Why plant poetry?
Why get my hands dirty?
There are many serious answers to these questions but I'm going to propose that the main reason you might plant a poem is to add mischief and sparkle to your day.
Exuding joy and doing what we do with inquisitive playfulness is a radical act. Radicle in plant terms means the first root out of the seed. Where can you be the first root out of the seed of something in your own lives? Be that exploratory, essential root that grounds the whole growth of what comes after. From little things, big things grow.
After talking online to a roomful of students about poetic misrule, it was enormously pleasurable to take a poem outside and read it out loud to my garden. The poem asked me to think about the 'hurts' we do each other and the land, and how the 'hertz' of those acts reverberate. I thought too about the care I give the plants and creatures in my garden, and about the attention they give each other and me. If I greet my teenager with warmth and without wanting anything in return, it genuinely seems to brighten his day. Why would the soil or the tree or the bumblebee be any different?
For planting, I settled on a patch of soil right by the back door, nearby the Daphne that I planted there so her winter scent could fill the room. Many varieties of bee come to feed on the early nectar of this beautiful, pink-flowered tree. It called me over, said plant your poem here. This is at its most simple level what 'listening' to plants entails for me. It's not fancy, it’s definitely foolish, but it feels right. It felt like the planting was welcome under this tree that's so beloved by me, by the blue tits, long-tailed tits, wrens and sparrows who are now rummaging through its clusters of flowers for a tasty dinner.
I urge you to be unruly, un-hook yourself from whatever you 'have to do' and find a tree by instinct. Take along a poem and lean on the tree. Tell it you've come over to bring it a poem and ask for it to listen. See what happens. Linger.
Maybe let the idea of speaking to trees marinade in both you and the tree. Ask again, can I read you a poem? And get to it. You'll never really know if it's your imagination that says, yes, and I don't think it really matters because I can tell you from experience that if you're not welcome, you'll know. Not all trees like poems, just like not all people do either!
If you're itching to plant whole poems then I can heartily recommend buying a copy of Hertz. Inside the fold, the authors have generously written about their collaboration and the science we gave them to inspire the collaboration.
The packet of seeds that comes with each copy of Hertz will sink 3 kgs of carbon in their first year alone! Yes, really. Please buy Copies of DIRT and send them to friends.
When we sell copies of this poem, they directly support the next DIRT commission, which in turn fosters more co-operation, which I have to say feels frankly more and more important with each passing week. I hope you're keeping well and strong in order to lend your communities whatever you can spare in terms of energy, activism and creativity. Getting our hands dirty and planting has never been more important! As I write these final words, the rain has just started wetting the patch of seed I scattered earlier. How lucky is that!
Yours in emerging spring,
Alice Willitts, Editor
Enormous thanks to Alycia and Hannah for writing for DIRT. If you're near St Andrew’s, Scotland, we're launching Hertz at the StAnza Poetry Festival on the 15th March.
StAnza Poetry Festival DIRT poetry walk 3.30pm on 15th March, where JLM Morton and I will be performing our DIRT collaboration ‘Chapel’ to support the launch of ‘Hertz’ by the very wonderful poets, Alycia Pirmohamed & Hannah Copley.
Author biographies
Hannah Copley’s poetry includes Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry) shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 and Speculum (Broken Sleep Books). She was winner of the 2019 Newcastle Poetry Prize for ‘Juice’ and winner of the 2018 YorkMix/York Literature Festival Poetry Prize for ‘Haworth, 1855’. Hannah is an Editor at Stand magazine and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. In 2023, she won the Nan Shepherd Prize for her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place, forthcoming with Canongate. Her poetry includes Another Way to Split Water (Berlinn) and most recently the collaboration this too is a glistening, (Bitter Melon). Alycia is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and she currently teaches on the Creative Writing MSt at the University of Cambridge.
This collaboration was funded by the Laura Kinsella Foundation, for which we are very, very grateful.
DIRT plantable poetry with Dialect Press
More info about the DIRT project at https://www.dialect.org.uk/dirt