Vegetal Delights: The Phytopoetics of Ross Gay

Abstract

This article explores the poetics at work in Black American poet Ross Gay’s contemporary two-volume Book of Delights (2019 and 2023). I argue that his delights are phytopoetic, which describes moments when plants impact the human imagination and, by extension, shape human culture and aesthetic production, such as literary texts. Such phytopoetic processes are moments of co-creation, involving plants both as engaged in poietic making and in the shaping of the poetics of a given text. By examining patterns of form in Gay’s prose and close reading some of his delights that center on plants, this article unfolds Gay’s specific phytopoetics and shows that the delights are a genre that operates on plant time: seasonal, cyclical, and rooted in growth. As such, the genre slows down the reader and draws attention to the delight found in small, everyday encounters with plants and the world around us, even in the midst of overwhelming crises.

1. Introduction

Ross Gay’s Book of Delights series (2019 [1] and 2023 [2]) contains what he calls “essayettes,” i.e., short reflections on a delightful moment that he wrote by hand every day for a year (from one August birthday to his next). He has committed to engaging in this exercise every five years, and the books publish a selection of those brief essays, edited only lightly. A typical delight is anywhere between one to at most five pages long, and they focus on moments that might otherwise escape our attention or be quickly forgotten, such as a squirrel dunking for seeds in a pumpkin, a lost glove stuck on a tree branch that makes the tree appear to be waving at passersby, the informal fruit trading economy of a neighborhood, the interaction of cats on one’s street, or running into a friend unexpectedly.1 Ross Gay is a poet, and the prose of his delights is ramble-y, neologistic, and dwells in long sentences that occasionally get interrupted just like speech or are followed by a row of very short, fragmentary sentences.2 Ross Gay is also a gardener, and his attention to the plants around him is present in almost every delight and is inscribed on both book covers, which show a leafy branch (2019 [1]) and a dandelion plant with blossom, seeds, and roots (2023 [2]).3 There are other things we learn about Ross Gay from his delights: he loves basketball, is vegan, his partner Stephanie has a dog, he is African American, he teaches at Indiana University Bloomington, he rides his bike, he drinks coffee and reads great books that are assembled in an appendix to The Book of (More) Delights, and he occasionally misses a deadline or appointment. His delights are both very personal and have universal appeal. Writing and reading them has the effect of focusing on the little positive encounters in the everyday, yet without ignoring the larger problems of our time.

In this contribution, I am exploring Ross Gay’s phytopoetics in his Book of Delights volumes. I have defined phytopoetics elsewhere (Jacobs 2019 [4] and 2022 [5]) as the impact plants have on the human imagination and, by extension, cultural production. There, I looked at historical moments in which plants have co-shaped the ways humans think about gender and sexuality ([4,5]) and school curricula ([4]). While I have focused on vegetal eroticism and vegetal violence in particular, there are many other ways in which plants have co-created not just nature but culture (see for instance Patrícia Vieira’s work on “phyographia” [6] and John C. Ryan’s discussions of poetry [7,8,9]). My definition comes out of scholarship in animal studies, looking at phytopoetics in analogy to what Derrida [10] first called zoopoetics in reference to Kafka’s oeuvre (for the development of the term, see Moe [11]; Driscoll and Hoffmann [12]; Haraway [13], including her sympoiesis or ‘making-with’ [14]; Middelhoff and Schönbeck [15]; and Middelhoff [16]). Drawing on this work, I highlight the ways in which plants are engaged in poietic making. While that can happen in poetry, I have always been particularly fascinated by the way it happens in prose.4 Ross Gay’s delights, the everyday prose of a poet-gardener, are full of a particular kind of phytopoetic prose expression, as this article will unfold.

2. Dandelions and Poetics

The text that likely inspired the dandelion cover of Gay’s Book of (More) Delights is number 52, called “Truly Overnight Sometimes It Seems” and written on 15 April. It centers on a particular plant, here the dandelion, as several of his other essays do as well (see, e.g., “Sweet Potato Harvest” and “Garlic Sprouting” in 2023 [2], and “Transplanting” and “Lily on the Pants” in 2019 [1]). This delight is also typical in respect to one predominant feature of Gay’s prose in these volumes, namely a penchant for long, meandering, stream-of-consciousness sentences. Indeed, one delight jokingly invents the alternative title Book of Digressions and suggests this prose style would lend itself to a Book of Preambles ([2], p. 213), which are themselves the topic of a delight, just like footnotes and their many cousins ([2], pp. 68–73). This style is partly owed to the hand-written, daily, quick, and conceptually ‘barely edited’ nature of the essayettes that describe the delightful moment (and usually where and how the author came across it), but it is also, so I argue, a phytopoetic quality. What I mean by that is not just that plants are significant in Gay’s writing and focus his and, by extension, the reader’s attention—whether they are central or not to a given delight. Beyond that, I argue that Gay’s writing has a certain vegetal quality or plantiness; that there are ways in which plants co-create his prose. They certainly do so materially, as Gay is writing on plant-derived material (there is a delight dedicated to his paper notebooks), and through the senses, as Gay is presumably describing plants that he really saw, smelled, touched, or ate that day. But I am looking for the ways in which plants are co-creating the thought landscapes of the delights and the writing—that is the choice of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, syntactically and semantically—in short, the poetics of Ross Gay. Put differently, this article is about tracing elements of plant agency and vegetal storytelling in the language of The Book of Delights series, and such phytopoetic moments simultaneously reveal the ways in which humans imagine plants in a specific time and place.

Before showing what Gay’s poetics looks like in more detail with the help of the dandelion text, let me define poetics.5 The word family of the poetic/poet/poetics is associated with literature, or more narrowly, one of its main genre categories, the lyric. Its root is the Greek word poiesis, which means ‘making’ and refers to the art of text production. More specifically, poetics determine the rules for literary writing. Rulebooks for writers, such as Plato’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica, have shaped Western literary production since antiquity and determined—following Aristotle—what was supposed to be the ideal form for which content. The norms laid out in poetics shaped the understanding of various genres, such as poetry, prose, and drama, and thus the expectations of listeners/readers throughout various periods. In the 19th century, the breaking of these rules became part of the literary canon, which has increasingly been the hallmark of modern literature. While categories like ‘the novel’ of course persist, (post)modern authors are expected to develop their own poetics. Analyzing the poetics of an author as I do in this article is called Poetologie in German, a term that often disappears in English, where it is typically retranslated into poetics (instead of poetology). When plants are actively involved in the creation of literary texts, the result is phytopoetics, a human–plant collaboration that extends into literary language in both form and content, and even, as I have shown previously in my other work, into human culture beyond single literary works. Phytopoetics thus shows the impact of plants on the human imagination, i.e., plant agency co-creating and shaping language, literature, and culture.

3. Making Growth Visible

Returning to the dandelion delight by Ross Gay, “Truly Overnight Sometimes It Seems” begins with the same words as its title and continues to describe the blooming of dandelions in a sentence that makes up approximately half of the nearly three-page delight.6 This 18-line sentence, which culminates in a 10-line recipe, is followed by two very brief sentences, fitting together in one line (one with six words, one with three, concluding the recipe instructions). Two more paragraphs finish out the essayette, all describing the many delightful dimensions of “the dandelion”—from its sudden appearance and ways of consuming it to the way it “giggles at the capitalistic myth of scarcity” (p. 178), to what it has in common with basketball players, to its soundtrack of “O-o-h Child” (p. 179), to its role as a missive from the dead. Before looking in more detail at this plethora of ideas in the essayette, I want to discuss the form and what an unusually long sentence has in common with plants, or even plant agency. Writing manuals (at least for English) tend to cut apart such lengthy missives to make ideas more digestible (and here we are back to poetics in its normative, rule-based form). They argue that having to keep in mind how a sentence started over many lines can be a burden for the reader (something my first language German delights in, however). Yet without meaning it only as a vague metaphorical commonality with plants, the uninterrupted growth of ideas is visible in the form of Gay’s writing. It is palpable in the many commas (25), colons (2), semi-colons (2), dashes (3), and parentheses (3 sets) connecting and expanding this sentence into 18 lines, rather than dividing it into distinct shorter entities. While I will unpack the content of this sentence later on, here it is in full:

It is truly overnight sometimes it seems that the dandelions put on their crowns, and just like that, the world is suddenly brighter, more abundant, more possible—this, of course, if you, like me, adore the dandelion, see their unmartial ranks suddenly outflanking the gloom, outflowering the doom, and if you, like me, make love (a little much?) with its absolutely usable body, body of utter benevolence, body of total beneficience, petite and profligate and gleeful lovenote: the roots for all kinds of medicine, not to mention your various probiotic, bitter, hot morning drinks (for the caffeine-weaning among us); the flowers, which are actually (get close—no closer—you’ll see what I mean) a million flowers, which the pollinators bloom into a winged dancefloor at our feet; and the leaves, little lion’s teeth, which, in addition to throwing them into your tomato sauce or greens or smoothie or black-eyed pea-fritters, you might do like this:

(pp. 177–178)

After the colon, the recipe follows as an indented, unpunctuated list of ingredients with few instructions, the end of which already marks the halfway point of the delight, where we find the first full stop. The growth of thoughts inspired by the dandelion is not edited down into a more easily digestible product after the encounter. Rather, I argue, the conceptual lack of editing leaves the associative thought process on the page, making it visible and turning it into the point, the poetics, of these texts.

This growth is slow and intermittent, not always in leaps and bounds, sometimes barely noticeable at first and at other times requiring us to go back to make the connection after a more sudden jump. In these ways it is modular, like plant bodies; on a time scale that is purposefully minute, sometimes below our regular speed of perception (or interfering with our regular reading speed), to draw our attention to the overlooked, the otherwise rushed-past. In this way it brings us closer to the dimensions of plant time that Michael Marder describes in Plant-Thinking (2013 [20]), where he defines “temporality as the mainspring of the plants’ ontology” (p. 95) and identifies seasonality, growth, and cyclicality as three aspects of plant time.7 These regular aspects of plant time happen across different scales, from the growth of an individual plant visible to humans only with time-lapse techniques to the hardly fathomable dimension of deep time. As seasons come and go, and as growth and reproduction seem to continue indefinitely, there is a certain circularity in plant time that draws our attention away from human notions of time, such as linear progress with a resulting finished product. Drawing our attention to seasonality, minute growth, and returns, Gay writes toward his delights with a kind of circularity that is distinctly planty in the way it slows down the moment and adds on layers.8 His beautifully long-winded sentences resonate with the way seasonality inflects the Book of Delights: writing it as a series every five years, from birthday to birthday, for one year, every day. In the seemingly repetitive quality of the seasonal, the small steps of growth and development, of observation and thought in the writing process become visible in ways that would otherwise be summed up quite quickly or perhaps even be overlooked or not written about altogether.

4. Genre Formation

What results from this kind of writing is a new genre, I argue, described as an essayette to evoke familiarity with existing genres, but really called a delight. A micro-genre about micro-moments of everyday life that shifts ways of seeing, thinking, and attentiveness. In co-creating this new genre, plants show their phytopoetic effect. While the publisher blurb of The Book of Delight calls it “a genre-defying book of lyric essays” ([22]), I consider it genre-defining instead. What made me first realize this was a group of students who wrote their own delights after reading one of Gay’s. When working on literature with students, I often start by examining the understandings of poetics that everyone brings to the classroom. Students have typically learned to recognize a poem ‘when they see one,’ even if they are unsure what poetics means. As Stanley Fish [23] has shown so aptly in “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” with his opening anecdote about students turning a random list of names on the board into an unintended poem, we respond to specific formal prompts (e.g., lines that look like verse) and are eager to make meaning. Take away the formatting in lines, the author, title, and year, and a poem can turn into a newspaper ad or other seemingly non-literary genres (an exercise I frequently use to ask students what literature is). Poetic conventions are constructed and can be deconstructed, and we all participate in these processes, not just the ones putting the pen to paper. The fact that this group of students recognized the delight as a literary genre readily and was able to imitate it with their own texts showed not just that they (graduate students in literary studies) had some prior training in poetics/poetology, but it also communicated something about the successful simplicity of this form. None of this is to say that what Ross Gay has accomplished here is easy or that anyone can do it at his level. Rather, the successful class experiment seems to point to three qualities: a certain recognizability of form or literary genre; an accessibility that invites even those who do not consider themselves literary authors to try their hand at it; and a universality of a shared human experience and emotion (the delight) that made Gay’s texts about being a Black man living in an Indiana college town resonate with my students, mostly white women living in Germany. Even if they had several comprehension questions about the text we read together in English, and even if the details took some discussion, the genre form of the delight and some of Ross Gay’s specific poetics seemed clear to them quite readily.

The texts these students produced after reading Gay’s followed the genre parameters of the delight and focused on a small positive encounter, yet they each developed their own poetics. Their choice of subject matter was not necessarily vegetal, and their sentences not necessarily long. Some wrote in German, while others used the opportunity for defamiliarization with their own voice and wrote in English. Some of their English sentences showed signs of German syntax, and some of their vocabulary choices only made sense to a bilingual reader. But each delight had the same effect on me that Gay’s did. It drew my attention to something I had not previously stopped for, thought about, and let develop and grow in my mind. The genre remained recognizable, precisely because every new writer in this tradition made it their own. Though they were short, it took me a long time to read them with adequate attention. As with Gay’s delights, I could not read too many in a row, otherwise I would miss the point—and I delighted in re-reading. One of the genre’s functions, I would therefore argue, is to slow us down and discover meaningful delight, joy, hope even in a world that feels like it is careening toward catastrophe. Climate change, racism, violent conflicts, and a global pandemic are large, overwhelming challenges. The delights are of this world and do not ignore them; yet they focus on a single moment in time, draw attention to a small encounter with nature or people that helps us see what else is in the everyday. And they encourage a slowing down and circular, cyclical, repeat engagement, an attentiveness to processes, patterns, and growth (a listening to missives, as the dandelion text will say at its close) that can shift one’s outlook and interactions with the world. Given that I have by now written many more pages than the three-page delight that inspired them, I would say that delights prompt the unfolding of the small, an unpacking of the ordinary, a discovery of the overlooked. I consider that an important skill to practice in order to engage with the world around us in a time full of information excess, distractions, and increasingly limited attention spans.9 As a practice, looking for delights might sustain us and perhaps even contribute to resilience in the face of crisis. In Gay’s phytopoetic delights, plants specifically attune us to a different way of experiencing time—from the short lifespan of a dandelion blossom to the deep time of their seasonal return. This, in turn, can shift our view of our own timelines and what matters.

5. The Dandelion Giggling

This finally returns me to the dandelion delight itself—so much talk about its form, but what is this particular one about? The text is all about ‘the dandelion’ of course, creating individuality in a way that is typical of Gay’s plant delights—but it is also about a plant impacting the world in many small but powerful ways, i.e., phytopoetics. Dandelions pop up “Truly Overnight Sometimes It Seems,” as the title and first 18-line sentence/paragraph state, “and just like that, the world is suddenly brighter, more abundant, more possible—[…] outflanking the gloom, outflowering the doom” (p. 177). As such a harbinger of positivity, the dandelion is called a “petite and profligate and gleeful lovenote” (p. 177), though it is not quite clear whether it wrote itself and to whom it is addressed (to those who notice the dandelion? the whole world? the sun?). What is clear is that the text itself is a lovenote to the dandelion, with its almost prayerful adoration for the plant, and thus perhaps the genre writ large is ultimately a lovenote to (the delights of) the world. The dandelion delight evokes sacred emotions similar to “Lily on the Pants” from the first volume of Delights ([1], pp. 70–71), which I discuss in Jacobs 2022 [4] as an example of vegetal eroticism—a kind of phytopoetics. In that text, the speaker drops to his knees in a prayer to the lily, which results in kisses that I have interpreted as a form of cunnilingus.10 While the lily traditionally represents the Virgin Mary, Gay’s lily climactically kills and resurrects “you” with delight in this text, whose breathless paragraph-long final sentence ends with “amen” ([1], p. 71). Resonances of religious imagery of a similar, saint-adoring kind are also present in the dandelions’ “crowns” (p. 177) and its “body of utter benevolence, body of total beneficence” (p. 177)—both lily and dandelion are personified as individuals that represent much and many. The sacred meets sex in the dandelion delight too because the closer look that the narrator of the delight demands will reveal that “the pollinators bloom into a winged dancefloor at our feet” (pp. 177–178), and in the third paragraph, “they fuck like bunnies: those million flowers turn into a million seeds turn into a million dandelions turn into a million million seeds” (p. 178). The beginning of spring means life and its return feels like a divine intervention.

Such multiplying multiplicity of flowers and seeds is just one reason why “the dandelion giggles at the […] myth of scarcity” (p. 178) in paragraph three of the delight. The myth is described as “capitalistic […] monotheistic […] and monog[a]mistic” (p. 178), highlighting a certain approach to the sacred and the sexual that limits adoration to just one (‘mono-‘), and adding capitalism, where the one to worship is money. Production in this sense meets reproduction, invoking ideas of sex work to which pollination is often likened (see Jacobs 2022 [5] and 2023 [26]). Yet ‘the dandelion,’ despite its description in the singular, actually represents excess in many dimensions. There is the excess of poly-gamous pollination that is far from an efficient process, as most pollen kernels (just like sperm) do not meet an egg (Jacobs 2023 [26]). There is the excess of the adoration that the voice of the delight shares with the pollinators on the dance floor, both a sacred ritual and a sexy rave. And then there are the many dandelions popping up everywhere from ‘a million million seeds,’ providing many more ways of enriching human lives, or as the text had called it its first sentence “if you like me make love (a little much?) to its absolutely usable body” (p. 177). There, the delight mentions some of those uses or ways of love-making to dandelions: “medicine” (p. 177), “morning drinks” (p. 177), “throwing them in tomato sauce or greens or smoothie or black-eyed-pea fritters” (p. 178), which leads to the recipe for the latter that is spelled out in the delight after the long introductory sentence comes to an end, or rather just makes space for the list-like recipe’s different formatting with another colon.11 These free ingestive ways of making love with the dandelion disrupt capitalist logic on several levels, rendering this kind of consumption both a material and metaphysical (though not a materialistic) one that nourishes body and mind, extending both into sexuality and spirituality. While the myth of scarcity divides people, dandelion excess brings together people and pollinators for sharing and its spread cannot be contained.

A plant’s giggling about human ideas is a powerful undoing that might leave us defenseless.12 Capitalism would likely agree with the impulse to “destroy[]” (p. 179) dandelions as a ‘weed,’ an entirely human-made category with a taxonomic history that hearkens back to the European Enlightenment impulse to categorize the world and its inhabitants, whose colonial legacies and racialized ‘science’ haunt us to this day (on classification, see Bowker and Star [30]; on weeds, Mabey [31]; on plant destruction, Nitzke [32]; and on colonial botany, see exemplarily Schiebinger and Swan [33] and Subramaniam [34] with the understanding that there is much more work on this topic and decolonization in the context of plants, not least Haraway’s concept of the Plantationocene). The delight undoes this equation by never even using the word ‘weed’ and calling dandelion “my most consistent, prolific, generous, trouble- and labor-free crop” (p. 179) instead. The supposedly useless, unwanted weed is re-signified as cultivated, and more than that, as the ideal crop. It is consistent every season. And here comes basketball (still in the third paragraph): dandelions are the “steady Freddy” (p. 179) compared to pest-prone squash, cabbage, or tomatoes, and hence like famous NBA players. “They are the Draymond Greens and Marcus Smarts of the garden. The Brian Grants. The Mo Cheekses or Bobby Joneses. The Patrick Beverleys. They always show up and give their all” (p. 179; this is a good example for Gay’s rows of short, fragmentary sentences that punctuate the long ones). These names are those of Black defensive players from various generations and teams. And while I know little about basketball, players so famous that even I know their name are absent from this list: the Michael Jordans, Kobe Bryants, or Lebron Jameses. Dandelions are not flashy or the most famous. They are steady and do their job unfailingly every season. Others call them weeds for this pesky quality, but in this delight’s taxonomy, they carry the team. This is why the speaker insists on eating mostly their leaves and leaving them their flowers, so as not to be “managing or curtailing their reproduction” (p. 178) (an impulse that would be as capitalistic-managerial and basketballistic-managerial as it is biopolitical). Instead, he advocates for letting the dandelion continue to multiply as regularly and excessively as it has because that guarantees its reliable return.

6. Soundtracks and Missives

The final paragraph of the arguably four in this delight brings us back to phytopoetics most directly, not just because of its syntactical form (cited further down) and the way plants set abuzz the author’s and reader’s imaginations, but because the plant speaks itself here—and it does so in the plural. Beyond the dandelion’s giggling, they are “little beacons of the it’ll be ok, and if they had a soundtrack, it would be ‘O-o-h Child’” (p. 179). This much-covered 1970s song is the one for which the original singers, the Chicago soul group The Five Stairsteps (consisting of Black teenage siblings like the Jackson 5), are probably most famous. My attempts to describe it will fall short, so I recommend you turn it on, just as I recommend you read Gay’s delights to experience the effect of his prose for yourself. The song’s lyrics tell you that “things are gonna get easier” and “things’ll get brighter,” that “some day, yeah, we’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun” (Vincent [35]). This is as comforting and consoling as the dandelion’s steady seasonal return, and it certainly matters for understanding the song’s message that Ross Gay, the aforementioned basketball players, and The Five Stairsteps are Black in the United States. The delight has switched to referring to dandelions in the plural consistently here, even though it turned away from the discussion of multiplication of the earlier paragraphs, and instead it refers to a collective, a community, a bringing-together of generations with a shared history.

To understand this more fully, let’s read on in this paragraph. The dandelions’ function as consoling beacons of the reliable return of spring and their soundtrack leads to a speculation:

Maybe their prettiness, by which I really mean their beauty, is because their roots go so far down, they fathom the depths […], and those beautiful flowers are missives from the deep. Or the dark. Or the mystery. Or the unknown. Or the underworld. Whichever word we want to use today to mean the dead, or at least the dead-adjacent. Missives from the dead, these little festive blooms. To which, I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to listen.

(p. 179)

This is how the delight ends, and it seems itself to be a missive from the dandelion (akin to the lovenote that it is). But what is it saying? Roots are a complicated trope of belonging and diasporic uprootedness (Jacobs 2024 [36]). Here, the down, depths, deep, dark of the dandelion root call up ancestors and the past, equally complex concepts in a settler-colonial nation that is built on chattel slavery. Six feet under with a dark history of survival that made the next generation possible (Roots perhaps rings out as the story of Kunta Kinte to some).13 A lot of it shrouded in mystery and the unknown—sometimes purposefully unreckoned with, creating an ‘underworld’—both as a dark historical past and the afterlife of the future. Here, we as humans are reminded of our own cyclicality.

These roots are embedded in soil. Donna Haraway reminds us that humans and humus have the same linguistic root: “We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman” ([14], p. 55). She suggests that focusing less on us and our assumed exceptionalism would do this planet good, would lead to us being more nourishing to others. As the delight showed us, dandelions are already nourishing, both materially and metaphysically, and they serve as reminders that we too are nature by sending their missives every season. Humus renders the difference between death and life less stark, as it shows how death gives life, forming part of a cyclical, seasonal understanding of time that has the dandelion bloom in spring again because of the seeds and nutrients of last year’s ancestors. Dandelions are thus (merely? already?) ‘dead-adjacent’ (a term that also calls up the baroque ephemerality of the cut flower that rings out with memento mori), which can refigure death into a ‘festive’ occasion. A form of resurrection, as the lily delight called it ([1], p. 71). Given their history of eradication as a weed, we might wonder why dandelions keep coming up so steadily, why they persistently and resistantly adorn themselves with festive flowers that draw attention every spring. No past or future crisis has stopped them yet. The missives from the dead entail the collective wisdom of generations of ancestors who survived. The dead make our living possible, often at great sacrifice, so listening to their wisdom honors it.

7. Roots Are Stories

As one might expect of a gardener, roots appear in much of Gay’s writing, which he observes himself in an earlier delight (8 February) about his friend Bernardo’s “Mistranscription” of the word root for route in the sentence “roots are stories” ([2], p. 138). This is Gay’s phytopoetics in a nutshell, if you will, as stories, or the delights, are both routes and roots. They follow the route to the root. This text confirms that the detour is the point and that time is centrally unimportant: “The delights foment stories, digressions, make us forget that we’re on the clock, which is what they’re meant to do” ([2], p. 137). Meander, preamble, footnote—circularity of plant time, seasonal return. The mistranscription in this delight

couples or enswirls or routes the path or way into the botanical (roots are avenues or roads, etc.), and makes the act of rooting (à la the botanical, searching in the dark for nutrients; à la pigs, searching for treasure with one’s snout or other appendage, often beneath something; and à la what I am doing for Bernardo right now: cheering) a story. Short form: roots are stories. We all know roots are resplendently, radically metaphorical, but thanks to Bernardoby’s poetic mistranscription, they are to me now even more so.

([2], p. 138–139).14

The mistake is poetic, the association is meaningful. Ross Gay’s approach kommt vom Hölzchen aufs Stöckchen, or travels from the little branch to the even littler twig in this German expression. As the roots take many divergent paths, they all gather water and nutrients. Gay’s stories are about this journey, about following a plant’s path, co-creating phytopoetically. Rooting, then, means going for the deep, dark depths of the dandelion, so that they can be missives of the dead, can tell their story. Like those treasure-hunting truffle pigs, he puts his face in the dirt, or—more frequently—hands in the dirt and face into flowers (see the dandelion dancefloor, the lily, and many other delights). Not afraid of getting a little dirty or pollen-dusted, he is involved up-close and intimately with plants in his poetics. The radicality of the root (radix) makes it the basis in botany and mathematics, the core in linguistics and music, the act of cheering or delighting for human and non-human kin—and the foundation of Ross Gay’s phytopoetics. Emerging from and supported by such deep radicality, the dandelion can be heard giggling about the myth of scarcity, showing off the power of the weed, the almost overlooked, the delight. The poetic and powerful potential of the small and temporary resonates with the graffiti from another delight (19 May), one that reverses the call for the destruction of weeds, “a mini haiku in all caps spray-painted on the rusty corrugated siding of a building that seems abandoned but who knows:

EAT CANDY!

DESTROY THE STATE! ([2], p. 200)