Sean Roy Parker:
stewarding

I approach a table of friends, it’s Friday afternoon, volunteer lunch, the most sociable point in the week at Platt Fields Market Garden, a community garden on a reclaimed bowling green in an otherwise densely urban part of South Manchester. ‘Do you wanna hear a poem about compost?’ Of course they do. I read Sean Roy Parker’s ‘Lasagne Bed’, which, as it turns out, describes one friend’s favourite composting method:

            weed out the dirt strip in a blizzard then stratify

            […]

            now water it with rain runoff harvested in a bin

            pull over the tarpaulin        blue as in I found it in a shed

I love this poem, for its sharing of practical knowledge, its care and joy in one of my favourite tasks, the magical act of building soil with ones bare hands, and many tiny collaborators.

I think of Diane di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letter #3’, which offers advice for the first hot moments of insurrection against or abandonment by the state. ‘help will arrive, until the day no help arrives / and then you are on your own’: ‘store water’, ‘store food’, ‘hoard matches’ (Revolutionary Letters, 1968-1971). It is hard to feel the imminence of revolutionary possibility as di Prima did in 1968, but we do feel the interlocking climate crises which will overturn our social order, one way or another. The fertile soil on which that order, and many other lives besides, intimately depends is dying (being killed), blowing or washing away.

What I see in the comparison is a poetics of instruction. Not what art teaches us in a banally abstract humanistic sense – the development of liberal sensibilities through the empathetic encounter with the other, say – but art which, perhaps perversely, instrumentalises itself, in the act of teaching something very specific. What dry goods keep best, what materials to stratify in what order to easily create a cubic metre of rich compost. Parker’s pamphlet, stewarding (Monitor Books, 2024), in which I read this poem, and the art practice which forms its context, is explicitly engaged in this teaching – practical skills for survival, joy, and revolutionary transformation, in relation to food and land use, against the enclosed, industrialised and extractive global food supply chains which are destroying our means of life.

Parker describes himself as a ‘visual artist, writer, and landworker’. His practice moves across mediums and spaces, out into the kitchen, community garden, regenerative farm. Drawings are made with plant ink and hung with blackthorns. Installations model techniques for fermentation, composting and germination – microbes, worms, seed and sun doing their live work in the gallery. A sculpture in a food garden is a shelter for visitors to rest, engage and acclimatise to the garden before they get stuck in. Workshops and skillshares teach participants about fermentation, preserving, cooking, growing, and other practical ways to re-figure their relationship to food.¹

‘Supermarkets and Food Capitalism’, published on Parker’s blog Fermental Health in 2023, contextualises his art’s relation to its social-ecological circumstances. Thinking at a systemic level, Parker connects the most visible deadly violences of our dominant modes of food production and distribution – pesticide and chemical fertiliser, plastic packaging, air freight – with interlocking structures whose place in this constellation is often more obscured: poverty, inequality, gentrification, labour conditions, the basic extractive position of colonial capitalism towards the fruits and creatures of the earth. ‘The fight for food sovereignty – how communities are primary stakeholders in the production, trading and consumption of their food – is the fight for people and the environment, and against corporate monopoly. By virtue, all of my desires and all of yours are interconnected.’ We are firmly within the politicised agroecological tradition which says there is no ‘sustainable farming’ without re-shaping the economic and material conditions which alienate people from the land, which privatise life itself, leaving many hungry, displaced, overworked.

Parker’s art is on a continuum with both personal shifts in consumption, and projects of community care and activism, feeding people and fighting the structures that keep them hungry: ‘It has become a primary aim of mine to deeply transform every aspect of my relationship with food, to critically engage on a daily basis, create discourse through my art practice and sidestep the boobytraps that capitalism lays out along the way’

            let’s be honest

            you would not work

            sixty hours a week

            picking strawberries

            in a heat wave

            while

            pesticides

            strip your microbiome

            without

            basic health insurance

                                                (‘shortages’)

stewarding is part of this continuum. ‘I began collating everything while in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in September 2023… Everything was written either while serving as a legal guardian at The Field [the property guardianship/artists co-living project in Derbyshire, where Parker lived for three years], or while undertaking art projects at farms and allotments around the UK and Europe’, he writes in a blog about the publication.

Before getting to the poems, I feel the pamphlet’s physical presence. Each cover is unique, hand-painted with plant dyes in amorphous, brushstroke forms, stained with petals and berries. I chose a copy whose central shape recalled to me a coral colony. Inside, bookending the poems, is a sequence of photographs in hazy monochrome – dandelions in long grass, rings of wire fencing, a water’s edge, its banking plants and the reflecting trees above only sometimes distinguishable – disrupted with markings, scratches, surface fragmentations, resulting from being developed with an unpredictable solution made from lacto-fermented garlic mustard leaves.

The high level of care for physicality in book-making, design, the weight of paper in hand, is characteristic of the works of Monitor Books, a small poetry press founded in Manchester in 2019, now based in London. This approach gives space here to assert the work’s connection to Parker’s wider practice. By making this assertion formally, aesthetically, physically, it simultaneously asserts the connection to the corporeal. This pamphlet thinks about its body, and in doing so – since the false dichotomy of post-Enlightenment thinking which refuses body for mind, form for content, is close kin to the refusal of nature for human, land for money – it begins its thinking about the many bodies of non-human others.

‘living in a building destined for flattening has brought me closer to my own body because I am closer to other bodies that thrive in decay’, Parker writes in ‘Reclaiming Land’, in the pamphlet – other human steward-guardians, fungi, birds, insects, rodents, algae, flowers.This poem articulates the material conditions of life at The Field, where this project emerges: ‘eager developers and property managers conspired / a new plan for wounded creatives fleeing the city’. It connects the pamphlet title’s obvious reference to environmental stewardship with the ‘stewarding’ of this crumbling property. As it doesn’t shy away from the ways this situation is complicitly enabled by profiteering property development, it suggests to me perhaps a similarly sceptical stance towards the former kind of stewarding. If both are hierarchical and propertarian in their relation to the non-human – we steward that over which ‘we’ nonetheless claim dominion – how do we move through these spaces and relations to forms of care more anarchic, sympathetic, horizontal?

Against the hugeness of this question in the face of ever-unfolding environmental crises, the pamphlet offers concrete, actionable instructions. Not just composting, but also foraging for sustenance beyond supermarkets, in ‘twelve reasons never to buy bagged spinach’. ‘Plum tree’ gives a detailed account of harvesting and processing a ‘dramatic glut’ of fallen plums – ‘brine the lookers / with aromatics / clove anise pepper’ – right to when the remnants ‘join[] the closed loop’ on the compost pile. ‘Community Kraut’ shows us how to use gleaned cabbages otherwise abandoned to socialised standards of vegetable beauty: ‘twenty grams of salt for an average cabbage / that’s two level tablespoons for every kilo’.

But what these poems show is not only practical. They show us something of that re-figuring of relationality, through the joy of these activities, and loving identification with the plants and critters involved – being with as in ‘like the tree / I dropped everything / to be with fruit’. When we learn that foraged forsythia flowers are good ‘for brewing when someone is feverish or hard of breath’, we hear it in the voice of the forsythia speaking to its forager, in an intimate encounter of mutual care. ‘Community Kraut’ describes massaging its salted cabbage:

            I’m sharing personal data with plants

            my fingertips deposit skin and yeast

            countless wild animals

            compounding compassionate metamorphosis

            for health and wealth        for kin or market

The scene it depicts of friends making sauerkraut together – what tools are used, the action of the hand, the way it all feels – is also a vision, of an act of care and collaboration amongst a collective of human and non-human agents. This vision is a metonym for the pamphlets’ sense of how we might live differently, in relations of mutuality and un-owning, which begin from these small-scale acts, but never forget that the individual acting is in collectivity and community, and looks through that interface towards systemic change.

I read all this through my own experience of working, volunteering, playing, and occasionally running poetry workshops at Platt Fields Market Garden. Not only is that work about the same things as Parker’s, working towards the same goals – food sovereignty, environmental restoration, a community of critters collectively caring for one another’s needs in shared space – but it is does so in structurally similar ways. When we learn to compost, to grow, to preserve food, when we eat together, or use art and/or gardening to soothe our overwrought nervous systems, to care for our own minds and bodies through the act of building something together, learning also to understand seasons, soil, microbes – ‘slow life ok ~ learn to hate hyperproductivity’, as Parker writes at the start of ‘Lasagne Bed’ – this too is both skillshare and creative play. What Parker’s work shows me in this space, beyond its practical lessons, is also the possibilities of re-figuring the relations in the shape of our art-making, by dissolving its distinction from all these other forms of activity through which we might, can, must, co-create a world where we can all actually survive, in community with many intertwining human, plant, animal, fungal, microbial lives.

            Art is mostly for and by humans so I make art for worms.

                                                                                                (‘Vermiculture’)

stewarding by Sean Roy Parker is published by Monitor Books.

Joey Frances is is a poet, poetry organiser, and fundraiser based in Manchester.

This is an independent commission from Corridor8.

Published 23.04.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations

2,252 words