The Daily Dose: What role do you see poetry playing in addressing the climate crisis named in the subtitle of your upcoming anthology, California Fire & Water: a Climate Crisis Anthology?

Molly Fisk: In every crisis that humans encounter, public or personal or both, part of what we naturally do is turn inward, toward our deepest selves, and that’s where poetry lives in the poet and resonates in the reader. Another and opposite thing we do is turn outward, toward our world, our fellows, to see what everyone else is doing, find solace or someone/something to blame (alas), try to make sense out of what’s happening.

There’s a strange flurry of poem-sending that happens in a crisis. People seek out poems, feel supported by them, and then pass them on. After 9/11, when the internet was still pretty new, no social media yet but lots of e-mail, I got more than 50 messages containing W.H. Auden’s poem about Germany’s invasion of Poland, “September 1, 1939.”

And it’s not the easiest poem, it’s old-fashioned, a little obscure. But it had New York in it, September, fear, the odor of death, skyscrapers, commuters, and a kind of hopeful ending (that Auden apparently was trying to change for the rest of his life: he thought it wasn’t true). Poetry says something to people that is valuable in times of strife. It’s always seemed to me to be the language of emotion, although maybe that’s a late 20^th/21^st century idea. Auden would probably hate it!

I’ve been teaching traumatized people through my whole “career:” first child sexual abuse survivors and Viet Nam veterans, then cancer patients and families. I taught with California Poets in the Schools, mostly in Juvenile Hall, but plenty of the other kids I worked with needed relief from the harsh things going on in their lives, too. Poetry had been a completely unexpected lifeline for me when I was recovering memories of childhood abuse, so I had the experience of poems serving to anchor my careening nervous system, and could pass that on.

When our wildfires began three or four years ago and then stacked up, the big dangerous ones in my part of California, I kept thinking about how kids’ lives were being changed by the smoke and fear and losing homes, losing everything, having to move or live in tents, figuring out schools, seeing their parents so upset. The Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship news ran through my Facebook feed and I snapped it up, thinking, immediately, that we could help kids by getting poets into their schools so they could write about fire. And all the other CA disasters: floods, mudslides, sea level rise, drought… but the prevalent one last year was fire.

The book itself, a compilation of some of those student poems and poems by adult Californians, serves as a record, in a way, of this time and place. But it’s also being seen as comfort: people have survived these disasters and are still here. They’ve coped with change. And they’re honest about the grief, the losses. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about how readers find resilience and beauty in the poems. I was feeling so helpless and ineffective, not knowing how on earth I could do anything about what we called climate “change” back then. Thinking up the project, getting the grant, and then having this book in my hand has been enormously helpful to me, in terms of participating in something useful. I encourage people to think of what they can do, too, with their own experience and skills.

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2019/2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow Molly Fisk is the editor of California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and four collections of radio commentary. She’s received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting