♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Mushrooms are not neutral.

People have strong reactions to them.

The entire world can be divided into mycophilic and mycophobic cultures.

That is, those that love fungi and enjoy them and those that fear them and hate them and shun them.

-Folks in the East have been using mushrooms and fungal fruiting bodies as medicines for a very long time.

Eastern European families collect mushrooms because it's free gourmet food on the floor.

[ Mushrooms sizzling ] -Sautéed mushrooms go on toast, or make them a little, like, in brodetto, like a little bit brothy and mount some butter in.

♪♪ -Mold and fungi -- it's a legit phobia of mine.

Like, I do -- I panic when I see it.

If I touch mold, I just -- I can feel it everywhere.

-Fungi will break down most everything we can throw at them.

There are untold losses worldwide due to fungal decomposition and rotting.

-They are stealthily powerful.

They take over garbage areas and ruin cities.

-This human disgust for fungi really goes back to our own primal fear of -- of our own mortality.

♪♪ -For a discussion of two poems about fungi, I gathered a group of writers and scientists ready to discuss how fungi both fascinate us and frighten us.

♪♪ Like many of her poems, Kay Ryan's "Weakness and Doubt" sets human values and characteristics next to natural processes, regarding both from a distance.

No such distance is available to the speaker of Sylvia Plath's "Mushrooms," which takes us down to the forest floor, where we begin to see ourselves in what grows there.

♪♪ -"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, "Very quietly "Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

-"Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room."

"Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding."

-"Even the paving.

Our hammers, our rams, "Earless and eyeless, Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes."

-"We diet on water, "On crumbs of shadow, "Bland-mannered, asking "Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!"

-"We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible."

-"Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies."

-"We shall by morning Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door."

♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] -When we walk through the forest, we tend to focus on what's aboveground, like what's visible to the human eye.

But there is a vast underground world, as well, that we don't see, and a lot of that is occupied by the fungi.

♪♪ -What we call a mushroom is the fruiting body of an organism, most of which lives in the soil.

-It may cover this entire forest underground.

-Most mushrooms will not fruit underground.

When they come to the air, then they can fruit.

-"Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

-It's exactly what happens.

It is unbelievable how the mushroom emerges overnight.

It wasn't there on your walk yesterday, and it is there on your walk today.

-It's true that when a mushroom grows out of the ground, it looks like a little toe or a nose.

-The explicitly human language is "toes" and "noses," "take hold" also.

You have to do that with a hand.

-It's almost like she wanted us as humans to, like, see ourselves in it.

-"Soft fists."

-"Earless."

-"Eyeless."

-"Voiceless."

-"Shoulder through holes."

-"Our foot's in the door."

-Many people think that mushrooms are vegetables, and they aren't.

We are more closely related to mushrooms than we are to plants.

We share more gene sequences with mushrooms than we do with plants.

-Fungal categorization is always changing.

They are just uncategorizable.

They're so queer.

They're so weird.

[ Laughs ] -Poets understand that the best foothold to the unknown is the known.

-Scientists, too, gain access to the unknown through the known, using analogies to identify and name living things.

Many so-called scientific names are, in fact, just Latin translations of metaphors.

Thus, the mushroom commonly called Judas's ear, refers to the biblical story of the eavesdropping Judas.

The Belly Button mushroom's name is Hydnum umbilicatum.

Sylvia Plath's father was a biology professor and her mother his collaborator in writing scientific monographs.

Plath studied botany, and she kept bees.

And with her husband, Ted Hughes, she roamed the woods, filling her journals with observations of natural phenomena.

-She clearly had studied up on mushrooms or had observed the natural and unnatural world around her really carefully.

-She wrote "Mushrooms" on November 14, 1959.

It was a season of rejections for her.

Her poetry manuscript was rejected.

Immediately after that, her first children's book was rejected.

Her journal is strewn with these sentiments of, "I feel hopeless and trapped between the potential of my talent and its fruition."

She wrote, "I must study botany and learn about trees and birds and observe and walk in nature."

She called this poem "an exercise in mushrooms."

-Plath's exercise mimics the form of mushrooms in its own poetic form.

-There are 11 stanzas, and within each stanza there are exactly three lines, and each line has exactly five syllables.

-Plath's poem is like little -- little buttons, you know, with their stanzas.

They're just these little bulbs popping through.

-Each of Plath's stanzas presents itself separate and distinct on the page, but the stanzas are threaded together under the surface by syntax and sound pattern.

-This poem is a great example of her choosing words with certain vowel and consonant sounds and putting those words in close proximity to one another.

-"Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles."

-"The leafy bedding, Even the paving."

-It's extraordinarily musical in the most brain-tickling way.

"Heaving the needles."

It's no accident that "heave" and "needles" have the same vowel sound.

It's no accident that she moves on within a matter of lines from "heaving" to "paving."

"Even the paving."

-I think she's doing this playfully.

-It's a little sinister.

"Our toes, our noses."

-Yes.

Mm-hmm.

There is a witchiness to it.

There's a kind of Grimm fairy tale meets nursery rhyme, Victorian nursery rhyme, you know, the dark ones.

-The world of fairy circles that are enchanting and of woodland places where the witch stirs the cauldron.

♪♪ -Plath knows how a poet can thicken the atmosphere by conjuring allusions to earlier literary traditions.

Mushrooms have a central role in European fairy tales, especially stories of earthy female powers run amok.

Russian folk tales feature the witch Baba Yaga, blamed for sewing poisonous mushrooms in gardens and crops.

And these Russian stories feed into Grimm's fairy tales, where witches' potions made of mushrooms intoxicate or kill, and to "Alice in Wonderland," where an adventurous little girl throws over the constraints of Victorian propriety courtesy of a mushroom.

-I read Sylvia Plath as using that creepy mythology of mushrooms to describe the underground powers we're all afraid of.

-I think she sees them as invaders, this army of organisms that are pushing up.

They appear very soft and non-aggressive, but, you know, they're coming.

[ Both laugh ] They're coming for us.

-There's a little bit of -- It's just, like, a horror movie.

-Yeah.

♪♪ -Hey!

Hey!

-There actually was an old sci-fi movie called "The Invasion of the Mushroom People."

[ Laughs ] [ Both scream ] -Matango, the horrible mushrooms.

♪♪ -It's like the return of the dead.

It's creepy as hell.

It's creepy to imagine this army of things taking over.

It's an army of eyeless, voiceless things that also, weirdly, have fists.

It's eerie.

It's wrong.

We are called on to, I think, feel a little bit of disgust.

[ Squishing ] -Human disgust at fungi is the explicit topic of Kay Ryan's poem, which links fear of fungi with the human fear of weakness.

♪♪ -"Weakness and doubt are symbionts "famous throughout the fungal orders, "which admire pallors, rusts, grey talcums, "the whole palette of dusts and powders "of the rot kingdom "and do not share our kind's disgust "at dissolution, following the "interplay of doubt and weakness "as a robust sort of business; "the way we love construction, they love hollowing."

♪♪ -Just as Plath does, Ryan layers literary and scientific approaches one on another.

Ryan's title and tone recall the classic fables where the often moral investigation of human qualities finds illustration in a story of animals and plants.

Meanwhile, the poem's wry use of scientific vocabulary and its lists of fungal characteristics read a little like a scientist's field notes.

-As a fungal biologist, I love the way Ryan has really captured the vast diversity of fungi and their variety of forms.

♪♪ -Mushrooms are called higher fungi.

They are the most evolved forms.

There are lower fungi that include things like molds and rusts and smuts.

-"Rusts, grey talcums, "the whole palette of dusts and powders of the rot kingdom."

"Dusts and powders" are a great way to describe the sporulation of certain fungi.

They make these minute spores in the billions.

It appears as though it's a fine dust, a fine powder, and this dust and this powder can come in many different colors.

Fungi are very colorful.

♪♪ -They are rusty brown, rusty yellow.

-Sky blue.

I mean, the most beautiful color.

-Cephalosporium, Alternaria, Fusarium.

-Gray, white, red.

-Cladosporium, Penicillium, Aspergillus.

It's blue.

It's powdery.

You see it on your oranges.

♪♪ -"Weakness and doubt are symbionts famous throughout the fungal orders."

A symbiont in the scientific sense is an organism that lives in association with another organism, and each of those "symbionts" are providing something beneficial to the other.

-One of the discoveries of relatively modern times is that plants cannot grow unless they form symbiotic relationships with fungi.

The fungal mycelium helps the plant assimilate nutrients from the soil and in return receive nutrients from the plant.

-Ryan makes the interdependency of symbiosis visible and audible in complex patterns of alliteration and internal rhyme.

The R's and D's of "order," "admire," and "powder" are knit together with the P's, T's and L's of "talcum," "doubt," "palette," and then with the sibilance of "dust," "rust," "disgust."

♪♪ -"Weakness and doubt are symbionts."

Fungi weaken bonds in materials.

That's how they break them down.

They secrete enzymes, and these enzymes go out and break down everything around them.

-She uses the word "dissolution."

-And there is hollowing that takes place.

Cavities form.

Things that are solid are reduced to powdery textures.

♪♪ -Rotting is an accurate description of what fungi do.

-We are creeped out by them because they remind us of death all of the time.

-Fungi remind me of death.

[ Laughing ] And, like, that's, like, everyone's greatest fear.

You know, they just remind you of rot, and that's not -- You never want to see rotting food.

It's gross.

You don't want to think about how your body's gonna rot in the ground.

♪♪ -Her use of the word "pallors" -- "the fungal orders, which admire pallors."

She didn't say "hues" or "shades."

She said "pallors," and pallor is always what you associate with sickness and death and dying and decay.

♪♪ -"And do not share our kind's disgust at dissolution."

-"Disgust of dissolution."

Not just distaste for or discomfort, but disgust, this kind of repugnant outrage at the fact that we are mortal.

-"Following the interplay of doubt "and weakness as a robust sort of business."

-Weakness and doubt is what fungi exploit in their dissolution of materials.

This is their sort of robust kind of business.

-If we wiped out all the bacteria and fungi, we'd be done for.

-Why?

Why wouldn't it work?

-Because you need that balance of growth and decay for life to succeed.

-"The way we love construction, they love hollowing."

♪♪ -To me, this is the absolute essence of the poem.

She really sets up this juxtaposition between the "we," which is humanity, society, where we are always constructing things, whereas the fungi are always dissolving, decomposing, hollowing things out.

-Fungi are the antithesis to humans.

And she really hits on that in this poem 'cause we think we're this, like, pillar of strength and construction.

-"Construction" is such an inorganic word, right?

It's so imposing.

What I will impose on nature, what I will impose on the landscape.

♪♪ -Construction -- masculine.

Generally speaking, that's how we think of it.

The natural processes that overtake that construction, the weeds that grow up around the skyscraper.

Nature -- feminine.

This idea of the feminine as finding its power in a quiet way that doesn't speak its name.

♪♪ I love the way that "hollowing" echoes "hallowed."

It suggests to me a valorization of this work.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -In defending characteristics humans typically consider weak, Ryan's poem returns us to Sylvia Plath's "Mushrooms," where these same characteristics are closely associated with those so lowly as to be disregarded.

♪♪ -"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, "Very quietly "Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

-Her picture of mushrooms -- they're kind of cute.

You know, they're meek and soft and cute, just pushing their toes and noses up.

♪♪ -"We diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, "Bland-mannered, asking "Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!"

-That's not that great to have so many of you who diet on crumbs of shadow, bland-mannered.

-This poem is describing the voiceless, the quiet.

"Discreetly."

"Nobody sees us."

-I see it very much as people who've been held down, the downtrodden.

-"We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible."

-"We are shelves, we are Tables."

She's purposely choosing two objects, two things that are, for lack of a better word, passive.

They are used to support other things.

They play a supporting role, not an active role.

"We diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, "Bland-mannered, asking "Little or nothing.

-These '50s feminine images.

It's the personification of mushroom as 1950s woman.

-For Sylvia Plath, so much of her life story, so much of her preoccupation in poetry is with the place that women have been put in society.

-By saying "We are shelves, we are tables," she is implying we live to serve.

-I'm aware of the feminist interpretation of this poem.

I'm aware that the most common reading of it is a kind of resistance to the patriarchy.

I personally don't see it that way.

♪♪ During that season of rejections, I think she's pondering as an artist the meaning of persistence.

-In thinking more about it, I actually wondered if she was talking about the act of writing poetry.

You often hear of writers saying that their poem or their piece of prose came out of nowhere.

And so, like a mushroom, perhaps it was kind of under the surface.

-That is true of most artists.

What we see at all of their fruiting body of their work that becomes the great masterpiece, it's a lifetime of incubation.

-It's like if you've been underground and you've been sort of pushing through the needles and you're trying to come up, push up through the cracks and the crevices.

And then suddenly your foot's in the door.

-And suddenly, suddenly to the outside world, there's this bloom of genius.

♪♪ -We shall by morning Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door."

-This is also a poem about power.

-It is.

-Unseen power and seen power.

♪♪ -There's this beautiful soft power that gets invoked, the sort of underground-ness of it.

♪♪ -Both Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan talk about how these things that seem weak and tiny and invisible are, like, actually very powerful and we're very dependent on them.

So, for, like, us to feel powerful, you know, for being a species that constructs, we're still at the whim of this whole different kingdom.

-Kay Ryan's poem gives love of hollowing the last word, suggesting that human constructions are ultimately transitory, while the final stanza of Plath's poem puts fungi among the largest powers of nature and creation across time.

-"We shall by morning Inherit the earth."

That's biblical language, of course, that she's reaching back to.

-"The meek shall inherit the earth."

The mushrooms will inherit the earth.

-Fungi were really the first large organisms to colonize earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

And hundreds of millions of years into the future, they will inherit the earth.

♪♪ -The very first line of Plath's poem is "overnight."

The first line of the last stanza is "We shall by morning."

She's remembered the time context, and she's kind of set it all in, well, 12 hours, really.

-There's the scientific time, and there's the artistic, imaginative time.

She compresses the entire life of a planet into one night.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪