From Spring 2015 to Fall 2016, Denise Newman and I worked as poets from a makeshift studio at the UC Botanical Garden, in Berkeley, California. Leading public walks and interviewing staff and visitors, we borrowed the form of the botanical catalog and created an annotated, illustrated index of all that we captured.

We created this project in formal collaboration with Chris Carmichael and Deepa Natarajan of the UC Botanical Garden, at Berkeley, and with a generous grant from the Creative Work Fund. For us, it was a chance to take poetry off the page and work with a community—to produce a substantial public poem (the index). It changed us, providing an experience, for almost two years, of poetry as a practice alive outside ourselves and wrestling with contemporary matter. For Chris and Deepa, who didn’t know what to expect from experimental poets on such an endeavor, it was a process “full of surprises.” “I don't know if I can explain the project in a sentence,” Chris would tell visitors, “but if you go talk to them, you’ll love it.” They delighted in how, at our open studios and public walks, “visitors became poets” as we “empowered their words with importance, weight and immortality” (Deepa).

Poetry space became a locus for unpredictable, deep, of-the-moment material that would otherwise be hard to say out loud. Could a plant sale purchase be equivalent to the value of anything else—a cupcake or a book? What did people want to steal? What’s natural here or anywhere—only the cotton in CVS bandages, someone volunteered. Can we think of the history of botanical collection, animal kills at the fence, climate change inside the fence? Human desires and claims, and wishes for the world to be otherwise—we collected all of it.

We are full of gratitude for everyone who participated and hold dear our conversations together. Hundreds of people participated—thank you! A special thank you to our garden collaborators, who explained and gave so much to us: Chris and Deepa—and also Anthony Garza, Basil Medeiros, Ben Anderson, Bryan Gim, Corina Rieder, Eric Schulz, Eric Siegel, Gideon Dollarhide, Holly Forbes, Jason Bonham, Jonathan Goodrich, Ken Bates, Meghan Ray, Michelle Laskowski, Paul Licht, Rafael Ortiz, Sarah Maclean, and Sarah Wininger.