‘Meltwater’ author Claire Wahmanholm: poetry is ‘kinship across time and space’

CATHY WURZER: Parenting, friends, is not easy. Well, that's an understatement. Many parents will tell you that, maybe holding their third cup of coffee with unnamed stains on their shirt as they're doing it. But in the face of climate change, with 60-degree weather in January and frigid winds in March, parenting just got a little bit harder.

Many parents with young kids are asking themselves what the future looks like for their children and what they need to do to prepare them. Prospective parents might be wondering if they should even be having kids at all. Claire Wahmanholm tackles just that in her fourth book of poetry, Meltwater. It's a book of poetry tackling the climate crisis through the lens of glacial meltwater and parenthood.

Here's an excerpt from one of the last poems in the book, "Glacier."

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: It is everywhere.

It is the water I am trying to teach my daughters to float in.

It is the sky I tell them to keep their eyes on.

It is the air I tell them to seal in their mouths

Should they slip under water.

I am a leaky boat,

But I am trying to answer their questions.

CATHY WURZER: Meltwater is nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. Welcome and congratulations, Claire.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Thank you so much. Good to be here.

CATHY WURZER: Thank you. That was a really good excerpt that we just heard. Can you tell us what the inspiration was for that poem?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah. For sure. So those are the opening lines, again, from "Glacier." And there are actually four poems called "Glacier" in the book. They're kind of part of this narrative sequence that takes place in this quasi-dystopian but also increasingly real future where there are maybe five or so glaciers left in the world.

Some are being preserved in vaults. Some are set up in art museums. A couple you can still see in the wild. And there's this kind of glacier tourism circuit you can go on. And so the speaker of these four poems is on a quest to visit all of them before they melt. And each poem describes one of her encounters with these glaciers.

And so this is the very last one she gets to. And spoiler alert-- she's too late. By the time she gets there, this one has actually melted and evaporated and become part of the air that she's moving through.

CATHY WURZER: Obviously, climate change is an environmental crisis, right? But it's also for many, many, many people an emotional crisis too. So what makes poetry a good vehicle for underscoring the issue, the environmental damage and the emotional damage?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Sure. Sure. For me, poetry has always been, first and foremost, an emotional endeavor. I do think poetry is especially suited for grappling with moments of emotional extremity, despair, ecstasy, grief, trauma, love, all those things, not just for the poet writing it, but for her readers.

We want to feel like someone understands our grief, our anger, despair, the radical hope, anxiety that we feel right now. That's super important. And we always hear the phrase, oh, humans are storytelling animals, as a thing that's supposed to attest to our drive toward narrativity.

And that's true, obviously, but a lot of the times, it feels like there is no story necessarily or like we don't know what the story is. Or we're in the middle of it and can't see the end. And I think poetry does a really good job of helping us explore those moments. And a lot of human experience is that sort of in-betweenness, those moments there.

CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering what made you decide to address climate change from the parenthood angle?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah. For sure. This is going to be sort of a non-answer. Since I had children-- I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old-- everything I write is from a parenthood angle. It's not something I choose at this point. Even if the words "parent" or "child" don't appear explicitly, it is like a framework that informs everything I'll do from here on out.

And I'm not sure I could have written this book without the experience of parenthood, which has, at least for me, been simultaneously de-centering and expansive. It's been so much about realizing that I'm maybe a main character right now, but I'm not the main character of my children's lives-- they're their own main characters-- and realizing I'm not the main character in the story of the natural world or in humanity's story.

And I think without that vertiginous sense of ego death, I don't think I could have written this book in this way.

CATHY WURZER: I understand what you're saying in terms of using it as a lens, that your whole life is-- you're kind of looking through the lens of parenthood. I'm wondering-- so then if you have two kids, and as we are in the grips of a climate crisis, what are you thinking about that decision in terms of having kids? How worried are you?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: For sure. For sure. For a long time, I sort of did that hand-wringing thing, where I felt guilty about my choice and very woeful about the world I was bringing them into, et cetera. But then I read this article that-- and you probably know it-- by Meehan Crist called, "Is It OK to Have a Child?" And I want to say it came out in March 2020.

And that was just like-- it totally shifted my view of even that question. Part of her article points out what we know now about BP, which is that they are the ones who came up with the idea of the individual carbon footprint as a way to distract the public and excuse themselves from taking responsibility over what they knew they were doing to the environment.

And I bought the carbon footprint thing for years. I was like, oh, my God. I'm not recycling enough. I'm forgetting to bring my canvas bag to the grocery store. I'm a monster. Instead of being like, wait a minute. It would take decades for me to do what the oil industry could do in a minute. They just won't do it.

Any extractive industry that throws human futures away for money, they are the ones who should feel ashamed. If you look at the history of humanity across time, the brand of capitalism that we live under right now is so recent and by no means an inevitable phenomenon. But living in communities, making art, raising children in various kin configurations, those are the oldest parts of the human story.

And to be told that, oh, no, maybe we should stop participating in the things that make us human because an industry wants to perpetuate itself, is one of the silliest, most cynical, most degraded things I can think of, actually. There are enough resources on this planet for everyone to be comfortable and live full, meaningful lives. There is not scarcity in the way that we're being told.

The five richest people in the world take in $14 million an hour. Like, nah. And this is not to say-- not everyone wants children. This is not me being a birther or whatever. I'm just saying no one should ever feel guilty about participating in that part of humanity's legacy. And personally, I will not feel guilty. And I don't engage with that conversation in that way anymore.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Thanks. I appreciate hearing that from you.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Sorry. Going on and on there. I could say more. Just kidding.

CATHY WURZER: I'm sensing that's correct. I'm wondering, when readers sit with Meltwater, what are you hoping they take away? What do you hope they feel as they read your poems?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah. Thank you. Mostly, I'm just hoping that people feel less alone when they read it. My favorite thing when I read a book of poetry is reading something and being like, oh, my God. Me too! Me too! You get me. You see me. I felt exactly what you're describing.

It's this beautiful, surreal moment that when it happens-- and yeah, sometimes it happens when I'm reading my friends' books. But often, it's with strangers' books. And so to feel that kinship across time and space is really profound.

Poetry can create these beautiful invisible nets that catch you and support you. And you didn't even they were there. And so I think any of us who write poetry just kind of hope that the books wind up in the hands of people who need them most.

CATHY WURZER: I love that. I've never thought of poetry in that way. A net. A beautiful net. Oh, Claire, that's lovely.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: You can have that.

CATHY WURZER: Thank you.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: That's yours now.

CATHY WURZER: And I will absolutely attribute it to you. Congratulations. Being nominated for a Minnesota Book Award is a big, big deal. So congratulations.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Thank you. Thanks.

CATHY WURZER: And it's been great talking to you, Claire. Thank you.

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Yeah. Such a pleasure.

CATHY WURZER: Claire Wahmanholm is a poet based in the Twin Cities. Her newest book of poetry, Meltwater, is a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards.