Photo: Hila Ratzabi in Acadia National Park in Maine
Thank you to poet Hila Ratzabi for sharing her thoughts on eco-poetry. Hila’s dedication to poetry and the potential that poetry has to make tangible, positive changes continues to inspire me.
Hila Ratzabi was selected by Adrienne Rich as a recipient of a National Writers Union Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbook The Apparatus of Visible Things (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, About Place, The Normal School, H_NGM_N, Cortland Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Philadelphia where she founded the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop. Some of her recent poems on climate change can be found in a special issue of About Place, entitled “Enlightened Visions in the Wake of Trauma: Indigenous, Marginalized, and Small Island Nations People Address the Issue of Global Warming.”
Q. You place your poems in the eco-poetry subgenre. How did you come to be interested in this subject?
I had started writing poems in response to Hurricane Sandy, but I only realized in hindsight that the poems were a result of that experience. I had waited out the hurricane in Philadelphia, but I was deeply shaken by seeing what happened on the Jersey Shore and New York City, my hometown. I started paying closer attention to news reports on climate change, and read Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which is an excellent primer on climate change. I don’t remember when I first heard of the term “eco-poetry,” but I became curious about it, and realized that what I was writing fit into that category. I later created an eco-poetry workshop in Philadelphia, which allowed me to teach myself about the topic and design a curriculum around it.
Q. What three books (any genre) or resources would you recommend to other poets interested in writing about the environment?
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy
The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street
Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, by Forrest Gander and John Kinsella
Q. You recently blogged in response to the most recent spate of articles asking if poetry matters. How can poetry contribute to helping to solve environmental emergencies?
I thought a lot about what poetry can and can’t “do,” particularly for a session of my eco-poetry workshop on Activist Poetics. I tend to be skeptical about what poetry can do, and furthermore I’m disheartened about how little progress has been made politically in terms of making large scale changes regarding the use of fossil fuels. If you start reading more closely about climate change, you’ll quickly learn that we are in a deep mess that may be irreversible. In fact, a friend and I recently started a climate change book club, where we’re reading the book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. The book attempts to empower activists while allowing the space to acknowledge and grief for the damage already done to the Earth. But I think for many of us, the question of whether we can really make a difference, whether through poetry or politically, is a difficult one. Whether I feel a sense of despair or hope can vacillate day to day, hour to hour.
That being said, I’ve been doing a bunch of readings lately from this poetry book in progress on climate change, and I’ve noticed that there has been a strong and positive response on the part of audiences. The topic deeply resonates with a lot of folks, and while I don’t write poems with a specific message in mind, people seem to be tuned into what I’m writing about. This gives me some sense of hope that poetry can tap into our innermost concerns for the Earth, and perhaps inspire people to stay connected to that feeling of concern, and act on it.
A few months ago I heard a talk at Poets House in New York given by the poet Brenda Hillman. She was asked about her environmental activism and she said that she attends protests and marches not because she necessarily thinks they’ll make a difference, but because it’s important to set an example. That struck me deeply. What if setting an example by our actions is even more significant than their tangible results? It reminded me of a quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “To be is to stand for.” I’ve been involved with a group in Philadelphia that is organizing buses to bring people to the People’s Climate March on Sept. 21st, coinciding with a U.N. summit on climate change. Inspired by Hillman, I can accept the possibility that my actions may not really make a difference, but that I can set and example and stand for the change I want to see in the world.
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Chloe Yelena Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. She is the author of Unrest (Finishing Line Press). She blogs about intersecting roles at Woman Mother Writer.
