Meet Our Fellows: Ariana Benson
OSGF
The foundation of human civilization is built from the relationship between humans and nature. This connection is certainly primitive, with nature providing food, medicine, and protection, but it is also social, as it is embedded in our cultures, perceptions, and beliefs. The Oak Spring Garden Foundation’s Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence is designed to allow people to explore these relationships through research and artistic practices.
Ariana Benson, our 2022 Eliza Moore Fellow, is a poet with an interest in this connection through the lens of black history. She is the recipient of the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her manuscript Black Pastoral. Scroll down to read our Q&A with Ariana, and visit her website to learn more about her projects and publications: https://arianabenson.wordpress.com/about/
OS: Tell us a little about yourself and your artistic practice - what do you feel is important to know?
AB: I am a poet. I was mostly inspired into arts by my grandad. He was the first African American Navy photographer, so he had all these incredible pictures of the North Pole and everywhere that he went, he also did needlepoint, crochet, and all this artsy stuff. I never really got to meet him, he passed away two days after I was born so there is that cosmic connection there. I kind of just know him through his art and what my dad, aunts and uncles tell me about him. I think growing up looking at his work really just inspired me and there was this quote he always said, “photographers paint with light,” which I am sure he didn't come up with, but it was what he lived by. I think about poetry as painting with words and that is where it originated. I am a nature poet so I write alot about landscape, plants, bugs and all that stuff but through the lense of black history, I often like using it to kind of frame and help understand the history and lives of my ancestors.Also, I am from Virginia so a lot of it is southern which is cool.
OS: What role do plants play in your work?
A: Plants do a lot for me, I am often looking up different details about them, different facts to try to open up a way to tell a story. A specific example would be this story that I read, months back, about this little boy in North Carolina who got arrested for picking a Tulip out of a woman's yard from a bus stop. He was about 5 or 6 years old. I have been trying to write about that because this is a black child and it goes to all the criminalization that we experience. I couldn't find the right way into that poem so I spent a while looking up Tulips, Tulip mania in the Netherlands, and trying to find a good frame for it. Then I read that tulips usually have 6 petals but half of them are sepals which are really leaves but they are almost identical to the petals, opening up this idea of what is pretending to be beautiful, what that women understand as beauty and what was she pretending to understand about beauty to make her call the police on the little boy. That is an example of plants, their structure and their ways into stories that I like.
OS: What have you been working on during your residency at Oak Spring?
A: I have been trying to write this essay that has been rolling around in my head for a while about poetics, specifically, of the black field. I kept this idea of the field being experienced differently as a black space, it has that really fraught history but it's also really beautiful and there are a lot of wonderful things that happened, with people learning how to nurture the lands and people learning how to nurture themselves from the land. I am looking at different poets in writing about the field to try to cobble together this idea of the black field and what that space means historically through poetics and life.
OS: Is there anything you’ve encountered here that you have found particularly interesting or inspiring?
A: I do love the Gallery. I am a big ekphrastic poet which means that I often write in response to visual art so I love looking at paintings and visualizing what the person who was watching that scene did or visualizing what might be going on in the art. Also, the Library’s rare books. I have never really interacted with rare books before and I got to read some really old copies of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, that was really a cool experience.
OS: What do you hope people learn or take away from your work?
A: I hope people understand that human relationships with nature can be both beautiful and really fraught, ugly and heinous. We can kind of hold both of these at the same time because we see all these things that we are doing to the planet, like the heat waves, the environmental change, that is 100% our fault, and a lot of ugliness but there is also a lot of beauty and a lot of people who really care and have really tender relationships with the land. I hope that my work shows that it's not really an either or proposition but something that is both and by looking at both we can understand that there is beauty for us to turn towards.
OS: Is there anything else you’d like to say about your work, or your time at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation?
A: I have just really had a great time. The landscape here is beautiful, it's been really inspiring to just sit, write and see fields for ages, that's been wonderful. This has also been my first residency and that's been a wonderful experience, where I slightly got into a routine, having the time to write, read and think has been wonderful. Thank you to Oak Spring for the Fellowship, I had a great time!
Ariana’s poetry is just one example of the range of work the Eliza Moore Fellowship supports. If you are an early career scholar in the humanities whose work is related to plants, gardens, or landscapes, consider applying – applications for our 2024 Fellowships and Residency programs will open in early 2023.