Let’s Write Back and Forth About Gardens
(Prairie Lights Reading: Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil)
by Caroline Meek
Think of yourself when you were four to seven years old, when you didn’t have to be told to look or to wonder...flipping through books…every page was wondrous, not knowing what would be on the next page. You were always pointing stuff out. Think of that kid – write in honor of that kid.” –Aimee Nezhukumatathil
At 6:59pm CST last Friday, I sat at my kitchen table (mulled cider candle burning to my right, freshly cut hydrangeas to the left) and waited for the hosts to let me out of the waiting room and into the Zoom call.
When I arrived, Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil were already there, laughing with Writers@Grinnel host Dean Bakopoulos. The participant chat column was soon active with hi’s hello’s, glad to be here’s. A message from a familiar name popped up in the chat – a "Hiiiiiiiiii <3<3<3” from poet icon Franny Choi herself – and I was reminded that this was the one of the joys of online readings. Across multiple time zones, in kitchens and living rooms, on couches and back porches, we were here. Dropped without ceremony or distinction into the chat with a virtual room of more or less well-known strangers.
I settled in with my Notes app and some Dove chocolate for an absolutely delightful evening of poetry with these two incredible people. Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil have published books both separately and in collaboration. For this reading, they each read from their recently published books (Gay: The Book of Delights, Nezhukumatathil: World of Wonders), as well as from their joint collection, Letters from Two Gardens.
Little Delights from the Reading
Ross Gay interrupting himself mid-poem to make a comment about axolotls. I’m not sure if I saw him stop smiling at any point during this reading.
“Melon season, a time of year I find myself abundantly hydrated.” From Gay’s poem, “An Abundance of Public Toilets” which is about trying and failing to find a place to piss in “the lavatorial deprivation that New York city is.”
The virtual audience’s moment of collective enlightenment after Ross Gay compared a porta-potty to a confessional.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s gorgeous floral background, in front of which she asked her audience, “did you know a moon can have a moon, and it is called a moon moon?”
Gay’s shyness at admitting he had wanted to write the perfect book – and how collaboration released him from that pressure. “You’re not in control,” Nezhukumatathil agreed. They’d wrote Letters from Two Gardens in the form of physical letters back and forth. “You never knew what was coming next.”
How I immediately texted my old writing buddy “hey, wanna write a poem together?” and felt inspired for the rest of the night.
Nezhukumatathil’s cactus wren flying over endless suburban swimming pools. This bird was one of two hundred plants and animals she had wanted to write about. She ended up narrowing that number to thirty for the actual book, which is still a lot of plants and animals. This poem described the longest species of wren, an eight-inch-long wren, “one who knew how to hollow out a place for himself in a place uninhabitable.”
Gay describing “the most beautiful wound” in twenty-something tree species.
Nezhukumatathil telling us about the Greek word for “poet”. How it means “to make” – not just poetry, but anything. Cake, shower songs, perfect circles on roller skates. How we continue being poets even when words aren’t coming out of us.
“Think of yourself when you were four to seven years old,” said Nezhukumatathil near the end. “When you didn’t have to be told to look or to wonder. She described us flipping through picture books, curious and unaware of what was coming next.
Can we go through the world like that, now?
Nezhukumatathil put into words something I’ve been trying to cultivate in myself for a while. After the Zoom call had ended, I smiled at the hydrangeas, well-hydrated in their post-pasta sauce mason jar.
“Think of that kid,” she said, “write in honor of that kid.”