In the Parc André Citroën in Paris, designed by Gilles Clément and Alain Provost on the site of the former Citroën automobile factory, I followed the diagonal path cutting across the parc’s varied sectors—south east to north west—past the Jardin des Métamorphoses, through the vast rectangular central lawn, to the six serial gardens (evoking the serial poem—each associated with a metal, a planet, a form of water, a sense, and certain plants) and the concluding Jardin en Mouvement, un-gardened and growing wild near the Seine—accepting whatever volunteers arrive (carried by wind bird animal or foot). Herein I found a new impulse for poetry. To be a planetary gardener, to work a garden in motion, is to work with the entangled relations of all living things—their mobilities and temporary landing patches. To work the planetary garden is to work at the unboundary between settled and unsettled organic migrants, living seed to root, as other beings might hand to mouth. It is to make a music of the sphere on which all life lives—a music out of neglect, growing rampant in the spaces we have used up, poisoned, and now forgotten. Ask the easements and vacant lots—piled with rusting steel, wire, old wood, torn fencing: the entire earth is a theoretical garden—a garden of seeds and sentient theories. Garden I will follow, when you move your lush borders. Now see the grass, the flowers, and the trees, Virgil tells Dante, high atop Mount Purgatory—his parting words—that Earth here brings forth solely for herself.
Gardens in Motion is part of a longer, three-part poem, to be published by Talonbooks in 2025 as The Middle. Dante, his Purgatory, and the Earthly Garden on the mountain’s summit are its guiding lights, written as it is from the midst of wildfires and atmospheric rivers. That middle poem of the Italian’s Commedia is a book of mobilities—everyone is striving upward. My book The Middle ends in mobile gardens, inspired by Gilles Clément’s theorizing around plant mobility. For Clément, the gardener today necessarily has to work with (rather than against) the powerful flux of life, provoking him to imagine a kind of utopian ecology where all of life together, including humanity, interacts without borders. This prompts Clément to refer to mobile plants as vagabonds which decamp to abandoned zones that he calls undocumented tracts. He also calls these abandoned zones a Third Landscape: a territory of the many species that cannot find a place elsewhere.
All of this resonates with my little above/ground pamphlet Gardens in Motion, although Clément is not directly cited much there. There is some Wordsworth (cut, excess discarded, compressed, reframed). And some Éduard Glissant (chaos monde). But more than anything else, this is a poem made out of seed dispersal research (the science of how plants migrate, by creep of root and shower of seed, and the direction in which they migrate). They are, depending on what they are and where they are, heading by and large in a north-westerly direction—away from the equator—at a speed measured against the velocity of climate change. Benjamin Von Brackel, in Nowhere Left to Go, describes this mass movement of life, the great redistribution or exodus of species, as global warming made flesh. Plants are a fascinating character in this plot, because we don’t think of them when we think of life’s mobilities. As Paco Calvo writers in Planta Sapiens, Plants underpin much of life on this planet, yet our animal speed makes them invisible to us.
My poetic practice has long been a citational one: poetry, I’ve always believed, is a process of linguistic commoning. Writing is made out of things read—materially, literally. Sometimes such practices have been called collage or bricolage. Sometimes I’ve thought of them as an entanglement (spooky motions at varied distances in space and time). Now I see it as a form of literary seed dispersal. Clément’s garden in motion is an acknowledgement that we can’t keep the invasive out of our back yards. That plants always escape, seeds have wills too, and how do we assess their rights to move vs our right to keep them out and keep things put—under rapidly declining conditions of our making? But that our is complicated, to say the least. If I mean human vs more-than-human, ok, but—all humans? There’s the Anthropocene problem (wait, who did this!?). Not all of us, I’m sure. But I have strong feelings for that larger us, the biosphere, ranging across the planet’s surface, as it always has, jumping fences, seas and mountain ranges as it can, in its varied forms. I want to cheer on the voyages of desperate human beings and desperate plants and animals as they follow the third landscapes human activity (the activity that has profited some human beings) has ripped up and abandoned once again. I want word-seeds to blow drift wash and get carried (eaten and shat) from one text read to another plot of text written.
Gardens in Motion is less elegy (perhaps the mode of these times) than it is ode (a kind of a celebration)—although if that is the case, it is an ode that yet worries what the consequences of all this motion will be, and perhaps laments the fact that this has to happen at all. This is climate migration from below. Remember the plants—they too have places to be and become.
Stephen Collis is the author of over
a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost
Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories
of Rain (2021) was a finalist for
the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the
recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near
Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at
Simon Fraser University.