image: Megan Kaminski
Credit: Photo by Leslie VonHolten
LAWRENCE — A recently published collection of writings on perennial agriculture, “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods“ (Princeton University Press), makes a cultural argument as much as an agricultural one: that perennial foods — crops that return year after year, building deep root systems and healthier soil — represent not just a different way of farming but a different way of belonging to the earth. The collection includes a contribution from Megan Kaminski, poet and professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas.
“Most of the other works are essays from a range of people like scientists, land restorers and traditional ecological knowledge holders,” Kaminski said. “What they share is a sense that our relationship to land is inseparable from our relationships to each other and that perennial foods are one of the clearest expressions of that. My contribution approaches that conversation from the perspective of urban food growing and neighborhood reciprocity, asking what it means to tend a place across time rather than extract from it.”
Kaminski said we are living through a crisis of attention: not just to screens versus books, but to the living world, to our neighbors, and to what we actually owe one another and the more-than-human communities we share this planet with.
“Poetry is uniquely suited to address these questions because it asks readers to slow down, to dwell, to feel the weight of a word. It asks us to practice the kind of presence that makes care possible,” she said. “My role as a writer is to help people connect their values and felt sense of the world to these larger problems. It’s a way to think about what we owe other people, animals and plants and how we’re all connected. And it’s a different kind of knowing than prose or academic argument.”
Kaminski’s participation in the book project stemmed from a long-running collaboration with the Land Institute’s Aubrey Streit Krug, who co-edited “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods” with Liz Carlisle. The Land Institute, based in Salina, describes its mission as leading a global perennial movement to transform agriculture and secure a sustainable future.
“She was thinking about the poems as a way to have space to breathe and a way to connect more directly with our embodied sense of the world and emotional content,” Kaminski said of Streit Krug’s vision for the collection. “Land holds not only species and ecosystems, but also culture and community. In my neighborhood, people with very different views still connect through gardening, caring about space and shared place-based relationships. Kansas is our common home, and relationships to land can cross political divides.”
Kaminski’s contribution is titled “Neighbors,” a poem drawn from her current book-length project, “Prairie Alchemy.”
“The book braids personal narrative, natural history and contemplative practice around the central question of how place calls us into relationship — with land, with water, with the more-than-human communities we share our neighborhoods with, and with each other across political and cultural difference,” she said. “The poem captures something I think is at the heart of that project: the way that a shared practice of tending — elderberries in the alley, mulberries over the fence, okra and sage in the heat of summer — creates bonds of reciprocity that resist the enclosures being built around us, sometimes literally. Perennial plants build memory in a place. Tending them is a commitment to land, to your neighbors and to a future you may not fully see. That’s what I wanted the poem to hold.”
Yet community and connection are subject to change, even in the poet’s old East Lawrence neighborhood.
“I thought I’d write something about exchanging with neighbors. We exchange plants, vegetables and fruit,” she said. “A colleague who is an ethnobotanist helped me identify the plants in my yard, and I turned much of my front yard into a native plant garden. But then a house was built next to me that shifted the context. The construction process, the cost and the scale of it made me think differently about what is happening to neighborhoods like this.”
In spite of the disruption, nature tends to fill space where it can, even in urban and suburban environments, she said.
“I live in a place that feels like its own small ecological system,” Kaminski said. “I have foxes, raccoons, opossums, skunks, hawks, bees, monarchs, hummingbirds — there’s a lot of life in my yard. It is full of volunteer trees and plants, and there is a real sense of reciprocity in the neighborhood. What I became interested in is what happens to these kinds of spaces over time.”
Kaminski is the author of three books of poetry: “Gentlewomen” (Noemi Press, 2020), “Deep City” (Noemi Press, 2015) and “Desiring Map” (Coconut Books, 2012). She has two forthcoming books: “Blazing Star,” a poetry collection from Noemi Press, and “Prairie Oracle,” an essay collection and divination deck from the University Press of Kansas.
“This work sits within my broader research and teaching in environmental studies at KU,” she said. “My approach to environmental humanities is deeply community-engaged and interdisciplinary. I work at the intersection of poetry, ecology and place-based practice, and my research consistently asks how creative and contemplative engagement with living landscapes can build the kinds of relationships and communities we need in this moment.”
Kaminski’s work has taken the form of public installations, plant and poetry walks, community workshops, and collaborations with prairie restoration practitioners and environmental nonprofits in Kansas and across the country. Her work was recognized this past year with the Community Engaged Scholarship Award from KU’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
Other KU contributors to the book include Kelly Kindscher, professor of environmental studies, who contributed a piece on “Root Foods” and their connection to ecology, culture and sustainable agriculture.
Kaminski said she hoped her contribution could help connect readers to land and a shared sense of space and community.
“We often talk about preserving pristine wilderness, but there is also a lot of life in these everyday urban and neighborhood ecosystems,” she said. “These places hold culture and history as well as ecological life. I think about what it means to lose those interactions and that sense of community, and how land builds relationships between people.”