Practical ecopoetics experiment 2: MONEYMAKER

As part of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway, in collaboration with the Poetics Research Centre, first showcased at the Small Publishers Fair 2024.

Moneymaker is an approximately A6 sized booklet of handmade recycled paper, bound with reusable metal clips, and hand-typed with the Hermes 200-typewriter, using red ink. Embedded in the paper are tomato seeds, and should the booklet’s pages be planted, they would most likely produce a tomato plant. Within the booklet is contained a series of poems exploring our relationship to the tomato-plant, through imagining the tomato as name, number, gender, encounter, and finally the plant itself.

The booklet, poem-object, bookwork, or artist’s book is interested in human and non-human collaboration. Could poetry move the bodies of readers and writers to engage with non-human processes of ecological indeterminacy? How poetry do the work of creating small-scale transformative experiences that could lead to sustained change in the experiences of ecology?

Inspired by the works of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, David Farrier, Stephen Emerson, and Astra Papachristodolou, among others, the pamphlet is an experiment in practical ecopoetics.