Wake, Butterfly: Plant with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

In the third episode, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge invites listeners to observe a plant and receive its messages. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Berssenbrugge’s prompt: Choose a plant and observe it with care for five minutes and intensity. Now, draw the plant with a pencil, shading from the center of the plant outward rather than outlining the plant. Now sit with the plant again, opening yourself to what the plant says to you. Now put the plant away, and for fifteen minutes write a visual description of your plant. There will be an interweave or seepage between perception, memory, and imagination. Now, as a stream of consciousness, quickly write down all the things that you receive from the plant. If you imagine your plant has said something to you, they did say that. The final part of the exercise is to compose an essay, a song, a piece of prose or poetry combining your written phenomenological description of the plant and your reception of messages from your plant. _____ The poem read in this episode is “Consciousness Self-Learns,” by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from A Treatise on Stars , copyright ©2020 by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can listen to Wake, Butterfly: Plant with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Wake, Butterfly: Plant with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is an episode from The Poetry Magazine Podcast by Poetry Foundation.

This episode is 00:14:08 long.

This episode was published on Jun 30, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from The Poetry Magazine Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.