Mihaela Moscaliuc
In Praise of Fungi
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I have always loved mushrooms and, even more than eating them, I loved hunting for them in the forests of Romania, where I grew up. Some of my best childhood memories involve roaming the woods with my folks at dawn, using our noses as detectors, while my mother whispered strange songs to help mushrooms grow faster. In recent years, I’ve grown to revere the mycelium (the invisible part of the mushroom, and probably the largest extant organism) and its role in our ecosystems as carbon sink, digestive track, defense mechanism, and communication network. “In praise of fungi” is a self-elegy in which I imagine the way I would like to depart: by becoming part of the mycelium, composted, feeding the mushrooms, creating as little waste as possible. My great grandfather staged his funeral and had it documented in photographs that he could then enjoy. He did not want to miss out on his own death. This poem became, in the process of writing, my way of taking pleasure in orchestrating my death.
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Cemetery Ink, Immigrant Model, and Father Dirt, translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper, editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern, and co-editor of Border Lines: Poems of Migration. She is associate professor of English at Monmouth University, NJ and translation editor at Plume.