On Gardening and Poetry

For the Washington Post's Lifestyle section, Adrian Higgins draws on poems by Stanley Kunitz, Genine Lentine, and Louise Glück to explore some of the ways that gardening can be likened to the craft of poetry. Higgins writes that "[f]or some of the greatest poets, all the important lessons and metaphors about life can be found somewhere right outside the back door." More: 

Something as prosaic as a compost pile feeds not just the soil, but also the fertile imagination of someone like Stanley Kunitz, who spent summers working in his seaside garden in Cape Cod.

In his 1995 poem “The Round,” he tells us that the only thing he can see outside his study is the “bloated compost heap,” but that is enough to inspire a paean to his garden and its powers to renew his very being each morning.

For Genine Lentine, poet, lifelong gardener and writing teacher, the link between gardening and poetry seems obvious.

There is a “kindred experience” between the two, she says, and both are ethical pursuits, in that they demonstrate a deep caring for the world and a need to connect to it. This is not a one-way street: The garden in turn nurtures us. “A lot of poets walk around, asking: ‘How do we survive, how do we thrive, how do we flourish?’ And the garden takes us through those questions.”

Read more at Washington Post.