Reforesting the Rhizome : Peter Larkin ’ s ‘ Roots Surfacing Horizon ’

This essay foregrounds the significance of contemporary scientific accounts of mycorrhizal networks in the poetry of Peter Larkin. In contrast to critical readings that have focused on scarcity, gift, particularity, and landscape, the essay is the first study of such multiplicities and connectivity in his poetry. Commenting on a single long poem by Larkin: ‘Roots Surfacing Horizon’ (2008), and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ concept, the essay firstly notes Larkin’s enactment of both rhizomatic and arborescent metaphorics, in a manner that simultaneously exploits mycorrhizal systems and ‘reforests’ the rhizome. The essay then draws out in detail the linguistic, formal, spatial, temporal and material ramifications for the poem of attendance to these mycorrhizal symbioses; and further supports this demonstration by reading an unpublished poem by Larkin entitled ‘Roots on Foot / Feet in Root’. The essay subsequently effects some further theoretical contextualizations. Firstly, it compares Larkin’s implied ecology of engagement to ethico-political philosophies of nonidentity. Secondly, it aligns Larkin’s ecological poetics with the conceptual and descriptive dimensions of network theories, in order to examine how Larkin articulates the hybrid status of entities. Thirdly, it explores Larkin’s sensuous registration of mycorrhizal differentiation as anthropocene cohabitation or ‘becoming-with’. The essay concludes by emphasizing comparatively the already fully developed entanglement of Larkin’s ecology, which is held to offer both a poetical and a philosophical enactment of the radical potentiality of a non-human environment for inhabitation.

come between us before we identify with any sense of locality'. 10 He explores these 'between' spaces through a language of flexible formal movements and congealments, identifying more with what fibrillates in the interstices of the relational connections between things than with what 'roots' or fixates them in place. I illustrate the networked environments of Larkin's poetics through sustained commentary on a single long poem, 'Roots Surfacing Horizon' (2008), considerably overlooked by critics. 11 Throughout this reading, I draw upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 'rhizome' concept, never used in any sustained critical examination of Larkin's work. 12 It is clear that Larkin's poetics enacts many radical aspects of the 'multiplicities' encouraged by the rhizome. However, I equally claim that, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Larkin's poetics re-incorporates and even defends the ' arborescent' metaphorics of the tree, and so works through a more ecologically sensitive network of thoughts, images, and textures more complimentary to recent discoveries of mycorrhizal systems. As such, I argue that Larkin hypothetically 'reforests' the rhizome.

Roots and Rhizomes
'Roots Surfacing Horizon' is a poem about tree roots; but, intriguingly, its roots appear to behave like rhizomes. Deleuze and Guattari's 'rhizome' concept has its origins in botany and dendrology. Rhizomes are subterranean stems sending out roots and shoots from their 'nodes' -forking junctions or intersections from which buds and leaves grow. Rhizomes allow plants to colonise and spread across wide ranges of ground, propagating laterally through offshoots. For the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, rhizomes overcome a logic of separation and dichotomous distinction, acting instead through a 'middle' space, 'between things, interbeing, intermezzo'. 13 They proliferate through principles of ' connection' and 'heterogeneity', forming 'multiplicities' that extend sidelong in 'lines, strata, and segmentarities'. 14 These connecting appendages, multiplications premised on the scintillations of counter-logic, would prima facie also describe the internal pulse of Larkin's poetics. Yet the poet J. H.
Prynne is, curiously, the only person to have made this association, and only in a very short note. Following a public reading by Larkin in Cambridge in May 2013, Prynne issued a short response statement, briefly claiming that Larkin's language promotes 'networks of connection' that are 'interrelational' and 'not far different from the kind of rhizome structures which certain French theorists have promoted as examples of alternatives to a world of muscular agency'. 15 Prynne argues that 'muscular agency' reifies a 'mammal language'; one that catalyses pronouns as its primary agents, and thus a language of intention and control that he claims does not apply to trees because 'trees do not have muscles' and are not, therefore, ' assertional structures'. 16 Indeed, there are hardly any personal, objective, possessive, reflexive, or intensive pronouns in Larkin's poetry. Instead, Larkin's circumambient poetics tracks the organic processes by which actual roots ' develop their own agency', which he dynamically relays through bending the 'roots of language' into complex and entangled structures. 17  open an irregularity of attachment-to 18 Larkin's root-network has no predetermined finitude but instead is 'infinitely finishing', spreading out laterally by coursing '[a]long the gauze of a plain'. His elongating lines mimic this, contorting in similar ways to Deleuze's rhizome that ' operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots'. 19 Moreover, Larkin's root-surface is rhizomatic in its relentless expansiveness, its 'brittle | unsurrendering', a phrase emphasising the coarse textural quality of organic outgrowths. But these outgrowths also inhabit Larkin's language semantically. The poem is covered in prefixes and suffixes, as with this quotation's 'infill unconsigned' and 'non-eradication as incom-| pletion'. Throughout the poem, Larkin's use of prefixes like 're-', 'un-', 'in-', or ' de-' equally enacts a continuous changing of states, connecting verbs or nouns with new qualifications of repetition, negation, entry, or deferral. This linguistic feature is more prominently accentuated later in the poem as a ' condensity' or ' co-sprawl' of roots, which help to emphasise a shift of linguistic agency from 'muscular' pronouns onto connective or mutualistic networks of prefixes. 20 In the above quotation, Larkin also reshuffles word formations and internal repetitions of the 'stems' themselves across phrases, like 'infinitely finishing' or the echo of 'surface' in 'facing'. Larkin's comparison of 'roots feeding near surface' to 'pens' clearly also stands, then, for his own grafting of prefixes onto words' 'roots' or stems, a process enabling them to crop up across the poem. These connections by ' attachment-to' recall the ' assemblages' of Deleuze's rhizome, and suggest how both linguistic and organic environments can connectively multiply. 21 An ' assemblage' is an 'intensive network or rhizome displaying "consistency" or emergent effect by tapping into the ability of the self-ordering forces of heterogeneous materials to mesh together'. 22

Spore of Root
The philosopher Michael Marder argues that the 'physical verticality of trees does not mean that they are vertical in the way they live or grow'. He points out 'how some tree species share their root system' and can 'be thought of as overgrown, hyperextended grass', giving the notable example of enormous clonal root systems of quaking aspens. 51  Larkin's lexical 'interconnections' not only to rhizomes but also to 'underground connections' of 'microbes and some kinds of fungi'. 56 In such a reading, the materiality of However, for Larkin, the connections between disparate or local fields of discourse are above all 'naturalisations which don't proclaim any secret knowledge'. 62 Larkin has framed the assemblaged aspects of his poetics in Merleau-Pontian terms, where material organisms are 'patterned jumbles' or 'traps for fluctuation', which are held in a relational tensionality of invariance and flux, friction and cohesion. 63 Furthermore, Larkin's deployment of patterns of fluctuation infuses his vocabulary.
He consciously extends meanings out from root metaphors towards a variety of forking conceptual branches with their own overlapping lexical fields and networks of exchange. Larkin has explained this strategy in light of 'the whole notion of "treetheory" in maths and computing where endless ramification is both a sub-infinity and remains connected, without reabsorbing itself cyclically'. 64 Larkin's practice of 'branching' is itself a network of different conceptual fields that, in this instance, If not transfer-fragile at their separate holds, the looming feet stitch the spreading roots at a prime come-out (root first) only ever offered to next burdens (which the trail so far hasn't relived). As if this were a slice across horizon whose edges should loom up vertically and target a next close-down or next nearly-on again. Bi-criterion network, yes, but the paths are only multiple in the easing shape of what speckles usable roots, dusting them step by step. Feet the alias of variance, replicas by simply aligning one ramification over another, and rendering unlightly onward their resort to fork. 74 By exploring intervallic borders between roots and feet, Larkin's poem asserts at its end that 'there are no "radical"

Towards the Mycorrhizal as Becoming-With
In the poem's 'infinitely finishing' rhizomatic reach and investigation of its matter, Larkin's ecological environment equally sustains an overall arborescent metaphorics that he elsewhere insistently calls the 'un-dislocatory differentia of a branch'. 84 To return to the poem's opening 'Note', by bringing together vertical and horizontal vectors, not just as tensions that 'reinforce or array' the forest floor but also the tensile forces ' displaced across a surface' of the page, Larkin can both release the rhizomatic potentiality of language while simultaneously re-arborealising its import as 'nurtured rather than simply induced'. 85 Larkin therefore suggests a 'horizonwards' vision of the forest as a cross-species collective that is more than a merely heterogeneous multiplicity. In a less giddy and undoubtedly less opportunistic manner, surface'. 87 In this strain for relationality, the roots themselves partake of a combinatory identity that produces an authentic meta-ethical language of substitution; wherein roots are also 'root-shoe', 'root-chipped', 'root-burn', 'root-globe', 'rootenshallowed', 'root-tool', or 'root-horizon'. 88 And as a material means of breaching the barriers of interrelation, Larkin's language logically tests its own grammatical rules and roots. Therefore, the text bristles with near neologisms, compound terms that strain evocatively over separation, and substitutional leaps across definition, producing such remarkable clusters as: ' entirement', 'unseverance', 'reachlessness', ' enfibering', 'infra-delivery', 'proto-agulation', ' enspinement', 'interminous', 'unenvelopment', 'water-walking', 'thin-farming', 'stoop-rod', 'surface-pactive', 'pro-intrudant', 'feature-inflective', ' de-immersed', and ' de-horizontalised'. 89 The procreativity of such language offers an ecological poetics adequate to the task of rendering ' a no longer rearable planet'. 90 Such a radical technical move also clearly facilitates communication with various conceptual dimensions of network theories, including in the Latourian sense of no longer being able innocently to posit 'transportation without deformation', or stasis and security of postulation, or performational permanence, and equally of not assuming that agency occurs only within and across human actors. 91 Additionally, Larkin's poem manages to incorporate all three of the phases -nature, (social) fabric, and semiotic construction -that Latour regards as resources developed over the ages to deal with agencies, the precise capillary character that he attributes to modern social interactivity, complete with his own vocabulary of 'netting, weaving, lacing, twisting' and even ' embranchments', the rapid dissolution of axiological distinctions (distance versus proximity, micro-ver- as both a poetical and a philosophical aspiration, in its 'infinitely finishing' and 'unrequitable' 'sponsoring'. Therefore, in the words of the poem's final section, it is an enactment of the 'radical gleaning' of a non-human environment that also enables the fuller potential inhabitation of a '[h]uman as strange as rooted' connectedness. 97