How to be in the World: An Interview with Allison Cobb

Allison Cobb is the author of Green-Wood, After We All Died, Born2, and Plastic: An Autobiography, winner of the Oregon Book Award and the Firecracker Award. Cobb’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Colorado Review, among other journals. She has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cobb sits on the board of Fonograf Editions and is Senior Director for Equity and Justice at Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Allison and I met over Zoom in October to discuss Plastic: An Autobiography, her writing process, and the relationship between her work as a writer and her work in climate justice.

Ashlee Laielli: Plastic: An Autobiography pursues threads of connections, navigating a vast territory in time, space, and subject matter as you investigate and meditate on plastic. How did you develop this writing practice that embodies the idea you put forth in the epigraph from Karen Barad, “Knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from direct material engagement with the world?”

Allison Cobb: It was a combination of literary and non-literary influences. I work for Environmental Defense Fund. I have done a lot of work around what it means to engage both with colleagues at the organization and with communities who are experiencing the impacts of the Anthropocene immediately and directly. That’s really shifted how I think about my work as a writer. What I didn’t want to do is parachute into communities and extract information. I wanted to develop authentic relationships with people, to engage rather than stand at a distance.

What I didn’t want to do is parachute into communities and extract information. I wanted to develop authentic relationships with people, to engage rather than stand at a distance.

There’s a poet here in Portland who has been an influence and inspiration to me, named Kaia Sand. She commented once that the book is one object, but it doesn’t have to be the totality of a project, or even its starting point or its endpoint. Kaia thinks about her whole life as a poetics. I have another friend, a poet named JD Pluecker, who takes the same orientation to the work. They’re both activists engaged in community work. Those two are my literary inspirations; they embody their ethics.

My inspirations among people who are doing environmental and climate justice work are those who persist despite all kinds of setbacks and discouragements—those who “stay with the trouble” as Donna Haraway says. I feel like I live in two worlds—this very practical advocacy world of an environmental organization and this literary world. Both can miss what’s happening with people who are, as my boss likes to say, experiencing environmental harms first and worst. That’s an additional world that I don’t live in, but that’s where I wanted to stay and not just be extractive and not just be theorizing.

AL: How did you think about balancing the theory with research and the personal in this book?

AC: My desire to combine these aspects, I think comes out of the feeling of living in two worlds. Whether I’m in the more academic theoretical world, or the environmental policy world, I always want something more. In the environmental advocacy world, there’s much less of an interrogation of language and structures. Things are taken at face value and are not problematized—the use of the phrase “Mother Nature” for example. I always want there to be a deeper interrogation of language and imagery. In the academic world, there’s deep interrogation of those things, but then it might stop there. I want to bring the two together.

I have this instinct to always undermine authorial voice and genre. One way I’ve done that in my work is by slamming them together—here’s a scientific explanation of plastic chemistry, or a history of this guy who built airplanes in World War II, alongside a personal narrative. I feel myself all the time slipping into these received authorial voices—a historian’s voice, a science journalist’s voice. I want to show that those are constructed voices, partly by juxtaposing them. The reader has to move through all these different registers. Even the personal voice is still a construction. I’ve created a persona.

I feel like being a poet is such a wonderful orientation in the world. It gives me a license to move through all these different roles. I don’t have to be a historian. Not being an academic, I’m not staking my claim to a body of knowledge. I’m a human. I can move intellectually, emotionally, intuitively through all these bodies of knowledge. What I want to do is metabolize them through my own being so that they’re making sense to me, and I’m understanding them, which means perhaps other people will relate as well.

I feel like being a poet is such a wonderful orientation in the world. It gives me a license to move through all these different roles. I don’t have to be a historian. Not being an academic, I’m not staking my claim to a body of knowledge. I’m a human.

AL: It seems like you were able to write this book the way you wanted. Was that a struggle at all? Or were you just very fortunate in that process with your editor and publisher?

AC: I am very fortunate. Nightboat Books is an incredible publisher and their whole orientation to publishing is that they want to take risks. They’re a nonprofit publisher, so they’re not trying to compete on the model of a for-profit publishing house. They’re very dedicated to literature that’s doing new things. They publish a huge range of work. I was very fortunate. They really worked with me and made it a better book. I love poets like Susan Howe and Alice Notley, poets who really skate on the edge of legibility, because again, that’s part of undermining genre. I always want to skate on that edge. I wanted Plastic to be a little disorienting—for readers to be confused about why they were learning all these disparate things, with the connections to plastic slowly revealed. The whole first section of the book, which is a bit of an overview of the project, came out of the process of collaboration with my editor. They wanted me to give the reader more “handles,” more ways to get oriented in the work—so it’s a balance!

A lot of what I do for a living at the environmental organization is write. I’ve been edited my whole life. I think that really helps me. I’m not very precious about it. I really see writing as a collaborative act. Collaborative at every step: with the communities I interview and engage, my friends and family. Everyone I mentioned in the book read the part that was about them. I was not trying to be an objective journalist. If they were like, “You kind of got this wrong,” or, “I don’t really see it that way,” I worked with them. The whole way along, I see it as collaborative.

AL: I love how you include a lot of your process in the text. You share with the reader about how you approached this book through the investigation of this particular car part after a more open-ended practice of collecting plastic on your walks and documenting what you found. Did you always know you were going to use that white whale of that car part with this book?

AC: I didn’t know early on what my way would be into this giant topic. I actually originally just wanted to write a book about the Anthropocene and what it means. Plastic is concrete and intimate in most of our daily lives. That’s why I chose it. I knew my way into this big topic was going to be through my own body, through my own life. It was very intuitive. It was all very organic. I didn’t know the car part would become an organizing factor. I didn’t know that nuclear weapons would be part of it, except that they’re my continuing life obsession, since I was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town that built the atomic bombs. I just happened to come across the information that polyethylene was really essential to the design of the thermonuclear bomb. Then that whole thread came in, but it was not planned. I definitely did not plan to spend a lot of time thinking about World War II airplanes.

AL: You implicate yourself constantly in the book. You name the carbon emissions of your travel and you talk about acknowledging your privilege. I would just love to hear you talk about those choices. Was that always a part of the project? Do you have a stance or an opinion about the importance of that kind of self-implication and accountability in environmental writing or nonfiction in general?

AC: It comes out of the work I’ve done around colonialism and working against white supremacy. For me, it’s important to acknowledge my privilege and my complicity, to lay out what the stakes are for me in this work, which are different from the stakes for others. I feel that one needs to start there in order to move forward. That doesn’t mean sitting in guilt because that does not support action—guilt is about me, not about anybody else. It’s real, and it may be an emotion one needs to process, but then it’s important to move past it.  Acknowledging my privilege and power enables me to think about how I can use that to support justice, equity, and liberation. It enables me to think about how I can give up some of that power.

For me, it’s important to acknowledge my privilege and my complicity, to lay out what the stakes are for me in this work, which are different from the stakes for others.

Also, capitalism benefits from our guilt because it keeps us isolated, and there we are disempowered. I hear a lot of people talk about feeling bad or guilty about their plastic use. I’d prefer that we look at the systems that put us here and keep us here. What are the laws, policies and institutions in which we’re all caught that are perpetuating racism, economic inequality, and pollution, perpetuating this whole orientation towards the planet that’s going to destroy all of us?

AL: Do you have a way to sum up your position on the individual in terms of responsibility and ethics and climate change?

AC: I get asked a lot to think about that tension between individual action and the fact that what we do as individuals doesn’t really make a difference. Or it doesn’t feel like it can. I would say for me, my ethical obligation is to work on shifting systems. As a society, we know what the solutions are. In fact there is legislation right now in Congress that provides clear fixes, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It would do three main things:

• Make corporations responsible for the plastic that they produce at the end of its life. Coke wouldn’t be able to put all its drinks in plastic bottles and be like, “You take care of it with your municipal recycling systems.” They would have to take that plastic back. My attempt to return the car part to its factory of origin was a performance that I hoped could suggest this would be possible. Companies need to take responsibility for their waste.
• Eliminate some single use plastic applications, which is the other huge problem. It’s not like everything plastic is bad. I’m talking to you on a plastic computer. I’m very happy that I have it. It enables everything that I do. But I don’t need the plastic throwaway fork I got with my lunch yesterday.
• Force petrochemical companies and permit agencies in the states that permit plants to look at cumulative impacts. Plants are permitted one by one. That’s how communities of color, that already have been redlined into where they’re living, get surrounded by a dozen petrochemical plants. Nobody looks at the cumulative impact. It’s not in the law that they’re required to do that. So, these are basic structural fixes.

You can imagine that every time that bill gets introduced, the American Chemistry Council, which is one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington, is like, “no.” Those bills don’t ever go anywhere, and they won’t without a lot of vocal support.

Another place to pay attention to right now is the global treaty being negotiated around plastic pollution—because this is a global problem. That could drive some systemic shifts—but only if that treaty has real teeth, as in economic costs to companies that persist in wasteful production practices. If we could lift our heads up and advocate for these kinds of systemic changes, I think we could have a huge impact.

As literary scholars and creative writers, we think about imagining how things can be different and questioning the structures that determine our lives. It’s our mandate to imagine worlds, right? Then there are these very practical bills that actually depend on us being able to imagine a different way of doing things. I think that’s where the practical and the imagination can come together.

AL: Do you have practical advice on where people can stay up on that kind of legislation?

AC: There are a couple of really good groups on plastic. People Over Plastic is organized by people of color. There’s also Break Free From Plastic Pollution, a global alliance. And there is 5 Gyres, which is particularly focused on the ocean and plastic science and advocacy. There is a lot going on, and many ways to engage and support if that’s what you want to do.

As literary scholars and creative writers, we think about imagining how things can be different and questioning the structures that determine our lives. It’s our mandate to imagine worlds, right? Then there are these very practical bills that actually depend on us being able to imagine a different way of doing things. I think that’s where the practical and the imagination can come together.

AL: Did you think about your audience when you were writing this? Did that play into your process?

AC: That’s a tricky question. It can be paralyzing to think of an audience. Over the arc of my life as a writer, my sense of audience has shifted. When I first came into poetry, I came into this world of experimental poetry writing, very anti-institutional. It was like we were writing for each other, a small coterie. I took some comfort from that. But writing for your closest intimates can also be risky. It feels like there’s a lot at stake.

I got a very concrete sense of the potential audience from my book Green-Wood. It’s about a 19th century cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s a post September 11th book. It’s investigative in similar ways to the Plastic book. One of the things that I do is describe some of the graves of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. An excerpt of the book was published online, in which I described the grave of a person named Sergeant Behnke. I got this email one day, from someone named Behnke, that had no subject line, just a link to a YouTube tribute for Sergeant Behnke. I responded, thanking them for sending it. It turned out to be Sergeant Behnke’s brother, Mike. The family valued my brief description of his grave because it was an additional way of commemorating Sergeant Behnke and his presence in the world.

I did a launch for that book in the chapel at the Green-Wood Cemetery and his entire family came to the launch. You don’t ever know who you’re writing for. The world will take your work, if you’re lucky enough that anyone takes it, and make of it what they need it to be. Since then, I’ve felt my conception of an audience is very open. I feel like what I am writing is helping me figure out how to be in the world. If it’s powerful and meaningful for me, hopefully it’s powerful and meaningful for someone else.

AL: In the beginning of the book, you mention how your work for your other job is about giving others hope. I have really complicated feelings about the use of hope. There always feels like this assumption that if we don’t have it, or if we lose it, then the only option is despair, but I think there are other ways to think about these things. I think you work with this a lot, so I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.

AC: I don’t know if you know the poet CAConrad, the two of us were talking and came up with this phrase, “Hope is a fallacy, despair is a luxury.” For people who are living on the front lines of environmental harm, despair is not an option. On this topic in particular, I really learn from people of color and Indigenous scholars, like Robin Wall Kimmerer. She talks about joy as a kind of ethical obligation, as a way of being in relation to the world. She says something like, “Even a wounded world is feeding us, even a wounded world nourishes. It gives me joy every day, and gifts every day, and I need to return the gift.”

To me, joy and love speak to action, because if we love something, then we’re going to act on its behalf. That feels more productive to me than hope. Joanna Macy, and other scholars who have done grief work around the Anthropocene and climate change, talk about how grief and joy are really two sides of the same coin. You don’t get to feel one without the other. Of course we are going to feel deep grief about wounds to something that we love so much, something that brings us so much joy. Grief is more productive than despair. It’s a whole cycle. We can feel the grief—maybe at times, despair—be in those feelings, process them through our bodies, and then be able to be in the joy. All of that, I think, gives us a kind of emotional wisdom that can prepare and inform our actions.

I always think about the Audre Lorde essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and how she talks about how poetry is the genre of the body. This is why I’m fundamentally a poet. Poetry is an embodied genre, through rhythm and sound and song. It speaks to our bodies in a way that no other form of literary writing does at that level of primacy. We are going to need that. We need that bodily wisdom drawn from our emotions and our intuitions to imagine new ways of living, unprecedented forms of action and solidarity. That’s where I’m dwelling right now–with joy and grief rather than hope and despair.