A Conversation with Poet Amanda Anastasi

Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet who writes about the effects and impacts of climate change. She is the author of 2012 and other poems and The Inheritors (Black Pepper Publishing, 2021), and most recently,  Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Works Press, 2024). Amanda is a two-time winner of the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and received a Special Commendation in the W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize.

Amanda’s poetry has been featured in a range of publications, including Best Australian Science Writing, The Griffith Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Right Now, and The Massachusetts Review. She is the convener and host of La Mama Poetica.

I came across Amanda’s poetry through her extraordinary one line climate change poems. ‘The child climbs to the top of an indoor tree’, she writes. ‘Within an hour the cooling rooms are full’. Reading her work reminds me of the immense power of brevity and imagination, and her new poetry collection offers the reader a rare method for dwelling within memories and loss.

Catherine Trundle: Poetry has a way of slowing us down, helping us dwell in the moment, sharpening our attention. How is this necessary for living within a changing climate?

Amanda Anastasi: We are living busy lives, where every aspect of our existence is steeped in consumerism. Many are realising that making time to be present in the moment and to slow down is healthy for them - mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Our consumer culture requires and prefers us to be fast paced, overworked, distracted and thinking as little as possible about what we consume and how it affects the environment. What poetry requires of us is the opposite to this. It calls for deep reflection and a slowing down to do so.

Living with climate change also requires us to stop; to ask questions about how we travel and how our energy, food and clothing is created, and the emissions involved in manufacturing, transport and agriculture. It involves thinking about how we are all contributing to climate change and how we have the power to contribute less to the problem.  To ask: what are alternative, less environmentally invasive means for having our needs met are and how can we transition to it quickly enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change?

Climate protestors have increasingly been resorting to more disruptive forms of protest that disturb daily travel and business as usual. As annoying as many everyday commuters find these disruptions, the message here is that we cannot continue in the same way. Disruption, a sharpening of attention and deeper thinking is needed.

Catherine:  Poetry also contains a degree of interpretive openness and mystery. The future of climate change is also open, with a range of possible/imagined futures. How might the strengths of poetry, a poetic voice, help us understand, face and engage with the challenges of climate change?

Amanda: Poetry, and storytelling more broadly, is an effective vehicle for climate messaging as people are more likely to be emotionally moved by a story than a dictatorial speech. The openness to interpretation that exists in poetry gives the reader a sense that they are not being told what to think or feel. Poetry seeks to invite and draw the reader into an experience, emotional state or scenario, which elicits empathy and this brings us closer to wanting to act.

Having said that, I have met many people who either don’t have the patience to read poetry or think it is difficult to engage with. Writing poetry in a way that clearly communicates and is accessible to everyday people is important to me. I felt I was closest to achieving this with my one-line climate poems, which were paired with pictorial images and made into memes by the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub during my poetry residency there. My one-line poems somehow perfectly aligned with the Hub’s focus on short, accessible climate messaging for everyday people to engage with. Much of the strong emotional reaction to these poems I received were from people who did not usually read or engage with poetry.

The future of climate change is less open and ranging in possibilities, as the world struggles to meet the emissions reduction targets needed to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In my poetry, I aim to bring the climate frontlines to the reader so that they can see, hear and smell the experience of a person or creature experiencing climate impacts in an everyday future scenario.

These poems can be confronting for many readers, but they need to be confronted. Many people still hold to the false belief that climate change has nothing to do with them or will not impact them. It is very important for me to convey that the opposite is true. There are climate change impacts that many people have not given thought to and don’t realise will affect them personally. Multiple industries will be impacted in the future including food, fishing, tourism and soaring insurance premiums, not to mention the numerous health impacts. In many of my futuristic poems, I show how climate change is shaping our future and will play a part in our everyday activities and quality of life.

Catherine: I want to turn to ‘dealing with’ and ‘dwelling on’ climate through poetry. The enormity of climate change is tough, emotionally and psychologically. Poetry can draw us closer to a subject as well as allow us some distance from it. How does your poetic practice allow you to engage with the common emotions of climate change - hope, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness?

Amanda: Poetry has a way of going deeper into a subject in a way that can cause us to think about it from a new perspective. Poetry makes us feel something and, at its very best, has the potential to change our notions or way of thinking. As a writer of poetry, I begin from a place of both wanting to understand something and having the strong urge to articulate it. Poetry has helped me during difficult periods of my life to process and give voice to a range of thoughts and emotions, including grief, sadness and hope.

There were times during my residency at Monash when it was tough to face the scientific and statistical reality of what was going on. I soon realised that the situation was far worse than what the media was portraying. There were moments where I felt what I can only describe as a deep sadness or solemnity, usually after listening to a lecture on climate science and the current situation politically.

One of my tasks was to write one-line climate poems while the 2020 bushfire crisis was occurring. To create these poems, I would watch footage of burned animals fleeing from fires, people evacuating their homes and losing everything. I would then need to take a break and do something to distract myself! However, having the opportunity to learn more about the climate crisis and write about it gave me a sense of agency and a feeling that I could contribute to something important and truthful. To contribute in a very tiny way to the solution was a far better use of my time than burying my head in the sand.

On the whole, not acting (not protesting or reading and writing about climate change) is more anxiety-inducing for me than properly talking about it and engaging with the subject. As Joan Baez once said, “Action is the antidote to despair”.  Communication is a key ingredient for any kind of change process. This is the part of change where I can be most useful – telling stories and conveying emotion related to this pressing issue. Writing is my way of dealing with my emotions about climate change and bringing other people into the space of being outraged and sad about it, and of thinking seriously about what kind of future we would like to be a part of.

Catherine: Your new collection, Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Works Press, 2024) was just published. There is a wonderful specificity of empathy and character in these poems. Within single lines and stanzas I felt the real presence of particular people, such as your father. Your connection to people, things, moments, places felt loving, yet complex and clear eyed. How does poetry - your poems - offer this vividness in its portrayals?

Amanda: Discovering something on the page arrives from staring the subject in the eye and properly exploring it. Much of my poetry comes from a place of urgency and great feeling, and this was heightened when I was writing Taking Apart the Bird Trap. It is important to me – even if it requires staring into my multiple losses – to write truthfully and convey the nuances of the situation, memory or person.

I think the vivid portrayals that you describe in my book arise from my willingness to try to understand everything around me and to interrogate it with open-mindedness. In the case of my latest book, the subjects were my father, family and relationships. To capture that which is closest to me with accuracy and without judgement was the most challenging task for me poetically – even more so than confronting climate change.

Catherine: The poems in Taking Apart the Bird Trap felt like a rallying cry to live fully, especially in times of loss and grief. ‘I mourn in brightest colour’ you write, and ‘Some days I forget to be cautious’. To me, these poems offer a way to navigate the weight of this moment, which is neither lying down in resignation, nor trying to exert control over things - how to be in the thick of moments, and allowing moments to permeate and affect us, and then propel us forward.  ‘I will need to carry my loss into another way of being’ you write. How have these poems propelled you on, what are you working on now - writing, other things, rest?

Amanda: Writing this book healed me and propelled me forward in a way I could not have foreseen. It enabled me to move through my grief while also looking deeply into it. While loss can be traumatic, it can also be enriching if you enable the introspection that seeks to occur. Childhood memories come flooding back and, if you look closely, you start to uncover the patterns that have affected your adult life. The process of writing this book allowed me to observe things about myself that I couldn’t before. I didn’t think I would feel joy or hope again, but I have and I will.

After working very intensely on the book, I have needed rest. Now, I am starting to write new poems and begin to bring my attention back to what is going on in the world outside of my own healing – although, I will always consider the climate crisis to be deeply personal. It should be for anyone who cares about living a habitable and safe existence. I am looking at what I can do next to draw attention to climate change, while I continue to try to find peace in my personal world to give me the strength to fight for the causes I believe in.