Someday all poems will be ecopoems.
Introduction
That all said, that all felt, I do believe in poetry’s power to help us do better. I believe in ecopoetry. And I believe in us, in you and me. I do. When I saw that Ann and Laura-Gray had reunited to make Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025), I knew I wanted to talk to them again and do what I could to aid their (our) endeavor. Their first collection has been pervasively influential. It has found so many readers and been a favorite text in many classrooms, including mine. It is my hope that this new collection builds upon that readership and finds its way into even more hearts and minds. Even more than the first one, in so many ways, it says now!
We do not seek to change what we do not see, and ecopoetry helps us see.
Interview
Derek Sheffield: Your first co-edited collection, The Ecopoetry Anthology helped define a genre. It includes erudite and expansive introductions by you both and by Robert Hass. What was the impetus for this collection? What was your process in finding the poems?
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Around 20 years ago, an acquisitions editor at a press known for its environmental books visited Oxford and asked if I might have something to submit to them. Laura-Gray and I have both been members of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment for many years, and we often participated on poetry panels at ASLE conferences. We started to notice how many ASLE poets were writing ecopoetry—so that was our first idea, to do a small collection of their work. From there, the project exploded, so that at one time we proposed to do an anthology of world ecopoetry. We went to a wonderful conference that Franca Bellarsi organized in Brussels and met people from all over who were interested in submitting.
By this time, we had shifted from the original publisher, which didn’t work out, to Trinity University Press, whose publisher at the time was Barbara Ras. She was incredibly helpful in bringing the project to fruition, because we had no idea what we were doing. For instance, she said, Not world ecopoetry. United States ecopoetry. We finally had to agree with her. So we started calling for submissions—this was before Submittable—which came in snail mail and online. I can’t remember all the details of how we processed snail submissions, since Laura-Gray is in Virginia and I’m in Mississippi. I do remember Laura-Gray’s patience with me as I struggled with various computer entanglements.
The book took its final shape as follows: I attended the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop one summer and had lunch with Robert Hass. I was describing the book to him and he said (I paraphrase), “Why don’t you have a 30-page section at the beginning that would include great American poems that were written before the term ‘ecopoetry’ came into use? That would be wonderful for teachers.” Both Laura-Gray and Barbara were excited about that idea. So “30 pages” quadrupled in size—and the anthology itself kept growing and growing and growing, to its present length of over 600 pages.
In March 2010, I broke my knee, and while I was convalescing, I typed the final iteration of the entire manuscript on my laptop, standing at my kitchen counter. This project took six years, and I’m just glad it happened.
Laura-Gray Street: Barbara Ras was a huge help in shaping the original Ecopoetry Anthology. In addition to the poems submitted and that we’d found, Barbara encouraged us to keep reading, keep looking. She’d say, “Have you looked into such-and-such poet?” and “What about this poet?” over and over again. More poems in the anthology came from that process of reading, researching, tracking down than from submissions (also because our original call included work from outside the U.S., which, finally, we couldn’t include).
In contrast, at least half, if not more, of the poems in Attached to the Living World arrived in response to our call for submissions. Ann and I still read endlessly to find poems that might not have otherwise found their way to us. At least twice that I can remember, Ann and I simultaneously emailed each other the same poem with the same injunction: Must have this one. But we gathered most of the poems through Submittable, a huge tech change, as Ann describes, over our first process. I was on sabbatical when we started taking submissions and was also editing several other journal issues, so I pretty much lived on Submittable. I will forever think of that year as my Submittable Sabbatical!
Which brings up another difference between the two processes: While The Ecopoetry Anthology was over six years in the making, Attached to the Living World took shape in two—conceived at AWP Seattle in March 2023 and launched at AWP Los Angeles in March 2025. The speed of the latter speaks to several points. Ann and I have worked together on several projects now, and we have a flow. Also, we had a clear sense of purpose and premise with Attached, while it took us some time to refine those with The Ecopoetry Anthology. Most importantly, we had a heightened sense of urgency with Attached, given everything going on in the U.S. and the world.
Derek Sheffield: The Ecopoetry Anthology begins with 123 pages of historical ecopoems. That’s not the case in Attached to the Living World. What are some other significant differences between the two collections?
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura Gray-Street: We agreed that Attached to the Living World would contain only poems written and/or published since 2010, by poets who were not in The Ecopoetry Anthology. The poets in Attached to the Living World are either U.S. citizens or, in a few cases, long-term residents of the U.S.—for instance, Ph.D. students. The book came together in two years rather than six, and it’s much shorter—just around 300 pages. And of course, the fact that all the work is contemporary is a difference. Attached to the Living World does not include Hass’s brilliant long introduction, but it has a foreword by Camille Dungy and a wonderful introduction by Margaret Ronda, who is working as an ecocritic and scholar at University of California, Davis.
But the time framework we mention above is the most significant difference: that Attached includes poems written and/or published since 2010. When The Ecopoetry Anthology launched in 2013, Barack Obama was president and delivered his first major policy speech focused on climate change, gay marriage was legalized, fossil fuel divestment was accelerating, solar power was expanding, EPA regulations were tightened, and so on. While there was much to worry about, it felt possible to slow, maybe even start to turn our massive, global ship in the direction of ecological, if not responsibility, at least recognition. But we were already experiencing the increased rumblings—racial and social injustices, ecological crises, political shifts toward authoritarianism—of now-ongoing avalanches. Following up The Ecopoetry Anthology with a collection that attests to so much excruciating change—that acknowledges the avalanches—was, to us, a necessity.
Derek Sheffield: Generally speaking, do the poems in Attached to the Living World differ from the ones in The Ecopoetry Anthology? If so, how?
Laura-Gray Street: I’d say that the poems in Attached to the Living World are written out of a greater general awareness and understanding of environmental justice. War is more present than in The Ecopoetry Anthology. Likewise, an awareness of gender fluidities. Also, computers, social media, AI. There are more speculative poems, poems that parallel the fantastic, surreal, and/or sci fi nature of speculative fiction. I would also say that there is arguably less humor. That was something we’ve heard frequently about The Ecopoetry Anthology, how much readers have appreciated the presence of humor, that some of the poems are downright funny. There is wryness and sharp-wittedness to be found in Attached, but, because of the intensity of our collective experiences in the past decade or so, I don’t think there’s as much comic element.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: To answer this, I’ll quote from the foreword. I love both anthologies, but I think Camille expresses what’s characteristic of this one. She writes:
So much of the world shows up in renewed record registered on these pages. Many countries, many peoples, many greater than human life forces are here. These poems exhibit a wide-ranging curiosity, shifting their forms, their tones, and their focus in countless ways so that what seems old might be renewed, what seems disconnected might connect, and what seems lost might be remembered. I celebrate this new volume…. Highest praise to the expanding definitions for communication, concern, and care this book welcomes into the world.
Derek Sheffield: In the time between your two anthologies, has your conception of ecopoetry changed? If so, in what way?
Ann Fisher-Wirth: I’ll go back a little further. When I first started attending ASLE conferences, around 1994, many of the presentations were about New England and the Pacific Northwest—about mountains and rivers and climbing and oceans—and they were great, but a lot was left out. I chaired a panel on Southern ecopoetry at one conference around 2000. We had exactly one attendee—and she was our graduate student. Since then, the focus of ASLE has dramatically widened, and continues to widen, with the foregrounding of environmental and social justice issues and the emphasis on diversity, both human and geographical. My conception of ecopoetry has developed in a similar way.
Laura-Gray Street: I still agree with what we wrote in our introduction to The Ecopoetry Anthology, classifying historically traditional nature poems, activist-leaning environmental poems, and more experimental ecological poems under the umbrella of ecopoetry, while also celebrating how richly all three categories interweave. But basically I believe all poems written by someone who thinks about the world ecologically are by definition ecopoems. What I hope that means: Someday all poems will be ecopoems.
Derek Sheffield: What are you hearing from readers and reviewers so far? I remember some people were surprised and maybe even a little distraught at the inclusion of John Ashbery in the first anthology. Have you had any similar reactions to any of the poems in Attached to the Living World?
Laura-Gray Street: Okay, I’ll confess: I was the one who advocated for including John Ashbery. And I stand by that! In The Ecopoetry Anthology, we were trying to see, and to help others see, the possibilities of ecopoetry in poems that weren’t classified as such. Just as you can’t really look at the world and ignore ecology (well, you can [try], but it tends to backfire), I maintain there are few poems that can’t be read in some way for ecopoetry, which is not the same thing as saying as ecopoetry. But reading for ecopoetry, like reading for feminism for feminist theory, helps to broaden our eco-literary “canon” (or maybe canyon, to replace a contentious term with a more ecological one).
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Everyone who has seen the book loves it. They’re drawn immediately to the stunning cover and then excited about the work inside. It has been out for less than two months, so people have not had a chance to teach from it yet—but the book’s reception has been incredibly enthusiastic. We had a wonderful launch event at Off Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, where eight of the book’s poets came and read, and brisk sales made the bookstore very happy. And one main form of response has been when poets receive their contributor copies. To sound like a Valley Girl, they’re like “Oh, WOW! The book is aMAzing!”
Ecopoetry, in particular, returns us to the knowledge many of us have lost: that we are embedded in existence, reliant upon and in reciprocal relationship with the other-than-human world.
Derek Sheffield: Since 2013 and the publication of your The Ecopoetry Anthology, we humans have not done nearly enough to address the hydra-headed environmental crises we face in climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, ocean acidification, and resource depletion. Can the writing and reading of ecopoetry really help us in this regard? Or are there other reasons to engage in ecopoetry we should be focused on?
Ann Fisher-Wirth: William Carlos Williams once said that the function of the poet—like the function of the doctor—is to diagnose and to heal. Many poems in Attached to the Living World diagnose; they show us what is wrong, what the nature of the illness is; they are about nuclear energy, wildfires, floods, fracking, Hurricane Maria, ICE, extinction, war, hunger, environmental and social injustice such as occurred at Standing Rock.
This is one reason I’m so eager to see Attached to the Living World assigned in classrooms. Beyond just preaching to the choir—those who are already reading ecoliterature and involved with environmental issues—the anthology offers many possibilities for discussion and education. For instance, before retiring from the University of Mississippi, I taught the gateway class to our environmental studies minor every spring, and every time, I would have students whose awareness of environmental issues was virtually nonexistent. By the time they finished the semester, that was very different. We do not seek to change what we do not see, and ecopoetry helps us see. The next steps in that process would be changes in one’s way of life, and direct political action. One of my students in that gateway class became an organic farmer; another directs a food co-op in the Appalachians; another is a lawyer representing renters’ rights in California—and so on.
But to heal. Here, ecopoetry participates in the power that poetry has always had. It offers the experience of beauty. It touches the emotions, shows us things to grieve for and rejoice in, teaches us strange facts about the weird wonderfulness of creatures in the universe. It gives pleasure. The poet is the maker—from the Greek poiétés. The poet makes, not bombs, not walls, not detention centers, but structures made of words. And ecopoetry, in particular, returns us to the knowledge many of us have lost: that we are embedded in existence, reliant upon and in reciprocal relationship with the other-than-human world. It gives expression to the infinite plenitude of both inner and outer worlds.
Laura-Gray Street: Amen.
Derek Sheffield: How do you see ecopoetry evolving in the next 50 years as the effects of climate change and related crises become more extreme and widespread?
Laura-Gray Street: That’s difficult to answer on multiple levels! But I could see at least three possible and not mutually exclusive ways that ecopoetry could evolve. It could increasingly play the role of Cassandra in our global tragedy in progress. It could effectively serve as an archive of endangered and extinct organisms, environments, and experiences. And, most importantly, it could foster new understandings of beauty (“beauty”) because that we continue to find beauty despite devastation is crucial. I think of generations to come (hoping that there are generations to come) who won’t have known the environments we know but who will nevertheless find beauty, comfort, other-that-human companionship in what, to us, might seem desolate. I don’t mean that as a way of glossing over loss or shrugging it off. I mean that is what humans must do to survive, and what artists have always done.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Sometimes I think there won’t be a next 50 years—there certainly won’t for me. But if there is, birds will keep singing, trees will keep leafing out in spring, and poets will keep writing. What that work will be, I do not know.
Catch up with Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, respectively, at annfisherwirth.com and lauragraystreet.com.
Derek Sheffield is the 8th poet laureate of Washington State (2025-2027). He received a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His other collections include Not for Luck, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He teaches at Wenatchee Valley College and Western Colorado University, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington. You can catch up with him at his website: www.dereksheffield.com.
Read poetry by Derek Sheffield appearing in Terrain.org: “Abortion Wish,” Derek’s second Letter to America poem; “Report from America Auténtico,” Derek’s first Letter to America poem, translated into Spanish by Rhina P. Espaillat; two poems; and one poem.
Header photo of road through the Hoh Rainforest by Simmons Buntin.
