ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics Issue 13 March 2014 Cultivating inter-being: human-plant society in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses Jen Crawford This paper considers Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s 2013 collection, Hello, the Roses, as an example of poetry as social action. The poetry is social in the general sense that, as Theodor Adorno suggests of all lyric poetry, its language “establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society”, even when it “assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses” (43). Unlike the lyrics described by Adorno, however, and despite a recent review of Hello, the Roses in the New York Times claiming that “Berssenbrugge would be hard pressed to notice other people walking along the mesa,” these poems don’t make social withdrawal their rule. This is first apparent on their surface, in their engagement in a society of text: like much of Berssenbrugge’s work, many of these poems are written “through” and in response to specific source texts. Most visibly in this volume she is working with Deleuze’s Pure Immanence, and its descriptions of the work of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but other texts quoted and paraphrased include Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe. While one might also pick out other defining interactions between humans (as individuals and groups) in the poems, this paper is primarily concerned with the poems’ social action in defining and extending a further social realm: one with human-plant relations at its “verdant heart”. These relations as Berssenbrugge explores them are themselves sociable, in that they are based in communication, in sustained conscious co-presence and, at another level, in unity of being. “Different species communicate and energies of environment and its inhabitants merge”, she writes in “Winter Whites” (31). It is worth noting that the relations of different species within that shared being are essentially amicable in character, as the title of the volume suggests, calling to mind the Latin socius as indicating comradeship and 72