poetry and nature combine in ‘the wildstory’ podcast

I WAS INVITED recently to be a guest on a podcast called The WildStory that talks about plants, of course, and ecology. But unlike other garden-related podcasts, it also explores poetry. I was intrigued because I recognized the names of many of its other recent guests, from Doug Tallamy to Barbara Kingsolver, and thought it would be fun to get to know its co-hosts a bit better.

Ann E. Wallace, the poet laureate of Jersey City (below right), and Kim Correro (below left), a Rutgers Master Gardener and director of state programs, are co-hosts of The WildStory, a monthly podcast they debuted in August 2023 from the Native Plant Society of New Jersey.

Read along as you listen to the Nov. 18, 2024 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

‘the wildstory’ podcast hosts, on poetry and nature

Margaret Roach: It’s good to meet again-

Kim Correro: It is.

Margaret: … even virtually.

So, I thought we’d do a little background first because this is an unusual fusion that you have going. And you both have different backgrounds and so forth, and I wanted to get a little bit of that. So, Kim, can you tell us a little bit about the Native Plant Society of New Jersey? It has chapters and educational programs. I mean, lots of great interesting stuff. So, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kim: Yeah. Sure. It does. It was founded in 1983, but it has grown. We have 15 chapters throughout the state of New Jersey, all over. And before the pandemic, I think there were 400 members, but after the pandemic, they saw a massive growth in members. We’re now up to 1,400 members across the state, which is great. And it’s made up of people who really care about ecology and making, creating wildlife habitat, and botanists, and scientists and entomologists. It has an incredible following, and it’s really sustained itself over the years. And we do all kinds of programs. I mean, the society just gave away 21 mini grants across the state, and two $2,000 grants for conservation. So, they’re very big on education and-

Margaret: Yeah. And there’s an amazing wealth of resources on the society’s website, all these past virtual program recordings. And I’ll give the link so that listeners can avail themselves of them, that they’re accessible there, including your annual fall conference that took place in early November. I mean, many hours of high-quality learning there alone. And another resource I noticed when I was clicking around was, there’s a rain garden manual that’s downloadable, like how to make a rain garden, which is another important topic in this era of climate change and sort of general havoc out there in the ecology.

Kim: Yeah. It’s true. And there’s also another one, how to make a school garden, how to create a school garden. And I think that is new this year, but we are also translating our materials into Spanish, which is important. So, that’s happening.

Margaret: Yeah. Ann, so all of what Kim was just talking about, it might be more the expected kind of output or content from a plant society and its website, and maybe even if it had a podcast, its podcast. But the poetry angle is a little bit different. And this is your expertise. And I want to know if you could tell us, how did the idea come about? And do I remember correctly that maybe the poetry part started with some Instagram live events or something like that? I don’t know-

Ann E. Wallace: Yeah, that’s correct. That’s correct.

Margaret: A shred of knowledge here in my embattled old brain [laughter].

Ann: Yeah. We started this as an Instagram live feature on one of the chapters, the Hudson County chapter. Kim and I both live in Jersey City, which is in Hudson County, right across the river from New York City, that’s the New York metropolitan area. So we started this as an Instagram live feature on that chapter’s Instagram page. And these were short interviews once a week with a poet. They would read one poem and we would talk about it, and that would be that, and so about 15 minutes.

That was really inspiring and we just felt really fueled by listening to poetry, slowing down once a week, hear a poem, talk to a poet, and think about the different ways that the natural world has impacted or made its way into their work and as a source of inspiration.

And I think the interesting thing that came out of that also was that poets tap into nature in so many different ways. It can be a site of history, it can resonate on a cultural level, it can be a place of healing. It wasn’t just about gardening and just about flowers, for instance, right? And also what we noticed or what I noticed in hosting those was that poets were slowing down. Well, poets always slow down to observe the world, that’s part of poetry [laughter].

But we were noticing that people were doing this outside, and this is coming out of, we were still really in the pandemic. This is summer, 2022, things were not fully open, but what we noticed was that people were really noticing the nature around them and using that and really leaning into it and finding meaning there. And so we wanted to expand it the next year because Instagram doesn’t… We love Instagram, but these live features weren’t getting the audience that we thought the poets deserved. So we thought, how about a podcast?

Margaret: So now the podcast is once a month, I think, and it’s longer, it’s like an hour and a half or so. And there are multiple segments and each of you does different ones during each show. And there are poetry segments, and there are sort of ecology/nature/garden segments. And so it’s a mix. It’s a real mix. So just a little bit more background. So Kim, your personal gardening, I mean, you’re a Rutgers Master Gardener, for example, so you obviously garden. During the pandemic. Did you get deeper into it? A lot of people took it up, but did you get deeper into it? Did it shift for you?

Kim: It did. I did, because again, just going back to what Ann was saying about slowing down, that’s what happened to me. And I started to notice things that I wasn’t paying attention to. I was rushing around my life like a lot of other people. And so I’d always garden. We bought our house in 2011 with a small backyard, but I found myself doing more birding during the pandemic, and taking walks.

And I met the wonderful people of the Bergen County Audubon Society, who really taught me that I was doing things very wrong. [Laughter.] And so I spent a lot of time removing plants and planting native plants and putting in shrubs and creating a hedgerow, that we talk about in the episode we did with you. And it really changed the way that I saw the natural world. And then I got involved in the Native Plant Society soon after that, but also listening to your show and listening to Jennifer Jewell’s show, and reading all of those books that you recommended and that other great podcasters had recommended. And so it was a real shift for me. And it just over time has gotten deeper and deeper and I’ve become more passionate about it.

Margaret: Yeah, I always say the birds taught me to garden, so I understand the bird thing frequently leads us deeper [laughter]. And Ann, for you, is there a garden or is it nature or what’s your personal…?

Ann: Yeah, I’ve been a gardener for decades, but I wasn’t a native plant gardener until the pandemic, really. But not in the beginning because I was very sick with covid and then long covid. But I have these big windows at the back of my house that look out on my yard, and I was sick on my couch. I was on strict bed rest for months, and it was very difficult for me to stand or walk, but I have these windows at the back and I could look at my garden, and that fueled me. I could watch the birds. I came to know the pair of pigeons that arrived every morning at about 11 A.M. [laughter] and I’d never paid attention to pigeons before. Those are city birds and not exciting, but they had character.

And I even wrote a poem about “For the House Finches,” just turning my yard over to them, because I knew I wasn’t going to be out there that summer. I wasn’t able to, but it was a sustaining place for other creatures, and that’s really fueling and a really beautiful thing to see. And then later in the summer of 2020, when I was able to walk again, I would walk up and down my block with my daughter, who was also recovering from long covid and dealing with long covid. And we would walk and we walk slowly and having to slow down, like Kim said…our circumstances were very different, but there was a slowing down that was forced upon us. And there was a silver lining to that.

Margaret: You would probably both… maybe you already know her work, a professor, a science professor, Joan Strassman, who wrote a book “Slow Birding,” which would appeal to both of you. I think I’ve had her on the show a couple of times. And yeah, the reminder to slow down is critically important, I think, for so many reasons now.

So I’ve loved poetry since taking a course at NYU like a hundred or 200 years ago. It was called Modern English and American Poetry, that was the name of the textbook, too. And “modern” is in quotes right now, because obviously what was modern then isn’t so modern right now. So we studied poets like William Butler Yeats, and actually, I named one of my books from a line of one of his poems; “And I Shall Have Some Peace There” is the name of my book, from the poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” And T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams with his “Red Wheelbarrow” and so on.

And I think on the show, you invite contemporary poets, and they may be people that we haven’t heard of, and you kind of almost in the same way that with a lot of the ecology segments or the gardening segments that may be techniques or ideas that we haven’t heard of or that we don’t understand yet, but that are aha’s for us. So yeah, there’s contemporary people. Yes?

Ann: Absolutely. And some of the names are familiar, like Barbara Kingsolver, who most people would not know is a poet. She is most famous for her novels, but she also is a poet. We had her on, in fact, we had her on our Instagram live feature way back, and we were able to recast that and include it in a recent episode this summer. And Ross Gay is also a very well-known poet, just beloved for many reasons. He brings joy, and-

Margaret: Delight.

Ann: Delight. Delight.

Margaret: It’s all about delight. I’ve had him on the show and I’ve also written about him in “The New York Times.” Yeah, he’s a lot of fun. And he’s a great gardener. He’s passionate about his garden, and about riding his bicycle.

Ann: I know.

Margaret: Those are two things he loves [laughter].

Ann: And about his community and bringing all those things together. And that’s something we need more of, that joy and delight that he brings. And he brings this wonder to looking at the world. And it’s important to say that when somebody like Ross Gay is looking at the world with delight, that’s not an easy decision to make necessarily. The world is not always full of delight. And we also had J. Drew Lanham on this past spring, and he has a book called… He’s a poet from South Carolina, and he has a book called “Joy Is The Justice We Give Ourselves.”

Joy and delight are decisions. Those are deliberate things, deliberate actions we take in a world that’s so fraught with pain, with loss. And so it’s really, I find empowering, to see poets make that turn and invite us into spaces where we can just think about awe and wonder.

And we also have such a range of poets, so we have some that are fairly well known. I mean, contemporary poetry is not full of household names for sure, but we have such a range, and that’s deliberate. We want to have different kinds of poets at different points in their career because we want to bring our audience, we just want to be promoting good, important work.

Margaret: Yeah. So speaking of contemporary poets, the Poet Laureate of the United States, the current one, Ada Limon: Anytime a gardener… I want to just share this little bit from the end of one of her poems, a poem called “Cyrus and the Snakes” about her brother holding a snake up, picking up a snake and holding it and then letting it go. And it ends with the lines:

And I just think, oh God, isn’t that everything?

Ann: It is.

Margaret: That’s exactly how we should be to every other living thing. Yes?

Ann: It’s what we need. Those are lines we need.

Margaret: Yes. So I don’t think of her as only a nature poet, but again, nature is infused in her work for sure.

Ann: Yeah, absolutely. And she has a whole project right now, which the name of which I’m blanking on at the moment, about pairing poetry and wild spaces, outer spaces, and I was in Provincetown, Massachusett, this fall, and I was on a walk, and I was just delighted to see that there was a poem on a board at the beginning of this nature trail, and it was part of Ada Limon’s project of putting poetry outdoors for us to encounter. And it was a Mary Oliver poem, of course, because it was Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is where Mary Oliver lived. So when we stumble upon poetry in places, we don’t expect it. It’s just kind of can take your breath away.

Margaret: So Kim, again, you’re a master gardener. You’ve had training in a lot of aspects of gardening, but I don’t know what have you guys done 17 or 18 episodes so far? Something like that?

Kim: Yeah.

Margaret: You’ve interviewed a lot of people. Is there something that you’ve learned some aha, something that stands out for you? A highlight that you’ve taken away from the experts you’ve interviewed or something that’s changed your practices or anything?

Kim: I think so many things, and I spent some time going over the episodes just to kind of refresh my memory, and we’ve been so lucky to talk to some extraordinary ecologists and experts. We also have a segment I wanted to mention with Dr. Randi Eckel, who gives expert advice in every episode, and I’ve learned from her every day. And we just recorded for the episode that’s coming up next week, last night, and she was talking about fall cleanup and leaving the leaves. And it is getting the opportunity to talk with people like Uli Lorimer, Nancy Lawson, and they provide so much information.

So we have a WildStory garden in Jersey City. We are partnering with the Museum of Jersey City History on this project. And we were lucky enough to get a Xerces Society grant to support launching this, but it’s right in the middle of a very dense urban population. So everything that I’ve learned, we try to take into the community and into the people. But Rebecca McMackin who was with us, is talking a lot right now about xenophobia, and she’s really teaching us another way to communicate, another way to use language. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’m trying to put into my own practice and take away and use new words.

Margaret: So about plants that are aliens versus plants that are natives?

Kim: Native, invasive.

Margaret: And how charged certain of the words are.

Kim: Yeah.

Ann: Yeah. Indeed. Indeed.

Margaret: And with so many things, we’ve made it two sides, very diametrically opposed, and lots of yelling across the gap in between. Yeah.

I read, speaking of poets and so forth, a writer, I had read his memoir, I don’t know, maybe five, six years ago, Saeed Jones is his name, and he’s currently doing an artist in residence at part of Harvard, and he’s a black queer man. And I read his memoir, and he’s a poet as well, and has a beautiful newsletter that he sends out each week and earlier this week before the elections and so forth. And I don’t want to get into politics, but just, I think this is true for everyone, no matter which side or where you stand, and I’m not going to do it justice, but he said in the newsletter, the idea that if all around us feels like fire, we have to remember we’re the water. And I just thought, oh, Saeed, thank you [laughter]. We’re the water. And that was very helpful to me in tumultuous times. It’s good to have these poetic images like that to hold on to, just like nature images, visual images. Yes? [The full passage from Saeed Jones’s newsletter: “And I believe that if this country really is a house on a fire, we chose to live out our lives here because we are water. We are here because we have a gift for saving our selves and each other.”]

Kim: Yes. Yeah. I keep thinking about a line from Audre Lorde, an activist who has a line, it’s very famous, “poetry is not a luxury.” And a lot of people think poetry, that poetry is the thing that gets read at a wedding or a funeral. We turn to it in big moments in life, but we need it in the every day. We need it in moments of upheaval, of uncertainty, of despair even. And we need it to motivate us and drive us forward. We can be the water, as you said. Yeah.

Margaret: Absolutely. Yeah. And I apologize to him for not quoting him precisely, but it just came into my head when we were speaking. And then also you both said you’re in Jersey City, and I was thinking, a friend of mine who lives in the Bronx right across from the Palisades of New Jersey, sent me pictures of smoke rising out of part of the parks there. There are wildfires happening at the moment in parts of New Jersey, including in part of the parks in the Palisades, so speaking of fire.

Kim: Yeah, and I keep getting notifications on my phone about the high risk for fires; the whole Northeast has been in such a drought lately that yeah, we don’t normally think about that much in New Jersey, but we need to.

Margaret: No. So Ann, for you has one of the non-poetry segments… Has there been something you’ve brought home to your garden that you’ve learned?

Ann: Oh, absolutely. I approach my garden so differently now than I used to, and part of it was, like I said, when I was sort of turning it over to the wildlife that lives outside my windows in the space. But since then, and also fueled by all of these conversations we’ve had with ecologists and experts, I’ve really thought about my garden as a space of community for the wildlife outside, and it’s not just for me. And so how do I garden in a way that encourages wild things to live there, even in a city space, even in a small city space. So it’s just been a real shift in my approach to gardening. It’s been incredibly meaningful.

Margaret: I think, Kim, on your Instagram, I think it was, I saw pictures of a big pile of upturned invasive woody plants that had been eradicated from somewhere that you were working on with a friend, I think, or something, doing some cleanups.

Kim: Yeah. That’s another Native Plant Society project that we volunteer for. So everybody that’s a part of the Native Plant Society of New Jersey is a volunteer in some capacity, and stewardship is very important to me. So we’ve been working on this garden for the elderly for three years now, and we’ve run out of space. And real estate in the city, in these small city parks, is hard to come by, so we finally made a decision to really go for it and take out things that were not helping the biodiversity crisis, and we added some more native shrubs in there, and it will be beautiful in the spring and it will be alive and bustling.

Margaret: I think you said winterberries are one of the things that we’re going in, and the birds will be very, very happy about that.

Kim: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m excited about it. We planted some winterberries, some American hollies, and some inkberry is going in, so it’s exciting. And I’m just looking for females now, because I’ve got a lot of males in there.

Margaret: Oh, you mean fruiting female shrubs? [Laughter.]

Kim: Yeah. Yeah. For the hollies.

Margaret: Yeah, I usually use one… I have big, big, big old groups, and I usually use one male for about 10 females or something.

Ann: And one of the beautiful things about that garden space that Kim’s been working on is that it is visible. It’s on a corner lot and it’s visible to the community. A lot of times in cities, our yards are in the back. My yard, nobody can see it unless they’re in my yard. But it’s really so important to have nature visible from the street in a city.

Margaret: Yes. A reminder.

Kim: Yeah.

Ann: And people love it when they walk by,

Kim: And I think what’s happening is the people that live on the block are now ringing my doorbell asking if they can get native plants, so they’re building their own gardens, and that’s nice. It’s exciting.

Margaret: Well, I’m glad to have discovered you and gotten to know you a little bit and bring you to meet my audience here. And so Ann Wallace and Kim Correro, I’m glad to talk and I hope I’ll talk to you again soon. Thank you.

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Nov. 18, 2024 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).