Producing poems on the theme of climate change across
a 3-year residency is an exciting, challenging and somewhat daunting task. For
almost 12 months now, I have been Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate
Change Communication Research Hub (MCCCRH) at Monash University in Melbourne. The
focus of the MCCCRH is to communicate climate science in a way that is clear, easy
to understand and advocacy-free, with the aim of increasing its accessibility
and to cut through misinformation. At the Hub, it is understood that by forming
innovative, multidisciplinary connections with writers, musicians, communication
specialists, weather forecasters and other professionals and organisations,
that climate science can be conveyed in new and creative ways that everyday
people can relate to.
Shortly before my residency, I began working on a
series of poems set in the year 2042, an envisioned future landscape based on
current trajectories. It was the first time, aside from writing ekphrasis
poetry, that I had challenged myself to write poems that were purposefully (albeit
loosely) thematic. In both this work and my climate change writing, the
approach has been to focus on the domestic, everyday and human-centred,
presenting a kind of flip side to anthropogenic life. I knew that the primary
challenge in writing about climate change would be to explore a very bleak
subject in a way that wouldn’t be utterly devoid of hope. So far, my focus has been
to confront the reader with the reality of the situation through strong, vivid
imagery regarding human and surrounding animal and landscape impacts. I felt
that the poems needed to – whatever the specific subjects chosen – look the
uncomfortable truth in the eye.
There has always been something greatly poetic and
emotionally engaging to me about the clash between humans and nature. So too,
the displacement of humans from their customary comfort and routine. As far back
as 2011, I depicted the aftermath of cyclone Yasi in Queensland. I had felt
moved to write about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the US in 2010, and a
community on northern Victoria’s border coming together to save a one-thousand-year
old tree. Of course, I have written poems unrelated to environmental issues, spanning
love, grief, family, suburbia and the city loop train. I soon realised that I would
be writing about all of these things still, as the impacts of climate change increasingly
enter the domain of our day-to-day lives. We will still be navigating our
families and friends, going to work and school and falling in love.
But where to start? In the latter part of 2019, I was invited
to attend lectures in climate science communication at Monash. I quietly sat at
the back of a lecture theatre with a class of undergraduates, as we were shown scientific
and historical graphs, data and images, delivered by scientists, communications
experts and knowledge brokers. To say it was confronting would be an
understatement. I realised that the climate crisis was, in fact, a worse situation
than I had originally thought or imagined. It was a truly heavy realisation. I began
looking for the human stories within the scientific data, and finding the relatable
images and events that would touch people and create emotional connection and
response to the issue.
In one of the lectures, an image of a tired and
emaciated polar bear balancing himself on a thin piece of ice was presented. I found
myself extremely moved by this direct, inarguable image and knew I would be
writing about the plight of this creature. I began researching reports about
polar bears being sighted in Russian villages, having travelled from the Arctic
to the panic of local people. One such event in Belushya Guba on Novaya Zemlya
in Russia was depicted in my poem ‘The Invasion’. ‘Bat Piles’, is a poem told
from the point of view of a wildlife officer walking through the piles of dead
bats wiped out by heat waves, based on several events in South East Queensland
and New South Wales. One likely future scenario that compelled me was that of extreme
weather keeping children and families indoors and unable to venture out or play
outside. I wrote the poem ‘Into the Heat’ about children craving outside play, including
incidences of people ignoring warnings and risking their lives by going out.
Now, in the time of COVID-19, this poem feels more current
than futuristic. In Australia, almost immediately before COVID-19 occurred, we
had endured the worst bushfire crisis our country had seen. It spanned 12.6
million hectares. For the first time in my life, the air quality was declared hazardous
in my Melbourne suburb due to bushfire smoke from country Victoria, and we were
encouraged to stay inside and wear masks when leaving the house. Melbourne, a
place that had been declared the world’s most liveable city for 7 consecutive
years prior, was now suddenly feeling the frightening impacts of extreme
weather. Sadly, we knew that we were the lucky Australians whose houses
remained intact and with better air quality than Sydney and Canberra to the north
of us. During this crisis, which occurred across December 2019 and January 2020,
we felt that the future was indeed here.
A large part of my writing on climate has been working
on numerous one-line or monostich poems. As the Hub has a strategic preference
for short, accessible messaging, and knowing that Instagram poetry has been
gaining popularity, I explored the idea of pairing one-line poems with
pictorial images in a shareable meme format. So far, I have written 22 one-line
poems about climate change and there are more in the works. These have been of
great interest beyond those who usually read poetry, including being featured
in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS).
I am also currently working with a fellow member of the Hub on a school lesson
plan to communicate climate change in Australian classrooms, where my one-line
poems will be studied in Year 7 English classes.
In October 2019, I had the opportunity to be a part of
the panel ‘Feeling the Heat: Exploring Compassion in Climate Change’, joining
the MCCRH contingent at the History of Emotions Conference at the University of
New England in New South Wales. In my first conference paper, I wrote and
presented ‘The Emotional Impact of Climate Storytelling Through Poetry’ in the dry
and drought-affected New South Wales Highlands, a region very close to where
fires were then burning. I vividly recall travelling from Sydney to Armidale in
a small plane and looking down at a landscape covered by a vast shadow of
smoke.
This month, my new poems have been posted on the
MCCCRH site including a poem about the wonder of a child being exposed to grass
for the first time (‘Charlotte in her Natural Habitat’), a poem about loggers
returning to bushfire-affected areas in Victoria and New South Wales (‘Loggers,
Post Fire’) and a poem about the common sight of a displaced koala ‘(Koala
Holds Up Traffic’). Next on my agenda is to write a creative response to
Assembly for the Future’s project ‘The Things We Did Next’ – a collaborative
practice generating a series of artworks and provocations via Zoom that
collectively imagine multiple futures.
By poetically responding to current events and
imagining and reimagining futures, I hope to hone my writing craft while finding
and telling the climate change stories that need to be heard and shared.
Hopefully, it will cause one or two or more people to think more deeply about climate
change and how a single species’ extinction or a burning tree affects us all.
The climate change poems I have written to date can be
read here, with more poems to be added in May and November every year until
July 2022.
Amanda Anastasi is an Australian
poet whose work has appeared on the walls of Prahran’s Artists Lane in
Melbourne to The Massachusetts Review. Her debut poetry collection was 2012 and other poems. Amanda has been the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk
Fellowship and is currently Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change
Communication Research Hub.