Bonnie Costello
Love and Lichen
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
One of the many things I love about being in an uncultivated landscape is the way it throws off my everyday sense of scale, of time and space. This can be unsettling, but it can also be transporting. Elizabeth Bishop gets at both in her beautiful love poem, “The Shampoo,” which compares the “shocks” of gray in her lover’s hair to the “still explosions on the rocks, the lichens” outside their home. Metaphor is one important way we connect to nature, not so much imposing ourselves on it as likening ourselves to it, to gain fresh perspective. The phenomenon of lichen also challenges our impulse to classify and separate, arising as it does through the merger of two entities that function so differently elsewhere in nature.
Bonnie Costello is Professor of English Emerita at Boston University. She divides her time between Boston and the Berkshires, and between writing and hiking. Her publications include many books and articles on modern poetry, most recently The Plural of US: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. Her literary essays have appeared in previous issues of this journal, and in Terrain.org, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, North American Review, and Arnoldia, among others.