Before the Soil Settles: Quarantine Acts, Spring 2020
OSGF
Water the Babies
Forsythia
To Respond
Q&A With Jesse Curran
Where have you been the past few months?
I have been almost entirely at home in Northport on Long Island. Northport, like most of Long Island, is suburban, but it is also a rather charming historic fishing village. About a year ago, my husband and I became homeowners in Northport Village. We own a flat and sunny .23 acre and in some ways, the quarantine has been a blessing because it has allowed us to focus our attention on our own space. For the past 9 years, we have owned and operated a small business called “Home Organic Gardening Service,” which builds, plants, plans, and maintains organic vegetable gardens and other sustainable systems (fruit trees, berry bushes, seasons extenders, composting systems, etc.). Often, time and attention turns to clients and projects away from home. These past few months have allowed us to dig in here at home. Early on in quarantine it became very clear that this year, in a victory-garden sense, the residential food garden’s value and wisdom would be heightened. So far we have planted well more than what we expect to need in an effort to share our excess with our neighbors. We have also planted extensive berry bushes, figs, and a number of fruit trees. We have two kids under 5, and with preschool closed, the gardening projects have become part of the structure of our days. The kids eat breakfast, get dressed, brush teeth, and get outside to “water the babies.” And for all the challenges of parenting while trying to work two full-time jobs with no childcare, this has been a special time for us.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
I see my work as a combination of three fields: poetry and philosophical inquiry; organic gardening/permaculture; and contemplative practice (specifically hatha yoga). I did a PhD in environmental poetics, with specialized interests in Thoreau and Dickinson. I also am a certified Yoga instructor with close to 1000 hours of teaching experience. In my 20s, I volunteered for several summers on organic farms in Italy and did my permaculture design certification at Punta Mona in Costa Rica. The connections between these fields are ancient, endless, and empowering. All three fields are grounded in ethics – or relations between self and world – and they all manifest their intentions through deliberate practice. They are also activated by metaphor, and employ the lexicon of the garden to generate intellectual, emotional, and spiritual connectivity. I believe that many of our social/economic structures afflict us rather than empower us, and that committing oneself to an ethical/creative practice like hatha yoga, or poetry writing, or maintaining a garden, helps one heal and regenerate. For me personally, these practices breathe life into one other. They offer endless wisdom and teach me how to live. They provide narratives of growth, compassion, care, and surrender. Whatever happens, I know I can go back to them. And there are great contemporary voices like W.S. Merwin and Wendell Berry, whose work powerfully reveals the beauty and consolation of poetic gardening as a form of contemplative practice.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
Currently I am working on completing a chapbook of poetry called Double Stroller Dreams. These are poems about the rocky terrain of early parenthood. Before having children, it was very easy for me to experiment with a more radically sustainable lifestyle. The transition into parenthood has been exhausting and bewildering. Suddenly something like a Ziploc bag can become a small existential crisis for me. Things I swore I would never do—and emotions I didn’t often feel— are suddenly and sometimes uncontrollably part of my life. I have had to learn to let a lot go, and to try and focus on joy, which often emerges from struggle. Despite being in a type of survival mode as a working parent/artist, there is labor and love and a commitment to “taking care” of one’s metaphorical garden—and of doing the best you can. These poems work to negotiate this terrain. They seek to breathe space into – and make peace within— the frenzy of suburban parenthood in our current historical moment, amidst the uncertainty of climate change, environmental destruction, pandemics, social injustice, and political chaos.
I am also working on several creative essays that continue to explore the poetic-ethic of gardening practice. One essay, entitled “Perennial Dreams” explores the suburban yard in the context of the landless farmer on Long Island. The other essay brings together two passions: permaculture and the Roman poet Virgil’s agricultural masterpiece, Georgics. In my essays, I seek to explore big philosophical ideas and literary voices through the intimacy of my own experiences – as a woman, a teacher, a mother, a writer, and a vulnerable human being. I think the classics are for everyone and that we are all philosophers, as our human hearts often dwell in uncertainty. In these essays, I try to bring the “tradition” down to my experience, through asking questions like, what do these ancient ideas look like through the lens of a 21 st century working mother? Are there ways that georgic ethics can coexist with shopping at Costco? I don’t always have the answers, but I try to explore the questions and to use my own uncertainty as the material of inquiry.
How has your artistic practice changed during this time?
It has been revived, deepened, and feels increasingly necessary and important. I have always kept a journal (I have a 92 volume handwritten journal that I’ve been keeping for about 20 years), but like many writers, I started a separate daily “covid journal” on March 13 and have committed to keeping it for at least a year. Daily practice is key in crazy times and I find these type of projects grounding. I feel like right now I need to keep a “covid journal” as a form of witness and personal discipline to ground my impressions and concerns. I often find that maintaining a daily project is akin to maintaining a compost pile. It becomes the rich soil from which more focused/polished poems will eventually emerge. Somedays you’re just throwing your coffee grinds into the pile and it doesn’t seem like anything is happening; somedays I’m just jotting down notes, chronicling the mundanity of my exhaustion. Ultimately, I believe that in the midst of radical uncertainty, it is necessary to return to one’s sources of strength and find ways of mourning, creating, and with hope, singing from that place. As Rachel Carson wrote, “to contemplate the beauty of the earth is to find sources of strength that will last as long as life itself.” I find strength in the beauty of the earth, the pen on the page, and in taking a few deep breaths. I find strength in watching the broccoli crowns get a bit bigger each day, and in experiencing this wonder through my daughter’s big beautiful brown eyes.
Has COVID-19 shifted how you think about the natural world?
COVID-19 serves to reveal what is already present: broken food systems, unsustainable and conformist landscapes, and a culture that is increasingly unaware of ecological imbalances. Such revelation can be constructive in that it challenges us to break old habits and take steps toward change; it allows us to immediately intervene in creative ways. Over these past months, I’ve never seen so many folks in my town out in their yards and so many of my neighbors talking about gardening. People have had time to take a new look about what is right in front of them. We contract with a greenhouse to start our seedlings and we always end up with extra plants. This year, we put the plants out at the end of the driveway with a sign that said “free.” They all went, and we had many good conversations with neighbors. So I wouldn’t necessarily say COVID-19 has shifted my thought, but rather has affirmed my conviction that taking time with the earth is a very real and important action—therapeutically, civically, and environmentally—during this time of crisis. No one says it better than Wendell Berry: “A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.” Without deep and sustained connection to place, we are lost.
I also think that the pandemic has offered many of us time to slow down. Indeed, in NY, Governor Cuomo’s response agenda was called “PAUSE.” What a gift for culture that is in a perpetual rush. For me, in having a break from commuting, I was able to take time to go for a walk or jog every afternoon along the same path. Each day, I could notice the progression of what my daughter and I call “signs of spring” – new growth, splashes of color, the increasing shade as the leaves filled in. I know that I am enormously privileged to be able to have this time at home, and I hope that I can use this gift in creative and regenerative ways. When we slow down enough to watch the natural world, we become absorbed in its wonders. And these wonders can be empowering.