A Season in Poetry Features Readings at the Garden Saturday

Posted in Programs and Events on November 17 2010, by Plant Talk

Poet Seminarian Finds Spirituality, Inspiration in Nature

Spencer Reece is one of three poets who will read classic favorites as well as their own work during A Season in Poetry, at the Garden on November 20, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Photo by Ruth Salvatore

I have never been to The New York Botanical Garden; I look forward to being there Saturday for A Season in Poetry. Nature inspires me. I find God in nature. If you think about it, much of the revelations in the Bible all happen outdoors, in nature—Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, Paul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus—very little happens indoors. The outdoors with its plants is rather churchy in its own right.

For the program, I will read the work of others poets of my choosing. I’ll also read one or two of my own poems from among those I’m working on for my second book, “The Upper Room,” which is due out with Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2014. The title refers to my room at the seminary in New Haven where I have lived in the process of Holy Orders for the Episcopal church. There is a small flower bed I can see out my window; it contains purple cornflowers.

Five seminarians live in the house, along with the Dean of the Divinity School, his wife, their child, and their Burmese Mountain Dog. One of our tasks as seminarians is to prepare a meal for the community once a week. It is a dinner for 100 to 150 people. Part of that duty requires cutting some of the cornflowers for the dinner parties. The cornflower is a delicate, easily broken flower, the petals shedding as rapidly as you pick them; something about their fragility speaks to me. The cornflowers look forlorn in their vase surrounded by all the food and people.

November 20th promises the reverse: three poets placed in a crowd of plants.