Megan Kaminski
Under Tree Canopy
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
Exploring ideas of indeterminacy, rootedness, and resilience, my poem “Under tree canopy” is part of a larger project that thinks with plants in response to our current moment and in thinking towards the future. Specifically, I’m interested in how research in plant cognition and plant communication can expanded our concepts of sentience, connectedness, and compassion — perhaps in thinking of fungal networks connecting trees to share information across the forest, the epigenetic inheritance of traits through subsequent generations of plants, and “kin recognition” amongst a variety of species. What neglected knowledge can plants share when we encounter them as subjects rather than as setting? In this poem, which was written in the Powell Gardens outside of Kansas City at the start of the COVID pandemic, I was thinking with the dogwoods, willows, and flowering plants in the woodland gardens—as well as with some clumsy juvenile robins and bumblebees. Out of these kinds of direct encounters, and out of research in evolutionary biology, plant studies, and phenomenology, I’ve been exploring a poetics of vegetal life, specifically drawing on plants’ ability to thrive in the face of trauma and loss. The poems coming out of this project both attempt to enter into a world co-present with but other than our own and to see vegetal inhabitance as a model of unconditional generosity in the face of vulnerability.
MEGAN KAMINSKI is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020), Deep City (Noemi, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012). Prairie Divination, her forthcoming illustrated collection of essays + oracle deck with artist L. Ann Wheeler, turns to the plants, animals, and geological features of the prairie ecosystem as guides for living in good relation to each other—and to re-aligning thinking towards kinship, community, and interdependence. An Associate Professor in English and Co-Director of the Global Grasslands CoLABorative at the University of Kansas, she lives in Lawrence, Kansas.