On the Energy of Words & the Energy of Nature: Poetry in the Shadow of Climate Change

susza_gettyimages-1189106278.jpg, default, Sun setting on a scorched, smouldering mountain landscape with a smoke-covered valley after a forest fire in the Blue Mountains, Australia, photo: And, On the Energy of Words & the Energy of Nature: Poetry in the Shadow of Climate Change

#language & literature

On various shades of poetry written in the shadow of climate change and the diversity of language in the face of shrinking biodiversity.

By the time you, dear Reader, read through the present article, the world will possibly have become poorer in one species of animal, plant, or fungus. According to the ‘optimistic’ version, at least 20 species go extinct each day as a result of pollution and human interference with their natural habitats; the realistic version, however, speaks of as many as 150 species. Two thousand years from now (if not sooner), there’ll likely be no more taste of vanilla and no scent of spruce forests; gone will be emperor penguins, New Zealant kākāpō parrots, mice, and ‘glaciers that scream when they’re calving’… [trans. AP].

The above mournful litany unfolds on the pages of Katarzyna Boni’s essay Którędy do Wyjścia? (Which Way to Exit?) published by Agora in 2025. One feels tempted to add: ‘from this disaster’. And so, there’ll be no more morning coffee, chocolate, chickpeas, or oranges; on the flip side, one will still be able to play Fryderyk Chopin and read Olga Tokarczuk. The Doomsday Vault, or the underground Arctic World Archive designed to survive for as long as two thousand years, contains analogue tapes preserving, among other things, musical notation signed by the composer and 4299 pages of prose by the Polish Nobel Prize winner. But will someone still be there to read them?

What are ‘ecopoetics’?

Cover of ‘Którędy do Wyjścia?’ (Which Way to Exit?) by Katarzyna Boni, photo: Agora publishing house

Boni’s book offers not so much an apocalyptic vision as a voice of despair and anger, an attempt to make sense of the peril we’re in, a cry for help for the dying planet. A winner of the European Press Prize for her reportage on parenthood and climate change, whose extended version has been included in Którędy do Wyjścia?, Boni isn’t a solo singer of the dirge for the end of the world. Rather, she has joined a choir of creatives calling for critical self-reflection on how our actions affect the environment as well as for a conscious experiencing of nature. Over a decade ago, Julia Fiedorczuk together with Gerardo Beltrán introduced the term ‘ecopoetics’ into Polish literary studies discourse. The term’s Greek etymology refers to the making of a home that is planet Earth. In conversation with Culture.pl, Fiedorczuk said:

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. 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.

[Trans. AP]

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

A power plant combining solar panels and wind turbines, Spain, photo: Juan Maria Coy Vergara / Getty Images

Picture image

gettyimages-2224337320.jpg

The poet argues that at this point, it’s not climate change but rather the loss of biodiversity – meaning the extinction of species, cultures, and ways of thinking – that may pose the biggest threat to the survival of human civilisation. Although nowadays she employs a somewhat different language, one that’s alive and open to imagination and experimentation, she continues to speak through literature and action alike. She seeks new modes of artistic expression, ways of speaking about crises, spaces for conversation and collective reading. In cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Fiedorczuk organises consecutive international editions of the School of Ecopoetics, to which she invites individuals writing socially and ecologically engaged poetry that’s deeply attuned to nature.

For the third time, these autumn-time exercises in coexistence with/in the nonhuman are taking place in Serbia, on 8th and 9th November 2025. This time, their main theme is that of energy, and especially solar energy, viewed both through the lens of environmental humanities and through that of psychoanalysis. The former field places importance on questions of how solar energy influences the shaping of cultures, the ways we work, create, and imagine the future. Meanwhile, the language of psychoanalysis enables us to reflect on the kind of subject that is contemporary global society as well as to analyse the dynamics that govern it.

Cover of the book ‘Ekonomia to Stan Umysł’ (Economics Is a State of Mind) by Andrzej Leder, 2023, photo: Krytyka Polityczne Publishing House

In his 2023 book Ekonomia to Stan Umysłu (Economics Is a State of Mind), Andrzej Leder makes a risky claim that goes against past scholarship on the consumptions of goods and services. Namely, he proposes a view of economics as an ‘art of distributing excess’ (rather than lack or shortage). If lack results from human inability to cope with excess, then this fact radically transform our way of perceiving, for instance, the phenomenon of hunger, as forcefully depicted by the Argentinian writer and journalist Martín Caparrós in his reportage Hunger (2016). The surplus of energy, understood both as a physical concept and as a psychic one (hatred or libido, for instance), is squandered on unnecessary luxuries or conflicts (e.g. warfare). In conversation with Karolina Rychter, the philosopher of culture informs that the idea according to which any kind of surplus turns out to be dangerous

originates from the Freudian understanding of trauma, according to which it’s a sort of energetic excess that rips apart the entire psychic structure. In this sense, excess essentially rips apart any structure. […] To some extent, the climate crisis, too, has been caused by surplus. The production of surplus energy that we cannot distribute is the reason we’ve begun to burn.

[Trans. AP]

Nonetheless, just like numerous activists and artists, Leder trusts that ‘human responsibility, including our responsibility for other living creatures, makes it impossible to remain passive’ [trans. AP]. How, then, do Polish poetry and prose tackle questions such as those of solar energy and the prospect of biodiversity loss?

Nothing new under the sun

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Dry lake in Africa, dessicated as a result of climate change, photo: S. Piyaset / Getty Images

Picture image

susza_zmiany_klimatyczne_gettyimages-1361668521.jpg

The Svalbard archipelago – whose largest island, Spitsbergen, is home to the Arctic World Archive – is the fastest-warming place on the globe. ‘Heat, scorching heat, death, mourning. I imagined myself building a little house out of them. […] Walls made of climate science, roof made of biodiversity loss, windows and doors overlooking emptiness’, Boni writes [trans. AP]. Emilia Konwerska, too, searches for an exit from empty rooms in her poem ‘Już Bez Tytułu’ (Titled No More) from the 2023 volume Ostatni i Pierwszy Kajman (The Last & the First Cayman). Meanwhile, in a canto by Fiedorczuk (from the volume Glif [Glyph], 2024), the tired speaker gives an account of dreams filling up sterile rooms ‘in ethereal cities’: ‘what you have extracted cannot be yours in tunnels made of light’ [trans. AP]. Meanwhile, Justyna Kulikowska plays in the void (Obóz Zabaw [Playcamp], 2023), but instead of light, only a ‘pharmaceutical with a little sun’ prescribed for depression appears at the end of the tunnel [trans. AP]. (Trittico shines the brightest from her 2021 volume gift. z Podlasia [gift. from Podlasie].) This isn’t the kind of home the authors of the term ‘ecopoetics’ had in mind.

As a source of energy, both the life-giving and the creative kind, the sun has been an object of worship dating back to the earliest belief systems. Mitra, a solar deity in the Indo-Iranian mythology, guarded the social order; the Egyptian god Ra reigned over the order of the universe; the Vedic Surya chased away darkness and illness; and the Greek god Helios was the one bringing light to humanity. Nowadays, too, we can encounter those who proclaim ‘radical hope in the face of the coming traumas of climate change’ [trans. AP]. The individuals in question, known as solarpunks, respond to the need for new, positive narratives about the future – although in the Brazilian version of the movement, the creators are inspired even by the poetics of horror and thriller, informs Kajetan Poniatyszyn, a researcher at the University of Wrocław who explores this artistic and literary movement in his 2023 book Słoneczna Synergia Słowa i Działania: Ruch Solarpunkowy z Polsce (A Solar Synergy of Word and Action: The Solarpunk Movement in Poland). In any case, the goal here is to maintain balance in the utilisation of Earth’s natural resources while also facilitating dynamic technological progress and keeping a positive outlook on the nearest future. Although resistance to the anthropocentric world order doesn’t always have to take on the form of aggressive confrontation, still, doesn’t gentle persuasion ultimately result in sugarcoating the problem and losing sight of its fundamental nature?

To happen to the world

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Sunrise over the Patras industrial zone in western Greece, photo: Alexandros Maragos / Getty Images

Picture image

zmiany_klimatyczne_gettyimages-503452266.jpg

Sometimes a change of perspective is enough to revolutionise one’s way of thinking and, in consequence, also one’s way of acting. Whereas in her 2025 poetry volume Dunaj: Chyłe Pola (Danube: Slanted Fields) Małgorzata Lebda cautions us to ‘protect the skin of [our] face[s] from the sun’, seeing the latter as dangerous to humans, Fiedorczuk responds in her poem ‘aubada’ (aubade) that it’s us who ‘happen to this sun’, and therefore we’re the intruding ones [trans. AP]. What’s more, in the poem ‘sondowanie snu’ (plumbing a dream), the sun has a body (‘you’re here, towards the light, the body of the sun’); in ‘nic nigdy’ (nothing ever), it’s subject to the laws of birth and death (‘sunrises and sunsets / a birth two deaths poems’). Still, as the poem ‘tańcząc bez tańczącej’ (dancing with no dancer) shows, the sun actually persists, ‘but human eyes will only register the effect of the change’. The sun doesn’t only give life, it is life; perhaps it can also feel? Polish ecological poetry is getting bolder in its practices of transposing human properties onto nonhuman entities. In zajęczy żar (hare heat, 2024) by Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz, an orchard squints its eye, crickets play their music in the soil’s aorta, and everything else quivers, pulsates, swirls: ‘just like breath wreathes at the ceiling and then escapes like smoke / I’d like to meet these elongated shadows the body of one sun’ [trans. AP].

Heat, droughts, fires. The warmer the globe, the more fires there are and the higher the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn results in the further warming of the planet and thus in new, dynamically spreading sources of fire. Another record has been set: according to the World Meteorological Organisation report from 16th October 2025, the past 12 months have been the warmest in the history of the measurements conducted since the mid-19th century. But it’s not the sun that’s responsible for present-day climate change. It’s human beings.

This conclusion resounds frequently and forcefully in The Climate Book (2023), which Greta Thunberg compiled together with over a hundred specialists from around the world, from oceanographers to psychologists, in order to equip those who want to save the planet with appropriate tools. This is also what Polish wordsmiths try to convey using the language of poetry: evocative, sometimes replete with expressiveness, at other times intimate and compassionate.

Bill of indictment drawn up in several languages

Konwerska’s lyrical reflections are somewhat distant, distrustful of the lyrical ‘I’. The poet doesn’t yield to the temptation of easy emotionality, instead shrouding her personal experiences in subtle irony, which forces the reader to make increased intellectual effort.

Cover of the poetry volume ‘zajęczy żar’ (hare heat) by Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz, photo: Warstwy publishing house

Meanwhile, Jaglarz seeks an emotional outlet within the structure of language itself: the muscles of metaphors, the nerves of associations. He feeds on contrasts, absorbs images and sounds, yields to sensations: ‘I multiplied letters like water now I will draw from other sources / unclear are my desires and the origin of words’, ‘I refuse to milk cows and don’t succumb to sentences’ [trans. AP]. His poems emit a quiet melody that nevertheless pierces through the cells of one’s body.

Words are a sanctuary for Kulikowska’s anger, although phrases burden her, becomes ‘a cramped cage’ or ‘a hole left by a key’ through which we’re allowed to look. Genuine aggressiveness transforms into artistic creation: ‘(this isn’t a poem, it’s a bill of indictment. / this isn’t a poem, it’s a criminal sentence)’ [trans. AP]. It’s not enough to cry, plead, or preach: ‘(a monologue on consequences is sticky toffee, / it stuck to / the phrase)’ [trans. AP]. Poetry is meant to shock, to pinch, to baffle, not for the sake of cheap showiness but to break through inertia.

Fiedorczuk searches for a common language to express the worries and crises that gnaw at her and the planet, she ‘weaves poems out of / what’s at hand / rubbish washed ashore / redundant clothes / despair / anger hope’ (things have obstinacy and will) [trans. AP]. Her poems are more intellectual and sensual than they are a form of account; they’re oriented more towards duration than momentary experience, towards feeling-with rather than just empathy:

I laboriously search for a common language, until
I understand that it won’t be made of letters, or
words, or anything that could be seen or
heard but rather of a flux that my body
(sculpted from memory) will experience as pain or its
portent […].

[‘grab’ (hornbeam) from the volume ‘Glif’, quote translated by AP]

Poetry is a form of resistance, perhaps a less spectacular one than climate strikes and rallies but no less necessary. It’s literature that creates tools we need to talk about the ecological disaster – and, as Fiedorczuk argues, our mode of understanding and describing the world must evolve, open itself up to the rapidly progressing changes, release the critical force of language.

Lebda seeks light and solace, and therefore it’s light that she dedicated her poetry volume to. Jaglarz penetrates into the inner core of the Earth, feels its pulse, the rhythm of nature, treats the planet like a living organism, and his zajęczy żar is an offering to animals. Kulikowska addresses gift. z Podlasia to herself and other available individuals ready to take action. In this context, it’s particularly telling that she dedicates her new poetry volume, Obóz Zabaw, to ‘nobody’.

The third edition of Serbian School of Ecopoetics will take place on 8th and 9th November 2025 in Belgrade. Among the participating creators are: Julia Fiedorczuk, Andrzej Leder (who will deliver a lecture titled ‘Economics, Excess and the Traumatic Encounter with the Climate Catastrophe’), Minja Tomić, Srđan Gagić, Bojan Marković, Maja Solar, Emilia Konwerska, Justyna Kulikowska, and Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz. The event is organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Partners include: Polish Institute in Belgrade, Kulturni centar Beograda (KCB), Belgrade University Institute of Literature and Art, ‘Mostovi’ Literary Quarterly, ‘Taćka Susretanija’ Centre, and Knijevna Rjadonica Rasić Publishing House.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English