From ecopoetics to action

An Interview with Serena Alagappan

Carrying forward the tradition of ecopoetics, Serena Alagappan reckons with both immediate calls to action and the fear inherent in today’s climate crisis. Galvanizing us through interpersonal details and beauty, she shows us poetry’s power to change minds and, in turn, effect change. “If we realize that not only fellow human beings, but also our shared environment, are sensitive, and susceptible, we might adjust our behavior, try new modes of communication, take more care in our treatment of one another and the earth,” she tells us. In her uniquely perceptive language, she extends C.K. Williams’ idea that “Beauty saves us. Beauty will save us. The world, though, is still ours to cherish, and ours to protect.”

We can’t wait for your forthcoming pamphlet ‘Sensitive to Temperature.’ Can you tell us about its origins and development?

The idea for the pamphlet came after I wrote a poem called ‘After the Mushroom at the End of the World’ which was initially published in the Colorado Review. I set out to write about environmental issues, inspired by Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, but the poem ended up being about unfulfilled desire and disappointment. I was frustrated. But then I realized I could approach the poem as a point of entry instead of viewing it as a failure. Existential questions for our earth and for our hearts are intertwined. Why not probe them simultaneously? 

I became very interested in documenting ‘natural disasters’ in the interpersonal realm.  What can slippery affection, precarious love, and fleeting infatuation teach us about the instability of our internal and external environments? I wanted to write a pamphlet that evoked themes like contamination, fragility, and fear in human relationships to underscore the climate crisis, habitat destruction, and ecological degradation.

Our impact on the environment (and vice versa) is at the heart of your poetry. In “Slipface,” for example, you write, “what is left besides deflation, desert, and pavement?” How do you see poetry’s role in combating climate change and humanity’s decline?

I remember an English professor who told me that professors in the humanities have a unique challenge. They need to tell their students not only what the words on the page mean, but also why they are important. Many will argue the primary challenges of the climate crisis require practical intervention and action. That’s certainly true. And since at its best, literature can serve as an emotional doorway for readers, as an invitation to empathize and act, it’s essential to ask how poetry and art can serve and inspire us amidst existential threats to our environment.

In this kind of writing, many questions arise — about the benefits and drawbacks of anthropomorphizing, the limits of aesthetics, and the power and problem of excavating hope from sites of human destruction and decay. There’s a wonderful collection on ecopoetics that the Poetry Foundation put together that has one essay by C.K. Williams titled “Nature and Panic.” Williams writes “beauty won’t save the world from the depredations with which it’s already been savaged, but it can save us from the enervating despair that is the outcome of panic, that paralysis that might keep us from doing what we can to confront what’s before us.”

As we meet the shared panic of a climate crisis, dwindling biodiversity, and environmental injustice, Williams’ words offer profound solace: “Beauty saves us. Beauty will save us. The world, though, is still ours to cherish, and ours to protect.”

I have tried to write poems in the spirit of nurturing beauty, and reinvigorating a call to protect and cherish our natural world. My own way into these issues is through interpersonal metaphors. I hope that method resonates with others.

Aristotle famously maintained that the universal is found in life’s particulars, and we see this viewpoint in your work. What draws you to certain details as samples of larger existential themes?

I do think that in probing, and devoting attention to life’s particulars (be they emotions, experiences, or stories), we approach a more kaleidoscopic view. 

There was an episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast, where poet Jericho Brown said, “The more authentically and deeply we can speak from our particular experience, we speak to the particular experience of others.” This sentiment feels true to me. 

Another writer whom I think leverages particular detail so beautifully is Durga Chew-Bose, who wrote the lyric essay collection, Too Much and Not the Mood. She has a description of ‘nook people’ that is both a general ‘category’ of person, and highly specific. ‘Nook people’ she says are ‘those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.’ She writes, ‘Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening.’ Of course, before reading her work this phrase was completely foreign to me, but I suddenly identified as a ‘nook person’ because of the granular detail with which she described familiar feelings. To offer particular, personal details is to trust and commune with your reader. 

In your writing, there’s a feminine sensitivity framed not as weakness, but as intelligence. How do you see this disposition as a launchpad for change?

The pamphlet’s title came from an essay called ‘Scar Tissue’, which my eighth grade English teacher, Jordie Kattan, wrote in college. In the essay, she declares her sensitivity. She isn’t ashamed of it. I’ve drawn inspiration from that essay over the last decade. 

I have often heard people criticize sensitivity, especially in women, and it’s really puzzling to me. Reacting to change, gradual or rapid, being attuned to the delicate, immediate, and jarring transformation of people and places: this seems like something to aspire toward, not be afraid of. I like the idea of rewriting sensitivity as virtue instead of hamartia. 

If we realize that not only fellow human beings, but also our shared environment, are sensitive, and susceptible, we might adjust our behavior, try new modes of communication, take more care in our treatment of one another and the earth.

“I read once, that there’s a kind / of love that doesn’t extend itself / both ways between two people / equally because it doesn’t have to,” you cite in “After the Mushroom at the End of the World”. Why did these lines from Carl Phillips’ poem ‘If You Go Away’ resonate with you & how do they resonate with our relationship to the earth? 

When I read those lines, I was comforted by the idea that lopsided expressions of love could still be legitimate. Disillusionment is heartbreaking and it can be really isolating to question the validity of your own emotions and experiences. But the truth is, most of us have at times fallen short, forgotten promises, and unmade plans. 

The Carl Phillips poem is related to what I am trying to explore in the pamphlet because it is easy to slip into feelings of denial and anxiety when thinking about the climate crisis. However, I do think that the love between people and the earth extends both ways. At the end of Robin Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass she pleads with readers to ‘honor the moral covenant of reciprocity…for all we have been given for all that we have taken…to hold a giveaway for Mother Earth’. This is our obligation, she says, ‘in return for the privilege of breath’. This testament to gratitude and everyday wonder resonates with me.

Apart from climate change, what inspires you to write? What fuels you as an artist?

Another theme I find thought-provoking is communication — its challenges, breakdowns, near misses, all the moments we swallow and suppress, the things we choke out, whisper, and exclaim. How does the form of our words (or nonverbal communication) affect their reception? What are the consequences of the forms we default to or choose?

I’m also curious about sensations of ‘the impending’— when you think/lead the reader to think something momentous is about to happen, and the poem ends in a shudder instead of an explosion. 

What fuels me is mainly reading! I feel most inspired to write when I’ve just read something moving. Also, good conversations — they’re spontaneous literature!