Gardening the Symbiocene: Andrea Zanzotto’s and Daria Menicanti’s Poetic Hospitability

This essay explores the weaving together of vegetal and elemental narratives through poetry Andrea Zanzotto Daria Menicanti shows how their experience landscape is punctuated by cross-species encounters, a radical openness to world, belief in common roots all life, embrace vulnerability interactions with others. Starting from premise that these poets comprehend an emphasis on verbality reflects anthropic desire translate life into one-species code constitutes impediment universal meaningful communication, this argues Zanzotto’s Menicanti’s nonverbality plant communication becomes key process meaning-making. A narration plants antidote what they understand as ultimate malady language prevents it grasping conveying richness world after has supplanted nonhuman domain. Through close reading four poems illustrates eloquent silences, gaps, hesitations, overabundance meaning realm, foregrounds boundary-breaking quality space for rich human-nonhuman exchanges. Ultimately, declining place themselves above exert power over them, usher Symbiocene, era characterized multispecies coexistence, mutual support, interdependence. Their creates spaces where human can lean more-than-human and, one brief instant, get taste existing harmony pulsates around.