Three California poet laureates, Fresno’s Joseph Rios, El Cerrito’s Tess Taylor and San Francisco’s former poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, received $50,000 from the Academy of American Poetry to fund literary projects in their cities. Their projects include new poetry curriculums, multi-generational workshops, and creating local anthologies. In addition to finding the next generation of poets, the laureates see their mission as creating spaces for people to reflect, connect and build empathy. We talk with them about why we need poetry now and how the artform serves civic life.

Tess Taylor is a self-described Poet Gardener – and if there is ever a season to feel the poetry of life in the garden and with the plants in every cell of your body, it’s springtime! An award-winning poet with many collection titles to her name and editor of the life-supporting anthology Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, Tess is also the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California.

Writers Victoria Kornick and Tess Taylor join Chris to talk about their creative writing projects. The natural world, plants, farming and gardening are all centeral to Victoria and Tess's practices, and in this episode each writer explores the roots of her interests and shares a bit about the current projects bringing them joy.

Tess Taylor, a member of the Ashland University MFA program’s Poetry faculty, will start her one-year term as El Cerrito poet laureate on April 1. She will be helping to build El Cerrito High School’s literary magazine.

Longtime educator, Tess Taylor, says she hopes to connect local students with Bay Area’s wider literary community.

El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor was selected to serve as the City's fourth Poet Laureate during Arts and Culture Commission meeting on February 26, 2024.  

Nina Burokas reviews "Leaning Toward Light" through Raven Chronicles Press

Poet Tess Taylor (59:15) reading with EcoTheo Collective 2024 AWP Off-Site Gathering

With Tiana Clark, Traci Brimhall, Jason Myers, Francisco Aragón, Ciona Rouse, and Maya Popa

Poet Tess Taylor (2:10) speaks with Ann Wallace about her new anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, 2023) and the ability of poems to carry us through the seasons of planting, tending, grieving, harvesting, sharing in a world filled with both joy and crisis. We reflect on the deliberate cultivation of happiness as a discipline, and at the end of our conversation, we spend some time with Tess’s most recent solo collection, Rift Zone, published in 2020 by Red Hen Press.

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The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them. Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”

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A novella steeped in nostalgia for the heyday of Berkeley cinema, a novel written during a BART commute, a report on the young men killed by football and a garden poem anthology are among the recent books with Berkeley ties.

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Book review by Kristina Sepetys

As poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil explains in her forward to Leaning Toward Light: Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them, the word anthology means “gathering of flowers,” and indeed, that is what the book’s editor, El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor, has done in a collection that celebrates the impulse to tend and nurture.

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14 new books of poetry are featured in this exciting guide, including titles from Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, and Matthew Zapruder.

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Sept/Oct. Issue

LEANING TOWARD LIGHT: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them by Tess Taylor. Bring this outside along with your trowel and gloves—Taylor has curated a poetry anthology about the healing power of gardening and connecting with the earth.

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Poet Tess Taylor reading from anthology of garden poems at Amherst College

All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening. That’s a shame, because garden poetry, a venerable tradition, offers insight and inspiration to gardeners everywhere.

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Gardens, like poetry, have restorative powers: Poet Tess Taylor reads from new anthology of garden poems Sept. 19 at Amherst College

All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening.

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Trying

I’d forgotten how much

I like to grow things, I shout

to him as he passes me to paint

the basement. I’m trellising

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Spring Planting

Today I plant bougainvillea and hyacinth. Tomorrow, crocus
and candied pansies.

I am gardening, but my mind is tilling. The crows enter my yard.
They remind me of ink slabs

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Deep Lane

When I’m down on my knees pulling up wild mustard

by the roots before it sets seed, hauling the old ferns

further into the shade, I’m talking to the anvil of darkness:

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Working in the Garden, I Think of My Son

Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash

dissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the air

on the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetected

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Levitation

A hummingbird lights on a woody stem of the cantua,

perches there stilled and looks around. An Anna’s,

the feathers on its neck catching the light

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“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden.

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The wheel of the year is turning, as it always does, beginning its slow shift from summer to the fall. If you’re unsure of how to spend the last days of August, rest assured that even if seasons always shift, one constant you can rely on is that there will always be new books to look forward to. Below, you’ll find twenty new titles to consider picking up to curl up with on these last days of August: fiction that ranges from philosophically complex to comfortingly comedic; poems on the transcendent power of nature and gardening; nonfiction on mavericks, murder, misogyny, mother tongues, and marijuana magazines; and much, much more.

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Tess Taylor on the Ancient Genre of Garden Poems and the Connective Power of Working with Plants

During the worst months of the covid-19 pandemic, when I’d suffered several losses and felt raw and isolated, I spent a great deal of time in our garden.

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Poets dig into gardening themes in new anthology

SANTA CRUZ — If you truly think you shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree, a new poetry anthology might beg to disagree. “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them,” edited by El Cerrito poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor, compiles many poems from classic and contemporary poets that capture the essence of gardening and the connection to the natural world. Taylor, along with local poets Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris — who both contributed to the book — will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz Thursday for readings and signings.

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Tess Taylor Talks About Her Poetry Anthology: “Leaning Toward Light”

Tess Taylor, NPR’s on-air poetry reviewer and lifelong gardener ,discusses—and reads from—her anthology of poetry entitled Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them, which goes on sale August 29th. The collection features work by writers such as Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, and more. In her foreword to the book, Aimee Nezhukumatathil notes that the word anthology means a “gathering of flowers,” a perfect way into this collection, which offers an abundance of writing that celebrates a tactile connection to the natural world and the way in which gardening, like poetry, can help return us to ourselves.

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A celebration of gardening in new poetry anthology

To tend a garden is to engage with hope, that this seed, pressed into the dirt, will rise and grow. It is to engage with nourishment, resurrection, beauty, and other real things of this world: sun, soil, rain, seasons. A new poetry anthology edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor celebrates gardening and the garden in a sweeping variety of contemporary poems.

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After a summer rife with extreme weather events—Canadian wildfires big enough to darken U.S. skies, floods, extreme heat—readers could use a reminder that a more caring relationship with Earth is possible. They will find it in Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, August 2023), which offers a lush bouquet of verse by authors exploring what it means to garden “when the natural world is collapsing, and where...we have not yet managed to cultivate widespread abundance, nourishment, or peace,” as editor Tess Taylor writes in her introduction. Setting the tone for the collection is Ross Gay’s now-famous lyric “A Small Needful Fact,” which considers the tragic irony that Eric Garner—who was killed in 2014 by a New York City police officer’s chokehold—worked in horticulture and therefore made “it easier / for us to breathe.” Jericho Brown remembers the morning glories that his mother grew in “Foreday Morning,” Mark Doty compares weeding to a way of fighting existential dread in “Deep Lane,” and Jenny Xie counts the ways a garden “sets off the mind’s tripwires” in an excerpt from “Tending,” among other hearty selections. At the start of each section, an author offers a prose meditation and a recipe, such as Jane Hirshfield’s braised fava beans. Bright illustrations of curling green tendrils and pink and purple buds make the collection a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. As Aimee Nezhukumatathil reminds readers in her foreword: “[T]he word anthology means a ‘gathering of flowers.’ ... How perfect, then, to have this gathering, this flowering, of poems, about the connection of hand to earth.”  

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Garden poetry reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace and joy to many. The Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes poets Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris and Ellen Bass at 7 p.m. Aug. 31 at the store,1520 Pacific Ave. Santa Cruz for a reading of their beautiful anthology “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them.” The book contains an inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal, and celebrate our connection to the green world.

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In ‘Leaning Toward Light,’ tending to life through a garden of poems. Tess Taylor's anthology gathers verse giants and local greenhorns, recipes and short essays into an almanac of living.

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