The Art of Interdependence: Exploring Climate Change in Poetry

Sasha West on her new collection and how “poetry allows us to knit big things together and find a human place inside them”

Sasha West and I met briefly at a poetry conference in Krakow, Poland, almost two decades ago, and I’ve followed her work ever since. We connected again recently to talk about How to Abandon Ship, her latest collection—a dynamic, compassionate exploration of climate change and the “compounding issues of our time.”

Sasha West is the author of Failure and I Bury the Body (2013) and How to Abandon Ship (2024). Her first book was awarded the National Poetry Series, a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Agni, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her collaborative multi-media shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize 2023 Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she runs the Environmental Humanities program.

Sasha and I will be reading together at the BookWoman series (in Austin, Texas, and virtual) on September 8th. Details TBA—stay tuned.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read and excerpt of the interview. To hear Sasha read poems from How to Abandon Ship, check out the video.

The Art of Interdependence: Exploring Climate Change in Poetry

Radha Marcum: I’d love to start with the themes of the book, which include climate change and other challenges we face, or as you put it, "the compounding catastrophes of our time." I'm curious, where did this book begin for you? Did you set out to write a thematic book?

Sasha West: It really started with something I felt I couldn't contain in my life. In 2013, the IPCC report came out, and it was the first time I realized the magnitude of climate change. Not only were scientists finding more and more things that climate change would impact, but I also noticed that each report was too cautious. Reading report after report, I found that the events scientists predicted for the future were happening even before the next report came out from the UN. This was terrifying because I had just had a child. Suddenly, I understood that this issue was bigger than me, and my understanding of it was completely changing.

There was a lot of silence around this issue, one of the pinnacles of polarization and silence. I had more information than many people I knew because I had been following it for so long, yet I still felt completely unmoored. I had brought another physical body into the world, and I was responsible for teaching my child about the world and how to live in it. This realization made me think deeply about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Parenthood made my body feel porous, and climate change made my sense of being part of communities and nature feel porous. I didn't know what to do with all the things I felt and learned. My child was born in summer, and by fall, I was teaching public policy graduate students who were entering government, NGOs, nonprofits, and the military—the very spaces supposed to address this issue. I found that the genres they had for containing climate change didn't suffice. They were built to address issues like poverty, where effects have some consistency or a clear villain, but climate change didn't fit that mold. This was scary because these were the people I was entrusting the future to, including my child's future, and they couldn't communicate about climate change in a holistic way.

This led me to a deep dive into the science and data of climate change, which then pulled me into economics, systems of government, and human behavior. I started in the present moment and looked back to the Industrial Revolution and even further into Western cultural stories that allowed our current systems to develop. At the same time, I tried to think forward about what will happen if we do or don't address these issues well.

While it started with the question of how to live psychologically in a changing climate and help my child through this time, it quickly encompassed almost everything. This exploration included what we listen to and what we silence, how systems in the world disconnect us, and how to reconnect with our histories, other humans globally, and across time and space.

A major theme became the limits of imagination. As I thought about the future, I wondered where imagination comes from, how far it can go, and to what extent it is bounded by what we already know. How much are we stuck in the present because of the way the human brain works and our own histories?

Radha: You said “holistic” a moment ago. Do you think a holistic approach is something poetry can bring to this conversation about these issues? Can you talk a bit about how poetry fits in?

Sasha: One of the things I love most about art is its ability to contain contradictions. When thinking about climate change, I see myself both as a victim and a perpetrator in my own small way. I'm inside these systems, so I can't stand outside of them. I feel a lot of grief and hope, which seem like opposite things. I also feel anger and guilt. There are so many contradictory emotions, and poetry can contain all that. Poetry can hold up these moments against each other, almost like a collage, and knit things together.

Art forms in general do this, but what I particularly love about poetry is its tradition of rhyme. We often think of rhyme as something in music, but in poetry, the patterning allows us to look at something really big and see moments of connection. I don't know what early parenthood was like for you, but there were moments for me where I’d watch younger parents trying to soothe their baby and feel that connection deeply. This fast connection extended beyond humans to the animal world too. Watching a documentary of an otter with a baby on its stomach, I’d feel my child's body on mine.

Living in Houston, I saw people who had fled New Orleans after Katrina, and later saw Houstonians driven into the convention center during Harvey. Seeing photos of streets I’d lived on, whether in Mumbai or Pakistan, I felt a connection. Rhyme in poetry allows us to knit big things together and find a human place inside them. The scale of climate change is so hard for our brains to contain, but poetry can help us access the human individual feeling within these large events.

We need the data and laws, but we also need art to help us process what's happening emotionally and culturally. This processing is vital to our sense of living through this and to how we’re going to address it.

Radha: There’s a strong sense of no escape in certain poems. We’re swept up in moments of time that are juxtaposed with one another, in the litany of material things we touch every day. You express an attentiveness to each thing in the midst of a gigantic swirl of time, history, and our lives.

Sasha: There's something about the attention of poetry that feels really powerful. I don't want to privilege poetry over other art forms because attention is also different across time in music or film. But there's something about the vast looking that can go anywhere. Poetry is a very malleable medium; it doesn't require a lot of supplies or people to gather.

Actually, there's an exercise I do with my students where we just look at objects, like a pen in the classroom or the plastic lid of a coffee cup. We try to trace it back to before it was an object. What materials make it up? Where did they come from? Who made them? How did the object get to us, probably across oceans in a shipping container? Then we trace where the object goes. If it’s recycled, what does it become? If it’s not recycled, does it end up in a fish's belly or a landfill?

It’s fascinating to do this with something like a pen made of plastic, tracing back to dinosaur bones and forward to 200 or 400 years when I can't even picture my offspring’s offspring. Or with a book, where paper comes from the forest and might degrade back into the forest or become something else.

Poetry in the lyrical space lets us back into these moments of our lives and shows us where we attach to all other humans and the histories we’ve inherited. There's such power in that kind of looking, in being present and asking, "What is happening here?" and recognizing how it’s a window into broader connections.

Radha: There's a really compelling idea in Buddhist philosophy of interdependence. It’s the sense that everything, including ourselves, depends on so many causes and conditions to exist. When we look at an object and trace what it becomes or where it started from, we quickly see the porousness, the connections between what seem like very disparate instances or things. Poetry allows for this in a way that is very different from the mindset of modern science, which often insists on separation and doesn’t encourage us to connect the dots between verticals.

Sasha: I think of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work showing how indigenous traditions, which are essentially science refined over hundreds of years through experiments and observations, have developed effective practices. However, the academy and scientific funding often can't recognize or accept this as valid. We've seen this with the resistance to acknowledging that trees communicate with each other through mycelium networks. Today, we accept this as a given, but there was a time when the idea that trees could talk to each other was dismissed as implausible. This skepticism stemmed from a preconceived story, not from fact.

I can't do the work of scientists in labs or lawmakers drafting and passing legislation. But the question of how we see ourselves and the possible ways of being that we're open to feels crucial. This is where we need art and artists to say, "Also, this.”

Thinking about interdependence, I believe this is why fiction sometimes struggles with addressing climate change. While there have been great climate change novels, Western fiction is often driven by a single protagonist and personal drama. What we need instead is a focus on interdependence and ecosystems, on people working together. The fluidity of poetry allows for tiny interdependencies; each poem in a book can take a different form, contain different things, and emerge from a different voice or sense of self. This fluidity fosters interdependencies even within the art-making process and the book itself.

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To hear more of Sasha’s insights and sample a few poems from the book, watch/listen to the full interview here.

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