A FEW SUMMERS AGO, I took a class on art-making and attention at Maine Media College with Éireann Lorsung. For five days, we walked, bound books, painted, wrote, listened and looked, did experiments, composed graphic scores for music later performed by musicians, talked and were quiet. The magic of that studio room, of being and making together during that solstice week, is still alive inside me.

A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Éireann is the author of several collections of poetry including Music for Landing Planes By, The Century, and the forthcoming Pink Theory!. She makes work for installation, viewing, and performance, and teaches both in and outside of the university system. Éireann’s work—her poems, prose, and visual art—vibrates with the same awakeness and possibility that workshop held, drawing attention to what and how we see, foregrounding beings and events we tend to relegate to the background, to gloss over or turn from.

—Kasey Jueds

Kasey Jueds: So much of your poetry takes up questions of time—being and creating within it. I’m curious about how these explorations arise within other creative practices of yours.

Éireann Lorsung: You are right, time is at the center of everything I make, especially a sense of time both simultaneous and looping as well as linear and countable. I think of time as a material, a constraint, and a conceptual and figurative concern. I make work that lives in time. It’s mortal work. It’s work as the totality of a human life, rather than work as something apart from the rest of life. Once, in a job interview, a dean or a provost told me that my career (and by extension my “creative life”—as if there were any other kind of life!) did not make sense. I thought he was wrong then—my life does make sense—but I couldn’t say why. I think now that he was looking for a strand of beads, which is orderly and can be held in the hand, and I had provided a patchwork quilt, which has its own kind of order that is not the order of beads on a thread but is the order of a much larger pattern, and sometimes a pattern that we can’t fully see in any one small view of the thing. Poems keep one kind of time and make one kind of pattern; drawings keep another and make another; walking keeps and makes yet another, gardening another, housework another, organizing another, etc. And I feel like the kinds of meaning I want to make (and that I’m interested in finding in the world) bear themselves out over long durations and aren’t always obvious in their entirety if you pick up one piece. A jeweler’s loup is a useful tool in certain situations, but I am more interested in a bicycle and a meadow, which are not tools but assemblages that express temporality.

Kasey: This idea of a meadow, or a garden, expressing a different kind of time reminds me of your poem “Garden cycle (keeping time)”, first published in ecotone, in which you set “hyssop, scenting the floors of the ninth century” next to “the cat biting the rabbit’s carotid artery” and “one day / and the human / disappears.” I love the way the poem folds past/present/future, questions of death and extinction, and delight in the garden’s aliveness into a single space. Can you remember when, in your creative life, time became a particular concern for you?

Éireann: Thinking about time explicitly as subject matter began for me in about 2010, when I drafted a piece called “A Matter of Public Record” (first published in Diagram, it is now one chapter in a novel called 1873, which was longlisted for the 2024 Novel Prize by Fitzcarraldo Editions). Maybe it began subterraneously, when I left the U.S. to live in France and then England and suddenly had to reckon with the bodily knowledge of simultaneous time zones and also with my increased awareness of the bifurcation of time into living time and historical but co-present time. In any case, I’ve been thinking about time for a long time, and especially about how something so “minor” as the way we tell time can point us to systems of control and power embedded in how we live our lives. Timekeeping is not neutral or natural. In 1873 I was trying to tease out a theory—and this is maybe one of the struggles in that novel for me as a writer, that it’s kind of a treatise and not a straightforward novel—that timekeeping, literally keeping and managing time, was central to modernity and to the spread of imperialism, capitalism, and all the kinds of dominance and hierarchy that come along with that, and that maybe one way to undo those things was to find other ways of being-in-time. I was looking for points in an immense constellation where things like the number of hours in a day, and what “an hour” meant, and the number of seasons in a year, and the date of the establishment of a national archive, and the year of independence from a colonial occupier all outlined something that looked like time’s relation to power. And I was also reading about and thinking about non-western and non-capitalist, minor, interior, ephemeral, fugitive ways of telling and making and keeping time. That book helped me get to where the poem you mention goes—a place where time is folding together multiply. Gardening is also part of that. You can’t garden and not experience time as looping and folding as well as extending.

Poems keep one kind of time and make one kind of pattern; drawings keep another and make another; walking keeps and makes yet another, gardening another, housework another, organizing another…

Kasey: It can be challenging—to put it mildly—to see that other systems of time even exist, when we’re immersed in the system that’s familiar to us. I’m wondering if your experience of living outside the U.S., in other countries and cultures, has helped you to view time more expansively.

Éireann: Living as an immigrant (beginning in 2007) meant that time was present in my daily life in a way it wasn’t when I lived in the U.S. growing up. Of course, as I mentioned, there was the complex question of when I was, once I lived in Central Time (U.S.) and Central European Time simultaneously. But time also expressed itself forcefully in other ways as I entered migration. For example, there were the hundreds and hundreds of days, when I first lived in Belgium, when I couldn’t work or go to school as I waited for my papers to be “regularized” and my residential status to be granted; days when the exoskeleton of schooldays and workdays was not available to me. I had to find ways to understand and relate to the passage of time, and one of the first ways I did this was by walking for hours and hours, almost every day. Time and space are inextricable, and through walking in that new-to-me city I learned this.

Kasey: I know you also had a garden in Belgium. Could you talk a little about your experience of time in the context of being with plants?

Éireann: Time and space are also demonstrably inextricable in the garden. Rows of zucchini take up a certain number of feet, and each linear foot of strawberries requires [x] number of hours to make hills of soil, bring barrows full of straw, pick off slugs. And time’s passage in the garden is made available in the form of produce—watching the flower turn into the ripened ovary and then swell into unripe, then ripe fruit; picking the fruit, making jam or cakes with it; watching the leaves change and fall from the tree—but also the same way spending extended time any small where makes it available: you start to notice how tiny the changes are that signal a new season (hundreds of them in a year). And the more I stayed with a garden the more I realized that everything living makes its own clocks, and the billions of tiny clocks all run together like gears. We are living in the midst of intricate timekeeping everywhere.

Timekeeping, literally keeping and managing time, was central to modernity and to the spread of imperialism, capitalism, and all the kinds of dominance and hierarchy that come along with that…

Kasey: Now I’m thinking of your drawing “Telling spring time (twelve clocks)”, and the way it gently upends clock time by tracking, instead of minutes and hours, the colors of twelve species of plants growing in your neighborhood during the first spring of the Covid pandemic.

Éireann: In March 2020, my partner and I were living in a very small town in western Maine, where we were both teaching on short-term contracts at a university. We lived in the upstairs apartment in a house and had no garden of our own—no outdoor space but a fire escape. I began to take daily walks on March 15, in part as a way to keep and mark time in what I sensed was going to be a return to a “timelessness” that resembled my experiences in immigration. I knew how destabilizing that “timelessness” could be and wanted to build rituals into my days that would give them shape (the same way ceremonies, rituals, and holidays give shape to the passage of the year). So I walked everywhere I could in our small town, watching the snow melt and return, watching the grit layers show up on the plowed piles, watching the snow draw back from the bases of the trees. I rejoiced at the first dandelions, mallows, horsetails. I watched the forsythia like a hawk to drink in all its yellow as long as I could. After not very long at all I would feel a small pang if I missed one plant or skipped a day of looking at them. These were plants on public property: growing in cracks at the base of walls outside gardens, growing on graves, growing at the edges of roadways, growing in parks and parking lots.

I tracked weeds and domesticated plants, taking pictures of the same specimens day after day. One day I woke up with the vision of a very yellow field, a long strip of yellow, that would be the equivalent of the duration of forsythia blooming (and the same color). I went back into my camera roll and found photos of each of twelve plants (one for every hour of the half-day) from the first time I documented them until the last time I did so, and then I translated those instances into visual duration, recording the color of the plant at each instance over the duration. Like the walks in my “garden” (where I could not plant things, only attend to them), these drawings became a way of telling time (time to draw, drawing time; spring time) and also of keeping a record, and also of spending the early pandemic time that in its quiet and isolation sometimes felt limitless and sometimes felt aimless.

Kasey: Is there a plant or flower that has been a particular teacher or companion for you? And what about writers—anyone whose love of plants has led you more deeply into loving them?

Éireann: I think horsetails are one such plant. In Belgium, they plagued our garden. I pulled dozens of wheelbarrows full each summer, only for them to come right back weeks later. There was nothing that could be done except to live with them—their presence and their resurgence. Because I spent so much time with them, I learned to see them—even though I was irritated with them—very carefully. And then, that first pandemic spring in Maine, when I saw the pale-pink shoots of the horsetail poking up near the municipal electric building, I rejoiced! I knew they were a true sign of spring’s return. Looking back, I also realize that they were a plant that taught me not to dismiss the “ordinary” plants, to learn to see that they were beautiful too—not in my way, in their own way, which increased the area of “beauty” for me.

There are two writers I can think of immediately whose love for flowers made me feel accompanied in my own: Jamaica Kincaid, whose My Garden (Book) is a close reading of everything a garden is made of, and Emily Dickinson, who in her poems gathers, attentively, the specific language of the natural world around her—and who, despite a very limited actual circumference, makes a huge compass with the names of the plants she loves.

And finally, Kasey, I just love flowers. I love that there are such beautiful things in the world. I love that everywhere you go, people admire them. I love that they are available for free—that even the most disregarded plants make them freely and for everyone, everywhere. I love that even in the hardest situations on earth, people pick flowers for their tables, plant them near their windows, adorn their dead with them. Flowers are infinitely fascinating to look closely at—object lessons in don’t assume anything—and they teach me all about color. They are simple pleasure in complex form. They make up my memory and constellate my visual field. They are time-beings whose littleness makes me more okay with my own, and they link me to a whole history of writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people who have spent their lives looking at them, too.