above/ground press author spotlight #3 : Orchid Tierney
Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), my beatrice (above/ground, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, and her scholarship has appeared in SubStance, Jacket2, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900. She is a senior editor at The Kenyon Review.
She is the author of two chapbooks with above/ground press: my beatrice (2020) and pedagogies for the planthroposcene (2025). Orchid Tierney reads as part of an above/ground press ZOOM event with Meredith Quartermain, Tom Jenks, Brook Houglum, Sandra Doller and rob mclennan on Wednesday, May 28 at 7pm EDT. Click the link here to join.
You’ve published two chapbooks so far with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? Were these titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?
Both titles represent different projects. my beatrice is a standalone title, while pedagogies for the planthroposcene is an excerpt from a new work-in-progress, entitled field guide to future flora, a collection of science fiction prose poems. This new manuscript explores vegetal intelligence, consciousness, and mobilities in a post-climate change world. I am interested in the critical turn toward plant studies in ecocriticism; for my part, the field guide attempts to dislodge the mammalian biases we hold toward vegetal life: namely, plants are not passive beings although their modes of thinking, communicating, and moving are deeply foreign to us. This particular excerpt, pedagogies for the planthroposcene, is a momentary recognition of vegetal potential; the plants conceived within the chaplet are not forms that we might recognise in our current world but future beings who share our DNA infrastructures.
Perhaps more to the point of your questions, both chaplets reflect my desire to stretch recognisable forms into new manifestations. In my beatrice, my primary concern was the sonnet; in pedagogies for the planthroposcene, it is the prose poem, a form that offers an opportunity to destablise received ideas about depth and surface, sedimentation and layers—and the strange movements between them.
Do you often work in manuscript-shapes, whether chapbook or book-length, when approaching new work? Do all of your poems fall into projects?
Yes to both questions! I’m easily distracted by new ideas but I have found that I can manage emergent obsessions by framing my poems as projects that are informed by a cluster of questions. In this respect, the poems in pedagogies for the planthroposcene/field guide to future flora are generated by questions relating to human-vegetal entanglements. Namely, the poems attempt to respond to thematic intrigues, which circulate in the field of critical plant studies: How do plants think? How can we describe their wit and humour? How do they express their intelligence? Naturally, I have added my own questions to this discourse: What do they desire or rage against? How will humans become plant-like in the era of post-climate change? How will plants transform into human-like lifeforms?
Do you approach such a project first through the research, or from the basis of form? How did you get to this point where you currently are, where your best thinking form is the poem through what might be otherwise seen as study?
I love this idea that poetry is a kind of study—it is certainly a mode to think with, in my opinion. And as a study, my poetry is heavily informed by research. In pedagogies for the planthroposcene, this research has brought me to such scholars as Matthew Hall (Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany), Michael Marder (Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life), and Giovanni Aloi (Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art)—to name a few—who have helped me to reconceptualise the plant-human relationship in a future context. But form, too, has informed my research. In my beatrice, for example, I was curious as to how the sonnet arrived at its defined parameters, given that Dante Alighieri’s sonnets in La Vita Nuova are quite variable. It felt important, then, to undertake a study into the form that accounted for the sonnet’s transformations. No form is ever static; hence my claim in the chaplet that the sonnet is a time machine. It, too, documents measures of historical change and disturbance. Similarly, the prose poem in pedagogies for the planthroposcene assumes that it is also not self-identifiable as a form. Rather the prose poem—despite what it announces itself to be—has likewise adapted to historical forces and environmental conditions. I wrote about the transformation of the prose poem in Shadow Doesn’t Ask: A Little Magazine of Practice, Process, & Pedagogy, which Michael Leong, Kate Hadeen, and I co-edit. Suffice to say, the prose poem is an extraordinarily dynamic form that allows itself to respond to the content needs of a poem.
What is it about the form of the poem provides, as opposed to working a more traditional non-fiction or critical approach, that might not be possible otherwise?
On the one hand, form is the technology of the poem: it regulates the language and the lineation to extend the thinking that the poem generates. On the other, form has its own mode of intelligence: it performs critical knowledge work with the questions that the poem asks. I think this latter reason is why form is so interesting to me: when we discount things like form and media in favour of the word (and I don’t mean language), we ignore the intensive study that a poem can perform. Evie Shockley’s Semiautomatic and Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed are really great examples of what form and arrangement can do for poetry—their forms don’t work independently of their projects, but they do produce a kind of relational knowledge work that, in turn, creates a situated livedness within the bodies of their poems. It is not that traditional forms can’t achieve the similar results, but poetic artifice certainly makes this knowledge work more visible.
How do you see your scholarly work in relation to your creative work? Are they part of a single, ongoing practice? Two sides of the same coin?
Scholarship and creative work for me are the same. While I was a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, Karen Redrobe, an art historian, once said to me that “Critical writing is creative writing and creative writing is critical writing.” This statement had a profound impact upon me at the time, in part because it destablised the distinctions between both areas of my work.. In fact, I repeat her adage to undergraduate students at Kenyon, who are themselves interested in working across creative and critical spheres. There remains a tension, of course, between literary studies and creative writing—but I think this tension can be enormously generative in terms of how we might conceptualise knowledge work in the Humanities.
You mention that this current chapbook is part of a larger project, field guide to future flora. I get the sense that you see your individual projects interrelating almost like a constellation of projects, each one expanding the reach of what it is you are working towards. Are there other projects you are working on simultaneously, or do you already see what is coming next?
I am also working on an essay collection: Mad Ecologies: Mental Illness and the American Poem. This collection of essays examines mid-twentieth century poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Lew Welch—poets with documented mental illness—to interrogate the intersections between Madness and the environment in their works. Presently I am working on the second essay: “‘The full meaning of it all!’ William Carlos Williams’ Mad Ecologies,” which explores the poet’s environmental imagination in his “iatroversalia” or doctor’s poems, such as “The Mental Hospital Garden,” “Between Walls,” and “The Yellow Flower.” I am interested in how Williams’ poems crip nature, as well as how he unsettles the stability of objects, such as the “environment” and “mind,” when they are staged in textual relation with mental illness. My first essay in this collection was published with Essay Press as look at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading in 2023.
What brought about this interest in poetry and the environment, and this further element of mental illness?
I have attempted to write about my own experiences with mental illness for years now with limited success. Back in 2022, however, I came across Lew Welch’s stunning poem “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen,” which I believe encapsulates Welch’s psychiatric struggles in relation to the micro-macro cosmos of lichen. By reading Welch’s correspondences and poetry, I felt that I was able to grasp the complexities of a psychogeographical poetics—and I have wanted to explore this idea further in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton. I am particularly interested in Williams and Lowell, here, since mental illness is often seen as a cluster of feminised disorders in popular culture. I do wonder how things would have played out differently for Welch had he been able to access the mental healthcare he so desperately needed. I have no idea if he had even viewed himself as having a mental health difference, but after reading his correspondences, I certainly gained a sense that he was navigating a world very differently from his peers.