I Interpret the World Through My Body: An Interview With Julia Fiedorczuk

julia_fiedorczuk_forum-0547863244.jpg, default, Julia Fiedorczuk, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk / Forum

Julia Fiedorczuk, poet, prose writer, translator and co-founder of the School of Ecopoetics, says: 'We’re at a point where it’s perhaps not climate change but loss of biodiversity that poses the greatest existential threat to the survival of human civilisation on Earth. Loss of biodiversity refers to the extinction of species of living creatures, which is currently progressing at an unprecedented pace. But it’s also cultures, languages and ways of thinking that are going extinct'.

From 20 to 24 March, during a festival celebrating International Poetry Day, the second congress of the Serbian School of Ecopoetics took place in Belgrade. The workshops organised as part of the congress were aimed at creating and reinforcing the participants’ deep ecological competences, which they would then be able to translate into their artistic and professional practice. We talked with Julia Fiedorczuk, the coordinator of the workshops, about freedom and anger, about searching for new modes of narrating the climate crisis, combining a scientific perspective with poetic sensibility, the experience of deep reading.

Agnieszka Warnke: ‘Ecopoetics: An Ecological “Defence of Poetry”’, which you wrote together with Gerardo Beltrán, begins with the quotation: ‘Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.’ What role does humankind play in this home?

Julia Fiedorczuk: It’s a quotation from Gary Snyder, an American poet. He’s a figure associated with the Beat Generation, though sort of a separate one, little-known in Poland – he was unlucky with Polish translations. When we were introducing the term ecopoetics, we wanted it to demarcate a certain space for reflection. We were referring to Greek etymology, according to which ecopoetics denotes the ‘creation’ (poiesis) of ‘home’ (oikos). According to the logic of this metaphor, the Earth is home, and humans are among its many inhabitants. The task would be to work out such forms of inhabiting that would enable us to care for our planet. The transformation of thinking that’s necessary here would aim at a more conscious and empathetic but also simply more rational settling into our shared home. That being said, this metaphor has become somewhat too static by now; I have a sense this it has certain limitations.

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Boat stranded on dry section of Lake Titicaca, Huarina, Bolivia, 29 September 2023, photo: Gaston Brito Miserocchi / Getty Images

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After all, we live on a planet of nomads. People migrate – the 21st century is a century of migrations – but so do plants, animals, even entities such as icebergs. The essay you enquire about was published exactly ten years ago. Many people have employed the tools and terminology that we introduced back then. I’m happy that they were useful, that they opened new areas of inquiry. Now I use language that’s somewhat different. I believe that our way of understanding and describing the world must evolve. We shouldn’t get attached to any particular terms; they are just tools.

AW: Is it the case, then, that our language provides adequate means of talking about climate change and ecology? All we have to do is learn to name the world, redefine certain terms, search for new narratives?

JF: Searching for new ways of narrating our situation continues to be an important, ongoing project. In a sense, no story can be the ultimate one, deserving of some sort of sanction. That would be incompatible with the overall workings of imagination, of poetry. Spaces of freedom, play and experiment are key here. Our linguistic – or, in broader terms, discursive – tools are always provisional. They are of use at a certain moment and for a specific purpose. They mustn’t become a ready-made set of keys, since then they lose their liberating, critical power.

I distance myself slightly from the term ecopoetics because I worry that, over time, it’s become something of a marketing slogan. I didn’t mean to create a label that I could then slap onto myself or other people in order for us to be advertised as representatives of a certain movement. That’s not at all what I intended. Language must be alive and flexible if it’s to work to any degree – and I believe it can indeed work as a mode of communication between living beings who have something to do and experience together.

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Greenland’s melting icecaps, photo: Uriela Sinai / Getty Images

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What comes to the fore for me now is the issue of what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the loss of noodiversity – that is, of different modes of knowing or forms of sense experience. We’re at a point where it’s perhaps not climate change but loss of biodiversity that poses the greatest existential threat to the survival of human civilisation on Earth. Loss of biodiversity refers to the extinction of species of living creatures, which is currently progressing at an unprecedented pace. But it’s also cultures, languages and ways of thinking that are going extinct. We now know that the so-called ‘indigenous’ languages store a certain kind of wisdom, or intuition, that translates into environmental competence. Hence, when I speak about losing forms of sense experience as an ecological issue, I’m not speaking metaphorically. There’s a real, material relation between the condition of human imagination and the condition of the biosphere (and vice versa).

The subject can be approached from several different angles: a philosophical one, as Stiegler or Eva Illouz have done; a poetic one, as Gerardo Beltrán and I have done; and a neurobiological one. I’m most passionate about the attempts to create the kind of knowledge that would combine a scientific perspective with a ‘poetic’ one, shall we say. Before we create any narrative, we must find our way out of the ‘stagnation of the anthropocene’ (a term coined by Ewa Bińczyk). We certainly need some form of therapy, because one problem at the moment consists in our sense of complete powerlessness. That’s how I see it. I think that, before we’re ready for new narratives, we must first understand what’s happening to our minds. It’s a task I consider urgent – the most urgent one, in fact.

The main error of our reigning narrative is the total domination of an instrumental attitude to the Earth and our resources. Pretty much our entire economy is based on extraction. An energy transition, while leading to a decrease in CO₂ emissions, won’t solve the core problem. What must change is the deep structure of our extractive attitude to absolutely everything, including the time that defines us, to our own bodies and to our relations. In his new book, Andrzej Leder refers to the economy as ‘a state of mind’. What does ‘a state of mind’ even mean? I’ll leave this question unanswered, let’s just look at the phrase itself. Analysing Western imaginaries, Leder arrives at highly pessimistic conclusions. Approaching the issue from a slightly different angle, I’d put it like this: moving from the logic of extraction to the logic of relations would require a deep reconstruction of the structures of our imagination. It would also require a serious conversation about so-called ‘values’.

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Machinery used to mitigate the consequences of the disaster, Ukraine, Chernobyl, photo: Vladimir Ostapenko / UPG / Reporter / East News

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AW: To build new narratives, we must first overthrow our fossilized, anachronistic ways of thinking…

JF: …or see these old narratives for what they are, acknowledge their limitations and destructive power.

AW: In ‘Ecopoetics,’ you write that many poets have turned to science in search of knowledge and inspiration and that it’s high time scientists, too, turned to poets in order to understand what happens when we try to describe the world. Has anything changed since then?

JF: Not much. Researchers doing so-called ‘hard’ science are, of course, interested in the humanities, but they treat them mostly as decorative sprinkles on the layer cake of reality (I believe I’m borrowing this grotesque metaphor from Timothy Morton). Wherever science encounters the enigma of individual consciousness, there’s more openness to the perspective provided by the humanities. After all, we’re the ones who ask questions as old as time: about subjectivity, about freedom and the conditions for it, about the nature of human experience. However, as a rule, neoliberal academia mostly rewards narrowly understood effectiveness, and that’s a fundamental problem.

AW: Facts, reports and numbers don’t seem to speak to human imagination anymore.

JF: Right, climate scientists sometimes say to us: here are the reports; communicate the findings to people so that they understand. Except that’s the role of communications specialists, which is not what we are. Literature can’t be reduced to that.

AW: Why is poetry an attractive mode of speaking and thinking ecologically?

JF: I’m not, nor have I ever been, a believer in writing ‘on a topic’ or on request, since this leads to an overproduction of mediocre texts. Unless it’s an attempt to train yourself in a certain language, a venture into new areas of imagination undertaken for your own satisfaction and development. Not only poets but artists in general who search for new forms of expression expand the space of freedom for human imagination. This freedom is key here. On the other hand, at the point when the world is disintegrating and burning down, it’s difficult to maintain your distance from these circumstances in your creative work. Habitats are shrinking, our sense experience is becoming more and more impoverished, we’re losing so much so quickly.

Poets sometimes make use of the same kind of research as documentarians – the English language has a term for this: ‘docupoetry’. There are poetry volumes documenting specific ecological disasters. Poetry has the power to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of a given event, the fact that it affects a lot of beings in a lot of unforeseen ways. It helps you work through your emotions, grieve. Poetry is a universal thing; it was present in all human cultures.

AW: And an intuitive thing too, since there are no interpretive frames given to us in advance. Each person responds to poetry in their own way. Ecology seems to me to be a space that invites various literary genres, from the already mentioned documentary through journalism to poetry. But poetry itself absorbs other genres. What comes to my mind is Urszula Honek’s volume titled ‘Poltergeist’, which includes elements of reality, with the author using the language of poetry to work through her grief following the death of a friend.

JF: Yes, of course. And it’s in poems that one works with the greatest intensity on metaphor, or with figurative language more generally. To a certain extent everything, science included, employs metaphors. I consider poetic metaphor an invention of sorts: if it really touches upon something, people recognise it as efficacious. Forrest Gander, a poet I’m close to and whose poems I’ve translated into Polish, notes that both poetry and science are forms of focusing one’s attention. Each of these forms leads to discovery.

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Dorota Bierkowska, Julia Fiedorczuk & Grażyna Borkowska celebrating the granting of Warsaw Literary Award to Julia Fiedorczuk for her poetry volume ‘Tuż-Tuż’ & her translation of Laurie Anderson’s volume of poetry ‘The Language of the Future’, selected as book of the month in June 2013, Klub Księgarza, Warsaw, photo: Andrzej Rybczyński / PAP

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Gander also speaks of poetry as a practice of intimacy. What this would mean is a more intimate way of experiencing one’s own life, one’s relationship to time, to the environment, to the Earth, to others. Poetic language has the ability to slow down our perception. Poetry operates through breath, sounds and rhythm; it’s embodied. Language is also a physical experience. For instance, the poetry of Coral Bracho, a Mexican poet I’m currently attempting to translate, is unbelievably dense, to the point where you begin to feel the world she describes with your own body. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience.

We need testimonies from different corners of the world, perhaps especially from the so-called ‘peripheries’, always more interesting than the imperialist centre. Mexican poet Hubert Matiúwàa, writing in the Mè’phàà language, reminds us of a culture in which it’s not the sense of sight but rather the skin that constitutes the fundamental ontological metaphor. To know is as if to touch. What does this teach us?

AW: The second congress of the Serbian School of Ecopoetics is taking place from 20 to 24 March. You’re also preparing another Polish-Ukrainian Eco Lab. Do you notice any differences between Eastern and Western ecopoetic thought?

JF: The School of Ecopoetics was born a few years ago as a result of my friendship and cooperation with Filip Springer. I hope that the next Polish-Ukrainian workshop will take place in May in an in-person format; so far we’ve only had an online meeting. I was enormously impressed by the wise, engaged comments made by Ukrainian participants. From their perspective, it’s important to speak about the environmental consequences of the current war, which is to a large extent a war over resources. Dreadful acts of destruction have been taking place in Ukraine, resulting in the suffering of people but also of animals, ecosystems and the Earth. It’s impossible to separate and segregate these forms of suffering.

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Hospital built for Chernobyl power plant workers, evacuated in 1986 after the explosion of reactor no 4, depicted: the hospital, Prypec, Ukraine, photo: Andrzej Stawiński / Reporter / East News

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Another topic raised during the workshop was the Chernobyl disaster. Our Ukrainian participants expressed their impatience with this matter, since the specific topic of this mysterious ‘zone’ fascinates the entire Western world. It’s very curious, because Polish participants wanted to hear about the legendary zone, at the same time contaminated and wild, one so famous it’s occasionally been a pilgrimage destination. I believe this short meeting made us realise the extent to which particular historical experiences influence the way we carry the narrative, the environmental one as well.

We’re only gradually getting to know the Serbian participants. I’m learning about Serbian literature, which I’m not as familiar with as the Ukrainian, considering the latter’s significant presence in Poland. What inspired me most about Belgrade is the participants’ strongly activism-oriented and highly involved attitude. By the way, the March congress of the School of Ecopoetics in Belgrade took place during a festival celebrating International Poetry Day – one of the guests was the aforementioned Hubert Matiúwàa. Guests from Poland included Emilia Konwerska and Bartłomiej Majzel.

AW: The programme of the Serbian edition of the School of Ecopoetics you’re organising mentions the experience of deep reading. What is this?

JF: To put it half-jokingly, it’s the experience of reading during which we don’t look at our phones every three minutes. Here, depth refers to time. Absorbing information through scrolling damages our memory, makes our understanding more shallow. At this point it’s standard behaviour among people to look not at one screen but at two screens simultaneously. In such conditions, it’s easier for negative emotions – such as fear or anger – to ignite and harder for the positive ones – empathy, for instance – to be evoked. One symptom of addiction to distraction is impatience. All practices that consist in building up patience are uncomfortable because the mechanism is the same as in the case of drug withdrawal. Both kinds of ‘rehab’ require time.

Time enables you to go deeper into the text. I really like the experience of reading together. It’s great to read poems in a group of highly engaged people. I find the shared concentration very pleasant.

AW: It’s curious, because to me, poetry is the most intimate of literary forms, one to be experienced in solitude.

JF: Such solitary reading is a modern experience. Prior to the widespread availability of print, literature (in its older forms, of course) was experienced collectively. Solitary reading results from the material form in which literature is available. And by the way, it’s fossil fuels that made such a form of reading possible, since they gifted a certain segment of humanity with leisure time and hence privacy.

AW: Do you manage to find time for private reading?

JF: Yes. It’s difficult, but I need it badly.

AW: What are you reading now?

JF: I always read multiple books at the same time. I’ve just finished the new volume of short stories by Radek Kobierski, Na wulkanie (On a Volcano). They’re dense stories, intense, sensual. I’m reading Forrest Gander’s new poetry volume Mojave Ghost, in English. I’ll probably try to translate this remarkable book at some point. I’ve returned to Spinoza. Together with my doctoral students, we’ve recently read – mostly for fun – two of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus and The Symposium. Moreover, to my own surprise, after many years I’m returning to Derrida.

AW: Do you read Derrida critically?

JF: Definitely with a certain distance, since the poststructuralist linguistic mannerism is somewhat ridiculous from our point of view. Nonetheless, I want to have a proper look at what is said in Archive Fever (which I’m reading in French and in English simultaneously). Derrida thinks of the death drive, so of human (auto)destructiveness, but in the context of the eponymous ‘archive’ and various forms of memory. I believe that currently this subject is coming back in full force. Our forms of archiving are changing. I would actually say that, in spite of appearances, what’s taking place now is the mass extermination of memory, even though servers, cooled down with enormous amounts of water, are technically supposed to store ‘everything’.

AW: You’ve recently published ‘Astrostrada z girlandami: Wiersze zebrane’ (Astralway With Garlands: Collected Poems). Have you thought about how you’ve changed since your poetic debut?

Okładka książki "Glif", autorka: Julia Fiedorczuk, fot. Wydawnictwo Warstwy — Cover of ‘Glif’ by Julia Fiedorczuk, photo: Wydawnictwo Warstwy

Yes, and I can see it even more clearly in Glif, which came out later. I think I’m much less interested in my own self than I was at the beginning. Creative work always involves some sort of self-reflection, but now it’s of a different kind. I look at myself with more distance and increased awareness of impermanence. I feel a stronger, more intimate connection to everything that happens to me and shapes me.

AW: Has environmental sensitivity accompanied you ever since childhood?

JF: My way of experiencing has always been very sensual, I think. I lived close to the earth; I was curious about what surrounded me. I was raised in the countryside, in rather harsh conditions, I was used to feeling the seasons somewhat acutely. Sometimes it was cold, sometimes it was damp. I don’t like abstractions; I interpret the world through my body. Perhaps this is why I’m a poet and not a philosopher (although poetry and philosophy are closely related to each other).

My conscious childhood took place in the 1980s. Back then, of course, nobody used the word ‘ecology’. Although, on the other hand, during his lecture for the School of Ecopoetics, Edwin Bendyk shared something very interesting: in the People’s Republic of Poland, it was quite common for people to declare their readiness to bear certain costs if that was what protecting the environment were to require. We’re talking here about times of relative poverty, times before microplastic pollution, the microplastics we all have in our brains nowadays – it was in those times that people were more ready to protect the environment than they are now. Isn’t this puzzling? During the ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, George H. W. Bush uttered the famous sentence: ‘The American lifestyle is non-negotiable’. Bendyk considers this speech symbolic of the turn towards neoliberalism.

At some point in my research work I encountered ecocritical and ecopoetic approaches, and the choice of this path came fully naturally to me. I chose an academic career because it’s the kind of work that gives you space to think. For many people, however, the breakthrough came along with the 2018 IPCC report, which described the impacts of potential global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

AW: In ‘Psalm XII’ you write that the first book began with ‘anger’.

JF: The Iliad begins with the words: ‘Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills…’ [trans. Samuel Butler].

AW: Is your poetry or prose born out of anger?

JF: I have poor access to anger, which probably isn’t good for me, creatively or existentially. Rather, I feel grief – sometimes, because except for that I also feel loads of positive emotions. It’s possible that I would write more intense literature if I could make better use of anger. For instance, I tried to induce the heroine of Dom Oriona (The House of Orion) to experience anger, but it wasn’t easy – what she did experience was more like her own dissolution. Although maybe it’s not only my struggle but a more general one? Maybe people aren’t fully in touch with their own anger and only ever let off steam? Maybe hence the fear, so easy to manipulate.

AW: Do poems come to you on their own accord, or do you need to induce them?

JF: They do come, but for them to come, there has to be some sort of openness to the process. If my schedule is filled to the brim, or – worst-case scenario – if I overdose on social media, nothing gets written. What’s needed in my case is some sort of silence, a void. I needn’t immediately go out into the woods; this kind of silence is accessible even on a tram, as long as I resist the temptation to listen to some fiftieth podcast while also responding to student emails at the same time. In this silence, in this void, an impulse appears sometimes, a thread I can pull. From then on, it’s just work.

AW: You spoke earlier about a sense of freedom.

JF: In its most beautiful moments – when it doesn’t feel like pulling teeth, when it’s not marked by struggle for a morning or an afternoon off or by attempts to overcome exhaustion and lack of focus – my work gives me a sense of power and freedom. I feel happy when I come upon an idea that I myself am surprised by. It’s in such moments that I want to be doing what I do.

The second congress of the Serbian School of Ecopoetics took place from 20 to 24 March 2025. The event was organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in cooperation with the Cultural Centre of Belgrade (Kulturni Centar Beograda) and the Polish Institute in Belgrade. The workshops were part of the international cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English