One Poem

“Econometrics” is a poem that enacts the relationship between plant roots and bacteria. The root–bacteria dynamic is informed by interspecies labor, value-production, and power. The first part of the poem treats the process of root growth and response as a form of cognition—embodied in syntax, neologism, and variations on the metrical notation for iambic pentameter. The second part concerns the bacteria that exist in a cyclic and endosymbiotic relationship with plant roots called the rhizophagic cycle. The plants ‘farm’ bacteria for the nutrients they gather (such as nitrogen), drawing the bacteria into their roots, degrading the bacteria’s cell walls and absorbing their nutrients, then releasing the survivors through their root hairs. I want this poem to act as an almost mute encoding of the root–bacteria relationship, which the reader can then decode and play out in their own mind. It is an attempt at developing a kind of historical–evolutionary materialism in which poetry can represent ecological dynamics as contingent and up for revision, as ‘economic’ and ‘politicized’ in a new sense.

Econometrics

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Brandan Griffin currently lives in Kansas City, MO, where he co-runs the pop-up / online bookstore New Material Books. He is the author of Four Concretures (Theaphora, 2024) and Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022).