive environmental and social change. Waiting for you to take your position as a kitchen activist Now that you arrived, you will change the world with what you eat. Welcome, I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:This is Floodans here, ramirez, I'm here with Tess Taylor. Tess Taylor is a poet, a professor, an activist, a mother and a friend. She has a new book out. She has actually five wonderful books out, but her latest is a poetry anthology which is called Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend them, and it's kind of like a prayer to nature and gardening. I really wanted to have this conversation with you right now, tess, because many of us are thinking what should we get people who we love for Christmas or for the holidays, and I felt this is absolutely a great idea to give this book that has incredible art and words and just energy to the people who love gardening your life or who want to garden. Before we get into this book and hopefully listen to a few of the poems from the book, I was hoping you can talk to us just about what really is that driving force for you. What is your heart's desire overall with all this work that you do in the world?
Speaker 2:Well, I just thank you so much for having me here. It's so great to be talking and it really strikes me that I believe very much that poetry and gardens are places where we build our understanding of diversity, about how to bring ourselves into conversation with one another and with the non-human world as well. And the garden is a place that builds diversity from the soil up, with microbes in the soil, inviting in weeds that sometimes we want but don't want, that are sometimes fortuitous, and building in also like pollinators. And then neighbors that stop by and are like what are you growing? Did you know that you could grow artichokes in the front yard? I never thought of that. Or, wow, you know, you yourself start going out and saying would you like to have some of these plums? I have way too many.
Speaker 2:And so there's this strange force that comes together in a garden. That's an inviting force of interaction, of density, of sharing, of collective. And the thing is actually in the art world something like that happens as well. The NEA did a study that says that people that are engaged in the arts longitudinally are more likely to vote, more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be leaders in their community and more likely to have friends across racial lines. Which is to say, artists are pollinators too. They're indicators of a healthy civic community. They're people who are working actually to bind the world together little by little. I think we live in a time when we're really starved for images of hope and of repair, and yet there's actually huge possibility that's out there, and I think that's what I want to give people just a little whiff of in the work that I do.
Speaker 1:So what if you were to put that all in one line for yourself, like what is your heart's desire? What is test is hearts desire restorative hope.
Speaker 2:That's two words, but I'm gonna sneak it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that could be, it could be longer than two words, but I love that restorative hope. When I read the book it did feel Restorative. I know you talk the repair that we bring when we come to our Gardens with that mindset right that we are part of repairing our just little patch. It could just be a few pots in our balcony or a little carved out space. It doesn't have to be this massive space. But when we put in that time and effort and love Into Anything right and it what, what comes back to us is we are repairing. But then there's the reward in the connection. But I wanted to go back a little bit further as to the why, the why you put this together, and the book itself is an anthology of how many poets Did you bring together?
Speaker 2:85 living and dead. It goes all the way from Virgil, who has this beautiful line about olives pleasing peace, the fat olive pleasing peace, and then there's a little bit of Keats and Walt Whitman of course, but that's mostly contemporary poets and that is really something that felt important to me. I was approached by an editor who knew me from a time that I worked on an organic farm in the Berkshires and she knew that I was a lifelong gardener, that I used to run a community garden in Brooklyn, that I had worked with a community garden here in Berkeley that had provided vegetables to shape an east, and she knew that I was kind of Vegetable obsessed. And she called me during the pandemic and she said test, I really think there's space for a new gardening anthology to be in the world. And we realized a lot of the gardening anthologies out there. Take a bunch of 19th century poems that are in the public domain and reprint them and sort of put a pink and lacy cover over them with some roses, and they have an image of a certain sort of grandmotherly, precious person in mind.
Speaker 2:But we realized that we garden for much more radical reasons. We garden to feel our connection to the earth. We garden to feel a sense of food justice. We garden because we want to compost. We garden because we love rot and also because we believe that there's a much more radical way to make food in this country and this world and that partly we garden to connect ourselves to those kinds of pieces of the food movement, and None of that had really been represented yet inside an anthology. A lot of anthologies are also really white and my anthology was not going to be that way. There are all kinds of voices that represent the spectrum of people writing in English today. It's mostly American, I have to say. That's one thing about it. So I'm sure there's actually room for a global gardening and farming anthology, just in case somebody has that hunger to make it. But but this really felt like a way of pulling in the community of people who are gardening now and the reasons that we garden now.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the pandemic when you were working on this project, but you were also working on a garden at the same time and I want to hear about that, about, about what that meant for you during just a very Intense time, right, and how and how that transpired. Community for you.
Speaker 2:I was working on two gardens during the pandemic, one in my front yard. My front yard is what gets the sunshine. Nobody was parked on the street anymore and we didn't need to park in the driveway. I took over the driveway, which was a very sunny spot, and made it a bed for potted tomatoes and blueberry plants. I was out there basically all the time. What would happen is that people in the community would stop by and there was this dropping off of fog-resistant tomato or discussing how somebody had made shiitakes grow in their side yard. Everybody was standing at a distance but sharing gardening wisdom or dropping off plants, and there was this little hub in the driveway. I felt like our plants could be friends even when we couldn't. That was really important. But I also thought about the way that these plants need each other and tendril toward each other, that having a neighborhood where everybody is growing tomatoes actually means that all the tomatoes are going to be better. I did crazy things, like offering to garden other people's front yards because they were so sunny. I discovered some volunteer kale in my neighbor's house down the block and showed her how to identify it. Then she cooked it and she was like this is the most delicious kale ever. It was like there was this interesting way that in these outdoors, slightly-distance interactions that were all about plants, we built a community together and rooted together. I thought that was really beautiful.
Speaker 2:At the same time I started riding my bicycle a couple miles north of here to Berkeley, to the BYA community garden where I had worked as a teenager. Their situation had changed, but they had this orchard that's tucked on a vacant lot behind their building. It was in need of repair. Somehow during the thick of the pandemic it had really gotten over-weeded and it needed mulch and it needed pruning and it needed gentle disentangling of like apple tree signs that had woven their way into the bark. I would go there and kids would come and youth would come and we would learn about tree pruning together, we would talk about harvest together and then some days there would be orange trees or lemon trees in abundance and people would go home with food.
Speaker 2:It was a neighborhood where there's food security issues. It's really incredible to just be able to walk over to a garden plot and send people home with three bunches of kale and a bag of oranges and know the earth is providing what you're providing, and just to have one place in the world where there's a figure, where we don't have to live with this kind of scarcity and where you can actually turn a piece of land in an urban area into something that can help feed a community. I think that is like some of the most meaningful work that we can ever do. It just it was wonderful to be there, to be working with them.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you can read us right now. Read us a poem, because listening to you just overall is a poem and you can tell that you are a poet the way that you just speak. I can listen to you all day. Actually, ted, I would love for us to hear one of the poems.
Speaker 2:Thank you, florencia. So there's so many great poets in this book there's Cheslaw Milo, there's Robert Hass, there's Brenda Hillman, there's this wonderful poet named Alan Cesaro, who has a beautiful poem about urban gardening, but I'm just, if it's permitted, I'll read the poem that I offered to the anthology by myself, and one of the reasons that I wanted to do it is because there's another mission that I had in making this book, which is I really wanted to gather poets and poems that are thinking about the tenderness that we have right now touching the earth in all its fragility, as we lose pieces of it in this moment of climate crisis and climate change. And I mean one of the reasons that I garden is to just break through my climate grief and my climate numbness into a place where I remember how much I love the world and how much I care about it. And even with that caring, sometimes you know that allows you to be sad or happy or both, but it's like different than not caring or different than tuning out. There's poems about gardening in the face of that change, and this is one of them.
Speaker 2:It's called green tomatoes in fire season, and it used to be only Californians that had known what fire season was, but now it's become an increasingly big phenomenon. And for those that aren't necessarily gardeners, green tomatoes are what you get in late fall, when yours haven't ripened, and actually it's a delight to fry them or to make them into chutney 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 find coated in ash.
Speaker 2: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. Worse, 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.
Speaker 1:Beautiful and you absolutely hit on something. When we have that respect for the natural world, how do you not? You take that with you throughout your day and all your actions. I know for myself it feels empowering to have to be part of the solution. Even if it's just a few pots in front of your house that you're cultivating, you're part of that repair and you're part of rewriting the story like a beautiful poem. I thank you so much for sharing that with us and also just bringing this poem, this book of poetry, out in the world, and it is a very special gift to someone and the artwork alone is just brilliant and I absolutely recommend to give this as a gift. Where can we find this book, tess, and where can we learn more about the work that you're doing?
Speaker 2:You can order the book, apparently at Amazon or even at Walmart. But if you're listening and you want to drop a line to Pegasus Books in Berkeley, you can actually ask me to sign it for you and I'll just go into my local bookstore. They're really kind and I think the email address that you need to use is infoatpegasuscellanocom. But literally Google up Pegasus Books Berkeley and it's the Solano Avenue store or either store. Really, we'll just take your order and the cool thing about it is there really is a person on the other line and they're very thoughtful and careful and they, like, are very delighted to hear from you. It's the absolute opposite of so much of the kind of customer service we get in the world, where there's no one to ask for help. Look for the book anywhere you'd like to, but Pegasus Books on Solano Avenue in Berkeley would certainly have it and if you tell them that you want it signed, I'll sign it. Go in into the store and sign it myself. But I also wanted to say I'm at wwwtesttaylorcom and at Tessathon and I love to be in conversation with poets, but also one of the joys has been to be in conversation with environmentalists and gardeners and to talk about this idea of the reparative imagination and how important that is.
Speaker 2:Emily Dickinson said I dwell in possibility, and I think if we don't dwell a little bit in possibility in our hopeful visions of what should and could be, if we aren't turning parking lots into gardens in our minds, we've lost some of the battle. So I just really encourage people to think about gardening and poetry also as figures for what could be and as restorative spaces that you can go to for a short time and come back with more energy. That's the beauty of a poem. You read it, it's a few lines long, but somehow there's this chamber that holds your body and your heart and then you go out sort of renewed into the world. So I hope to kind of share that gift with people a little bit this season. And Florencia, it's really a joy to talk to you. It always is. Shall we end one poem by Chesla Milosh.
Speaker 1:I love it yes, okay, gift.
Speaker 2:Speaking of gifts, gift by Chesla Milosh. A day so happy. Fog lifted early I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him, whatever evil I had suffered. I forgot To think that once I was, the same man did not embarrass me In my body. I felt no pain. When straightening up I saw the blue sea and sails.
Speaker 1:Hmm, what a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much, tess, and again, thank you for bringing this to us. It is a gift. It really is a gift. Let's stay connected. Sign up for my newsletter and receive more tips in your inbox weekly and 15% off your first purchase at the Eat Less Water Shop. You can also find me on your favorite social media space, at Eat Less Water. Please remember to hit subscribe and leave a review, even if it's only the star rating, because every one of them will increase the chances of other like-minded folks to find us. Thank you for joining me on this journey to Eat Less Water. Together, we will write the story of wellbeing for this planet we have the privilege to call home. Meet you back here every Wednesday. There is power in the collective.