Rhizomatic Poetics for Our Plant Companions

These twin cinema poems are part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

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In the past year, I’ve been experimenting with poetic form to destablize harmful ways of thinking about the more-than-human world. Human companionships with more-than-humans often run in the grooves of dualism. Dualisms, as Val Plumwood describes, are a way of seeing and being in the world based on exaggerated separations which create, maintain, and justify harm and otherness. Dualisms privilege the universal over the particular, eschew animality for rationality, and exceptionalize narrowly-defined human agents over nature, which is cast as inert, non-human objects. These pairs become the schemas by which humans understand and act in the world. They justify and essentialize harmful ways of relating.

I found a co-conspirator in the twin cinema, a poetic form that originates from Singapore. The twin cinema is structured as follows: Poems consist of two (or more) discrete columns that read vertically down each column as well as horizontally across multiple and all columns. Its structure requires and produces nonlinearity and multiplicity in both writing and reading. As such, the form makes for a good companion to not only think through, but also practice multispecies companionship.

This is especially so for plant companionship, which has entered a more widespread collective consciousness with the help of recent public-facing books like Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters (2024) and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018). In a dualistic worldview, plants are removed from the cornerstones of rationality and agency, and often considered unworthy of personhood. Forms like the twin cinema might help us appreciate and stay with these less familiar relatives by destabilizing this paradigm.

The two poems below work with the twin cinema to engage in companionship with plants, to (re)present their perspectives and vibrancy. The polyphonic performances included accentuate the multiplicity of twin cinema and provide some guidance on how the pieces might be read.

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aspen study

aspen study emerges from my observations of the bustle and drama unfolding on and around one of the aspen trees outside The Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Education Center at the University of Utah over a week in August. Aspen leaves crown both its bark and its residents; various birds, insects, and other unnamed occupants of the yard observe their varied cultures; ants stalwartly proceed with their heroisms in concert with high mountain winds.

My aim here is to move beyond anthropocentrism. Focusing on species as companions to each other, alongside and beyond humans, helps us to recognize their personhood and respect their agency.

While the human gaze is at the core of these observations, I leave Linnean names and classifications off the page to engage in an epistemology of encounter rather than exposure, as characterized by Freya Mathews.

This polyphonic reading of aspen study is carried out with Madi Sudweeks.

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roots

roots narrates the encounter between two seedlings whose roots meet in the underground mushroom mesh. Excited by their encounter, they dream of a larger family reunion. In the final stanza, I envision them practicing 團圓飯 (tuan-yuan-fan), an extended family hotpot dinner that takes place on the eve of Chinese New Year and is considered one of the most important gatherings in the year. I feel it is a fitting parallel to the plants sharing nutrients and moving into a more entangled phase of their maturity.

This poem marks the start of my experimentation with the twin cinema form, especially by complicating and collapsing columns. As I move to portray the rhizomatic qualities of plant life, I am simultaneously guided by them.

This polyphonic reading of roots is carried out with Erin O’Farrell.

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Featured Image: Mushrooms growing on a tree. Photo by Alexas_Fotos, 2015.

Jerald Lim is a queer, Singaporean Chinese, new media artist and poet playing in the intersections of the ecological, computational, and poetic. Their creative practices aim to destabilize dualisms and their offsprings—anthropocentrism, colonialism, capitalism, and other forms of extractivism and violence. They graduated with an M.S. in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. Their work has been exhibited at Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts, I_S_L_A_N_D_S, and starch; published in Dark Mountain, Kernel Magazine, and you are here: the journal of creative geography. Website. Contact.