Compost poems

In another life, our fundraiser Joey is also a poet and occasional poetry teacher, organiser, critic. He has just written an essay about a poetry pamphlet by Sean Roy Parker, an artist, poet, and landworker, whose work and thinking about food, land, and practical, grassroots community support, is in close conversation with our own work and thinking at MUD. The article thinks a little about what activities like community arts, poems, gardening, fermenting workshops, cooking together, have in common, as forms of creative play which help us to think through the ways we want to live together.

We’ve extracted a few short sections where that article touches most on what we do in our own gardens:

“

I approach a table of friends, it’s Friday afternoon, volunteer lunch, the most sociable point in the week at Platt Fields Market Garden, a community garden on a reclaimed bowling green in an otherwise densely urban part of South Manchester. ‘Do you wanna hear a poem about compost?’ Of course they do. I read Sean Roy Parker’s ‘Lasagne Bed’, which, as it turns out, describes one friend’s favourite composting method:

            weed out the dirt strip in a blizzard then stratify

            […]

            now water it with rain runoff harvested in a bin

            pull over the tarpaulin        blue as in I found it in a shed

I love this poem, for its sharing of practical knowledge, its care and joy in one of my favourite tasks, the magical act of building soil with ones bare hands, and many tiny collaborators.

[...]

‘Supermarkets and Food Capitalism’, published on Parker’s blog Fermental Health in 2023, contextualises his art’s relation to its social-ecological circumstances. Thinking at a systemic level, Parker connects the most visible deadly violences of our dominant modes of food production and distribution – pesticide and chemical fertiliser, plastic packaging, air freight – with interlocking structures whose place in this constellation is often more obscured: poverty, inequality, gentrification, labour conditions, the basic extractive position of colonial capitalism towards the fruits and creatures of the earth. ‘The fight for food sovereignty – how communities are primary stakeholders in the production, trading and consumption of their food – is the fight for people and the environment, and against corporate monopoly. By virtue, all of my desires and all of yours are interconnected.’ We are firmly within the politicised agroecological tradition which says there is no ‘sustainable farming’ without re-shaping the economic and material conditions which alienate people from the land, which privatise life itself, leaving many hungry, displaced, overworked.

Parker’s art is on a continuum with both personal shifts in consumption, and projects of community care and activism, feeding people and fighting the structures that keep them hungry: ‘It has become a primary aim of mine to deeply transform every aspect of my relationship with food, to critically engage on a daily basis, create discourse through my art practice and sidestep the boobytraps that capitalism lays out along the way’

            let’s be honest

            you would not work

            sixty hours a week

            picking strawberries

            in a heat wave

            while

            pesticides

            strip your microbiome

            without

            basic health insurance

                                                (‘shortages’)

[…]

‘Community Kraut’ describes massaging its salted cabbage:

            I’m sharing personal data with plants

            my fingertips deposit skin and yeast

            countless wild animals

            compounding compassionate metamorphosis

            for health and wealth        for kin or market

The scene it depicts of friends making sauerkraut together – what tools are used, the action of the hand, the way it all feels – is also a vision, of an act of care and collaboration amongst a collective of human and non-human agents. This vision is a metonym for the pamphlets’ sense of how we might live differently, in relations of mutuality and un-owning, which begin from these small-scale acts, but never forget that the individual acting is in collectivity and community, and looks through that interface towards systemic change.

I read all this through my own experience of working, volunteering, playing, and occasionally running poetry workshops at Platt Fields Market Garden. Not only is that work about the same things as Parker’s, working towards the same goals – food sovereignty, environmental restoration, a community of critters collectively caring for one another’s needs in shared space – but it is does so in structurally similar ways. When we learn to compost, to grow, to preserve food, when we eat together, or use art and/or gardening to soothe our overwrought nervous systems, to care for our own minds and bodies through the act of building something together, learning also to understand seasons, soil, microbes – ‘slow life ok ~ learn to hate hyperproductivity’, as Parker writes at the start of ‘Lasagne Bed’ – this too is both skillshare and creative play. What Parker’s work shows me in this space, beyond its practical lessons, is also the possibilities of re-figuring the relations in the shape of our art-making, by dissolving its distinction from all these other forms of activity through which we might, can, must, co-create a world where we can all actually survive, in community with many intertwining human, plant, animal, fungal, microbial lives.

            Art is mostly for and by humans so I make art for worms.

                                                                                                (‘Vermiculture’)

”

To learn more about Parker’s work and read Joey’s full essay, head to Corridor8. Thanks to them for commissioning the piece, and giving space to think through these ideas. And see Parker’s pamphlet, stewarding, from Monitor Books.