Emma Bolden’s “Poem after Watching An Inconvenient Truth with my Students” appears in the Winter 2021 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses unexpected arguments from her students, the artistic power of line breaks, and the struggle to communicate across radically different frameworks of thinking and belief.
Shakirah Peterson, Editorial Assistant: An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary that follows Al Gore’s lecture circuit on the dangers of global warming. I’m curious to know the age group of your students. How do you feel about their overall reaction to the film?
Emma Bolden: I used An Inconvenient Truth in my Composition II classes as a way to move into analyzing an argument; the students were freshmen in college, for the most part. And they were wonderful students: bright, engaged, intelligent, willing to participate in discussions—everything one could hope for. When this particular argument emerged, it shook me. I had anticipated arguments against the existence of climate change from a political point of view, but I had no way to anticipate arguments against fighting climate change because it was God’s will. On a personal level, it chilled me. On an academic level, it was an interesting moment because it opened a space in which discourse and argument seemed impossible: there was no way for me to argue my stance that would be effective for them, and there was no way that they could argue their stance that would be effective for me. I remember just kind of moving with our discussion, and to this day I feel conflicted about that. In a way, I feel like this poem is my attempt to do that, ten or so years later.
SP: The opening line of this poem is phenomenal: “If you’re writing a poem about a tree, you’re writing an elegy”. It’s powerful to consider writing about nature as synonymous with writing about the dead. Can you tell us how you chose this opening?
EB: I wrote the first draft of this poem shortly after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their dire 2019 report. I think that we tend to think and speak of climate change as something ahead of us, far in the future. Perhaps this is a kind of unconscious defense mechanism that allows us the justification we need to continue our lives as we’ve been living them: if it’s far ahead of us, we have time to change things—and we have time before we need to drastically alter our daily routines, habits, and behaviors. The IPCC report made it terrifyingly clear that this is not the case: climate change is already happening, and the terror we imagine as a (preventable) future is already here. I wrote the first line of the poem with that in mind.
SP: You quote a student in the fourth stanza. The student tells you “we can’t stop climate change because we can’t stop God, can’t choose the way he wishes to end us in our world.” Was it this student’s particular response that inspired this poem? Did any other responses stand out?
EB: Actually, a lot of the students were in agreement about this. It felt surreal, at the moment, to face this response to a documentary showing the brutal consequences of and vast potential for human suffering from climate change, a documentary that also acts as a call to action to fight against it. But the argument was doomed to fail with this audience to begin with, as the argument and the audience depended on radically different frameworks. It was one of the first times that I saw the kind of fracturing that divides our country into chaos, where we’re unable to agree on the very basic level of what is truth and what is not.
SP: I personally enjoyed the line breaks in this poem. My favorite being the second to last stanza. You write that we could choose what we could save. However, on paper this phrase is broken into two separate sentences:
we can’t see a silence that has nothing
to do with us. We could choose. What
we could save if we stopped believing
that only what belongs to us is holy.
Can you speak about the form you chose for this poem?
EB: I like to think of line breaks as just another part of language in a poem. I love the way they direct and redirect attention, and I especially love the way that enjambment—often with the assistance of punctuation and sentence structure—can create shifts in meaning and in feeling that wouldn’t be possible with end-stopped lines. The line breaks and sentence structure in these two stanzas encapsulate what I was thinking as I wrote the poem. I broke the sentence apart so that both parts of the sentence held equal weight. In a way, “we could choose” is the argument that I wanted to make in that classroom. We can choose—we can change our behavior, our laws, our way of life, in order to if not prevent then at least mitigate some of the effects of our behavior on the environment. I also wanted to hover a bit on the idea of what exactly is at stake here and how much we could choose to save by making “what” the start of a new sentence. There’s a kind of sadness in that structure. By breaking the sentence apart in that way, I wanted to let some of the hopelessness I felt in the classroom into the poem.
SP: Are you working on any new projects in this new year? Where can we read and follow more of your work?
EB: I’ve been working on what I think are two collections of poems—one that’s centered around the experience of living in the Deep South, one that’s a collection of meditations on theology and spirituality. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing that those two things are intimately related, so perhaps they aren’t separate collections after all. I’ve also been working on a secret prose project that I’m quite excited about. I’ve recently had work appear in F(r)iction, Limp Wrist, and the Bennington Review. I post about new work on my Twitter account quite frequently; though, just as a warning, I post more frequently about, well, Star Wars, sourdough, and possum gifs.
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, she serves as the association editor in chief for Tupelo Quarterly.
Shakirah Peterson is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She writes across all genres: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is originally from Los Angeles, California, where she earned a BA in communication studies at California State University Long Beach.