Tess Taylor: Why Gardening Matters

Tess is the author of five collections of poetry, including Work & Days and Rift Zone. In the fall of 2023, she published the anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. In 2024-2025, she will serve as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.

In her presentation, Tess will explore how, in our often-furious world, we come to gardens and poems because in dense quick space, they reroute us, surprise us and remind us of the joy of savoring life on our fragile, complicated, endangered planet. She will highlight the fact that gardens and poems share critical, linked invitations.

In the face of all that seems challenging and downright intractable about our struggles to coexist justly with one another, gardens and poems each build ecosystems of nourishment and possibility—what English poet Andrew Marvell called green shade. Gardens and poems remind us how to admire, steward and participate in our own lives and in the life of the planet.

Tess will talk about ways to extend and build our spaces of patience, curiosity, attentiveness and care—in our own daily practices, our front yards, our morning meditations, our cities. How we can weave just a few more poems and a few more green spaces in and how these spaces might enrich us all as we face down the climate crisis, the empathy crisis, the hunger crisis, the loneliness crisis.

Tess will share her belief that people reading poems, people practicing and admiring art, people engaging in acts of art, are more likely to be wise and tolerant citizens, fostering diverse community. The arts foster civic health. Artists are pollinators, too!

Following the talk, Tess will sign copies of her books. We will have Leaning Toward Light for sale, or you are welcome to bring a copy of another volume.

Thank you to Turner Farm, Xavier University and the Brueggeman Center for partnering with us to sponsor this event.