Listening to Seeds Tiny Songs: Haiku and Meditations by Terry Hermsen

Tiny Songs is a multi-genre meditation by poet and environmental activist Terry Hermsen, inspired by the sounds of seeds. The book came into being through Hermsen’s interactions with the visual and tactile art exhibit “It Sounds Like Love” by Cadine Navarro, hosted by the Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University (Westerville, OH, USA) and the Grange Insurance Audubon Center (Columbus, OH, USA), 2021-2023. Navarro recorded the seed sounds of nine species of prairie plants native to Ohio, USA. She then used the technique of “suminagashi,” a Japanese art form in which ink is dripped on the surface of a pan of water to translate the sounds of seeds into images. Navarro allowed the whispery, crackling, seed voices of each species to vibrate the ink in the water to make graceful, complex patterns. She then captured these patterns by laying sheets of paper on the water's surface. The patterns were etched onto nine glass panels, arranged on the gallery floor amid grass mats, and lit from below. Visitors entered a darkened room with light emerging through the images on the floor and were invited to walk, sit, lie down, and physically engage with the space. The seed recordings played softly in the background. It was a truly original and transformative way to interact with seeds.

Hermsen worked with Navarro to promote “It Sounds Like Love” and brought a variety of groups to see the exhibit, including a college-level class taught by me. Groups were often treated to music, discussion, meditation, and writing exercises as part of their tours, led by Navarro and Hermsen. In Tiny Songs, Hermsen shares his own reflections on how the exhibit changed him, other visitors, and the ways in which art might renew human resonance with the natural world more broadly. Hermsen uses multiple genres to communicate his message, combining haiku, essays, free verse, and photographs of the exhibit and visitors interacting with the artwork in the gallery. The book communicates a sense of hope and expanded possibility for deeper human connections with plants and the environment in a time when hope feels scarce. While the work in Tiny Songs is ekphrastic in the sense that it sprang from “It Sounds Like Love,” the voice of the book is its own and represents a wonderful example of how art begets art.

The first section of the book is a series of haikus, a charming play on the concept of “tiny songs.” The topics of the poems range widely, but many are set at night and comment on longing, beauty, love, and loss. Deeply intimate, they take us into personal moments of sleep, dream, and tenderness. The haikus are arranged in triplets on each page and often seem to be in conversation, as in:

Fallow orange moon, you too –

the other half of your heart

darkened?

Turn this too, my dears,

around – light as rotation

pregnant as sound

Tonight you give me

endless dreams – but none

of them have verbs (52)

Hermsen, who also works as a translator, occasionally presents the same haiku in both Spanish and English, such as:

Qué extraño –

comer de nuevo

del plato de los muertos

So very strange –

eating once more from

these plates of the dead (50)

The alternation of languages provides a rich musicality to this section and reminds us that we are, in fact, translating the seed sounds into our human language. This is a beautiful bridge to forge between species, and yet, in translation, we risk error and loss of meaning in the process. For me, this is a reminder to be humble and open to diverse possibilities as we consider the messages of seed sounds. Yet, the haikus as literal “tiny songs” do offer the reader a vehicle to imagine what seeds might say to each other, to other non-human beings, and to us – a crucial starting point toward understanding. The graceful brevity of haikus, along with the way they hold meaning with such density, is a perfect poetic metaphor for the language of seeds.

The second section of Tiny Songs is a series of short, meditative essays. Hermsen deftly interweaves the voices of other authors with his own, including ideas from Loren Eiseley’s essay “How Flowers Changed The World,” to reflect on how important plants are to animals generally and humans in particular, and how we fail to acknowledge all the ways that plants touch our lives amid the frantic pace of the modern world. In the essay section, Hermsen rejoices at how the “It Sounds Like Love” exhibit creates “…a place where images allow a dear space to dwell in, to invent, to rearrange our lives” (69). He then invites the reader to focus on memories of plants from childhood as a way to reconnect with these vibrant, essential beings, saying, “Do you recall the taste of cherries? Bins of apples that gather in the cellar, wrapped in newsprint, wintering amidst nests of mice? Did you carry nests back to your mother, garnered carefully from pine branches, or the nook of a bent tree” (69)?

This appeal to reconnect with childhood ties into a theme that emerges in several of Hermsen’s essays: the importance of play to open the human spirit to deeper connection with nature. In the essay “Symbol, Play, and Festival,” Hermsen draws on the ideas of Hans-George Gadamer to convey how play is an essential component of all human endeavor that invites us to intermingle concepts and transfer images and ideas from one context to another, often with astonishing results. In the opening of the essay (78), he notes that “Experiencing ‘It Sounds Like Love’ is nothing if not an invitation to play.” Benefitting from years of experience teaching poetry to young people, Hermsen also recounts several instances of how children responded to “It Sounds Like Love.” He mentions that “…many children – and even a number of college students – can’t resist rolling around on the seed images, or dancing on them, or moving from one to another, as if they were a spontaneous board game” (78). The essay section also presents examples of free writing produced by children as they worked with the images. Among the most powerful are:

I feel like an unknown seed

What will I become

What will others in my garden think of me

Sometimes I feel too much

Nandita (96)

I listen as all the people continue to leave

Still taking me with them

But I listen

I, the listen seed

Sydney (96)

The essay section of the book is particularly strong. Hermsen’s poetic sensibilities translate well to short prose, and his commitment to environmental preservation comes through clearly. He also communicates his sense of wonder and personal awakening in response to “It Sounds Like Love” in a compelling way and invites the reader to share in this awakening by posing frequent questions such as “Are we, as W.S. Merwin once said, like bees with their abdomens removed, so long used to gorging on honey which does not fill us that we do not even remember what true hunger is”? (81) and “We have lost so much of the sacred. Do we even know how to walk without endless worry?” (81).

The final section of the book is a series of nine ekphrastic poems inspired by Navarro’s suminagashi artwork. We see the artwork for each species alongside a poem by Hermsen on the facing page. The most effective of the poems freshly describes a dimension of Navarro’s artworks such that the reader can see the work in a new way. For example, in the poem-artwork pair “Big Bluestem” (125), Hermsen says “Riven heart / Sea hammer / Strands of your jagged hair” (6-8), prompting a re-examination of the artwork in connection with the creative images in the poem. A similar re-seeing of the artwork is inspired in “Echinacea” (117) with Hermsen’s images “Goat mind” (1), “tasseled jester” (1), and the lines:

When you sing do you

reach out     and loop the sound

back     before

it latches flame? (7-10)

The book Tiny Songs is fascinating not only as a multi-faceted piece of art itself, but also in the questions that stand just outside its covers. The “It Sounds Like Love” exhibit raises as many scientific questions as it does artistic ones. How do seeds make sounds? Are the sounds made in response to particular conditions? Do the same species of seed always make the same sound? Plants have not been much associated with communication by sound, although in a review of scientific literature, Gagliano (2012) noted that soil may transmit sound more quickly and easily than chemical signaling, and postulates that sound communication should be more deeply explored in plants. These questions are not explored in Tiny Songs and might be a great topic for a future essay. However, this book is not meant to be a scientific treatise. Rather, it is fundamentally a call to human beings to reconnect with the natural world and explores the potential of a unique, challenging art exhibit, centered on a virtually unknown aspect of seeds, to act as a road map back to a sustainable, loving relationship with our home planet. Hermsen’s book is for anyone who is interested in plants, in nature, and in exploring connections between art and the natural world. This work is for people who care deeply about the questions Hermsen poses in one of his essays: “How can a song, a poem, a work of art, even an installation grounded in the earth as “It Sounds Like Love,” make a difference? Might we find here renewed breath, an inner burst of tiny song hidden in the seeds (84)?”