Ann Fisher-Wirth: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Ann Fisher-Wirth

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Five Poems

Today

Make it of this, of this, of this

                        —William Carlos Williams

Today I walked in the sun

and picked up pecans still falling from the trees,

even the ones on the muddy sidewalk.

Then we drove them, three grocery bags full,

to the Feed & Seed Store in Batesville, where a little

rat terrier for sale whimpered in a crate

(please God let somebody buy it) and the taciturn man

whose khaki shirt didn’t meet across his stomach

poured my 35 pounds of pecans into their clackety-

clack machine that breaks the shells 

and the blower that mostly blows the shells off.

We drove home along Highway 6, past the empty

concrete building that was once the Cedar Bucket

which made picnic tables and Adirondack chairs,

past the billboard for a bucktoothed

bankruptcy lawyer named Ronnie, past the golden

mansion built by the owner of El Charro, with its lake

and an entrance gate flanked by two enormous

rampant metal stallions, and past the fenced hill

where John Grisham built his own Little League

diamond and lived with his family until the tour buses

came and people started getting married in their yard.

As we drove home through the sunlight, past the Nissan

dealership and the Toyota dealership and the Ford

dealership, past all the sprawl, off the highway,

down Jackson, my love’s hand on my thigh,

on an ordinary north Mississippi afternoon,

I thought, Who could deserve this happiness?

Blue Window

In that shadowy time before sorrow—

that twilight, October in Berkeley, the early 60’s,

when I walked home along Euclid from Mrs. Runkle’s

where I’d played Schumann’s “Traumerei”

so beautifully, for once, I’d made her cry—

Before the missile crisis, when I sat on the bed in fear and exaltation

and thought of Anne Frank—while on the TV downstairs,

Soviet ships inched closer to Cuba—and wondered,

when they come to get me, when I hide beneath my desk,

my head in my hands, and the walls shake,

will I have told the world

how I love this life I am forced to lose?

Before Christian, my neighbor, drank developing fluid

and his death at Alta Bates took 48 hours, the poison dissolving his stomach,

and his father the beautiful philanderer told my mother,

“The divorce caused it,” just failing to add, wringing

his elegant crooked fingers, “He did it for grief of me”—

before Ronnie, my neighbor, took acid and flew out a window,

and Jackie, my neighbor, drove 90 miles an hour into a stone wall

at prep school in Massachusetts, and Kwaasi, my neighbor,

talked to God and carved his arms and died at Napa,

the boys who lived around me lost, all dead by nineteen—

and before I had ever bled yet, ever got high, or

loved a boy, or played at kisses through Kleenex with Mary Lou—

In that time before my father lay in bed

all one year’s end, the vast flower of his death blossoming,

and wrote, in a tiny crabbed hand, in the datebook I found years later,

“Had to increase the dosage today. Ann and Jink allowance”—

in that Christian Science household no one spoke, silence thickened upon us,

to this day no one has ever said to me, “It was brain cancer,”

but last winter my husband got drunk in his rare blind fury,

ran weeping into the room and pounded the bed over and over,

shouting, “Don’t you understand yet?

In the war they treated men for lice with lindane,

poured it over their heads,

they did it to your father, and now they tell us

lindane eats your brain.” —In that time, that twilight, 

when I walked slowly home along Euclid,

how I wanted to belong to the family I saw

through the blue, wisteria-covered window, to be their girl,

enter their garlicky dinnertime kitchen,

later, to sit on a high attic bed, legs crossed tailor-fashion,

and pick dreamily at white chenille—

I wondered, why not be anyone, go anywhere?

When light dies around the oakleaves

and white, ragged moths come out to beat against the streetlight,

why not knock at the door and say “I am yours. I am here”?

(Published in Blue Window, Archer Books, 2003).

In Crescent

The blood wall thickens

and everyone I have loved

begins to ripen within my body.

A quiet time: the house

curls in upon itself, enfolds

the sleeping children; the daisy

shuts its petals, and their lashes are wet

with the mercy of sleep.

Summer’s grasses

are long, so long

that we seem to move through water.

Children again, we clamor, Mother

may I, mother may I? And she

by the elm in shadow, whose belly

catches moonlight: Come

as you will, I will hold you,

I am warm, all steps

lead where I am hidden.

And so inch forward toward that

teeming bed

where we all lie down together.

(Published in Five Terraces, Wind Publications, 2005).

Persimmons

My sister said, I would like to write

about these persimmons but I can’t. 

Along the street they hung,

glossy and taut among the leaves,

all of light in their red-orange flesh,

like breasts, like buttocks or wombs

swollen with sun, with desire,

those sexy fruits that she loved,

on this radiant All Souls’ morning

when she returned to walk with me.

            For Jennifer (1948-2019)

(Published in Paradise Is Jagged, Terrapin Books, 2023).

Prague

First day in Prague. Six cans of Cokes

tacked in a pyramid,

the only things in a storefront window.

The towering statue of Jan Hus, burned at the stake

in 1415, snow piled around his feet in Old Town Square.

Cold so intense that over the week, my husband

lost five toenails. Gray skies, the bitter Vltava River

churning black beneath the Charles Bridge,

Soviet soldiers on every corner.

At twilight we sought the address we had been given by the principal of our school, who had sent presents for his friends—a toaster, thick wool socks for the parents, sweaters and tights for the children. A door opened, just a crack, at the top of a vast staircase, and a woman peeked out, terrified. Once she could tell we were not police, Er ist nicht hier, she said, and bade us enter. He soon returned—Zdenek, his name was, Elishka, his wife, and there were three small children. He insisted we stay for dinner, insisted that he would show us around Prague the next day and the next, and invited us to move from our hotel to his apartment as soon as he and his family left, in two days, for their cabin in the woods, far from the city where Elishka, eight months pregnant, had stood at the window the year before and watched the Soviet tanks rumble in. She nearly lost her child when the soldiers came, he told us. I am film director, my work is in the city. I live here. But while our children are small, she will keep them in the forest.

After dinner we sat in the study

around the seltzer and slivovitz

and made halting four-way conversation—

Czech to French for Nicole and Guy,

French to German for Elishka, German

to Czech to English for John and me,

with our passable French and execrable German.

Zdenek’s paintings were stacked against a desk,

with two on the wall, a bit like Modiglianis,

both Elishka, a crimson beach, a turquoise sky,

her olive skin, a swoop of jet black hair. I wanted

to be Elishka—someone a man would want to paint.

And I wanted Elishka’s children, most of all

the three-year-old, skinny, with huge dark eyes,

who came from somewhere in the apartment

and stood by me at dinner. Shy, he showed me

his violin. I longed to set him on my lap

and feel his fuzzy head beneath my chin.

Zdenek and Elishka went to the forest over New Year’s while the four of us, the visitors, stayed at the apartment. John and I slept in the study, in a trundle bed, made up with feather duvets and lace-trimmed heavy linens. Above us on one wall, there was a medieval statue of a saint—rescued, I learned, from the church near Elishka’s childhood home—and on another wall, an enormous painting I believed to be a Rubens. We held hands, lying one high one low in the two narrow beds. And I couldn’t sleep. I looked around in flickering lantern light at the peeling white walls, the dark old wood, Zdenek’s chair with the carved lions’ heads, this most beautiful room with its elegance and poverty. I felt so young, so raw—so American.

I belong in this room, I thought, this bed,

this dilapidated apartment on Hybernska

down which the tanks came, terrifying Elishka.

I was in love with this whole family

but knew I couldn’t stay here. No matter.

I was here. Drowsy, I reached across

to the table to turn off the lantern

and sank into darkness, snow falling steadily

all night long outside the window.

On a hill above the Vltava a vast official building, something to do with a long-gone World’s Fair, was hosting a New Year’s banquet to which John and I, Guy and Nicole, bought tickets. How fun, we thought, a real Czech experience—but it turned out only the soldiers and their wives could afford it, so the banquet hall was thronged with Russians, who got happier and happier as they made their way through the fifth of vodka, bottle of wine, and bottle of cheap champagne found at each place on every table, until finally we were surrounded by very drunk soldiers wearing party hats and plastic pig noses, who blew cardboard and tinsel-fringed zappers in our faces. Then as midnight struck and the band started up, nearly the whole room rose. We formed an enormous line, everyone hanging on to everyone, and did the bunny hop—kick, kick / kick, kick / hop, back, hop hop hop—around the tables and out into the night, the sparkling snow.

Sparkling snow, thick bodies of drunk sweaty Russians,

for a moment I could forget everything

and fling first one leg then the other higher and higher,

hanging on to some soldier’s waist as the music

blasted from the building far above the city

and we hopped and lurched along the frozen path.

When we’d arrived at the banquet Nicole gave us a Czech talisman for luck, a tiny pig with 1970 in gilt lettering on its porcelain side, and told us she was pregnant with her third child—no wonder she turned down the champagne and the bunny hop, and sat pale and tired, holding hands with Guy across the table. Next day we all four wandered shivering through the Old Jewish Cemetery, Beth Chaim, the guidebook said, The House of Life, where 100,000 people were buried layer upon layer because Jews were seldom permitted to buy more land. Headstones crumbled, leaning against each other, carved with names and symbols of character or occupation—wine, grapes, a lion, a deer, a rose or bird, a pair of blessing hands—old stones lifted to the level of the new each time more earth was added.

Why even try, I thought—

when it all comes down to

mottled stone and layers of the dead?

Always my child,

the nurse who couldn’t find a heartbeat,

the doctor who strapped me down

as I struggled, begging.

Always that nameless little grave in California,

with the rain falling.

First day, first year, of a new decade.

The same loss closed its hands on my throat.

I pulled my coat tight around me.

2.

At the time of our first visit, Zdenek was making a film of The Call of the Wild. As we sat around the table drinking slivovitz, he asked us if we’d read Jack London, what we could tell him about Alaska. He was just getting it pulled together. Now, They have seized my film, he said, when we came to the table for breakfast. It was eighteen months later, in June; John and I had come to say goodbye before moving back to America. And I got a call at midnight. My friend, also director, has opened his veins last night. The police have called me in for interrogation. We must go today to the country. I must speak with my wife.

Outside the cabin, at a wooden table among blossoming trees,

Zdenek and Elishka spoke rapidly in Czech.

Their faces were pale. We were near tears

with helplessness and fear for them.

Don’t cry, Zdenek said, almost impatiently.

What can they do to me as long as I have my family?

The beauty of this sentence made the afternoon a chalice of light. Elishka and I gathered wild strawberries, stooping and kneeling among the tall grasses as we spoke in broken German about God. Glaubst du? was about the extent of it. Ja. Mir auch. I could not believe I could be so happy, feel such closeness to a woman I could barely talk to. John taught the children a song in French, Mon cheval est fatigué, bouncing them on his knees faster and faster through il marche and il trotte until with il galope they were flying up and down, screaming with laughter. We showed photos of Guy and Nicole with their three little girls. No one spoke of Prague. No one spoke of what awaited them. Later we sat as the dark came through the trees and drank cassis that Elishka had made. For dinner Elishka fried mushrooms—puffballs?—airy and light and big as hands.

3.

Zdenek was seated in his lion chair. He rose when we entered, hugged me, hugged my two sons, hugged Peter, my second husband, whom he had never met. Twenty-five years had passed. He seemed tired, and—I couldn’t tell—maybe not to want us. Friendly as ever, Elishka invited us to go with her to the cabin the following morning and stay there while Zdenek had, as he called it, a

minor procedure—it’s nothing, don’t fuss, he told us brusquely. We drank seltzer with slivovitz, but didn’t know if we were expected to linger in the apartment and chat with Zdenek, or eat, or leave. Finally he said, Now you must leave. Come back tomorrow.

First day, again, in Prague. Tourists milled along

the Charles Bridge. Street artists sold bent-wire earrings

and leather bracelets or offered in several languages

to cut our silhouettes. Fresh paint on the buildings

of Old Town Square, where lines snaked out of Pizza Hut.

We had to buy tickets and wait our turn

to file through the Jewish Cemetery, where once I’d wandered

full of grief. Bah, Zdenek growled. My city is not my city.

I don’t go down to the streets. Prague is for the Americans.

Next day I learned a little of the surveillance and hardship, those intervening years, during which, though I wrote, only once did they reply.        

—A photograph, black and white, of the three small children

singing—heads together, mouths stretched wide. No words

beyond Dear friends, be well, we wish 1974 a happy new year.

Years doing menial, ill-paid work. Then the Velvet Revolution, the completion of Zdenek’s film Funeral Ceremonies, which tied for Grand Prix at the Montreal World Film Festival. All was good, he said, the children were grown, two worked in film, one ran a restaurant, Elishka still preferred the country, kept sheep, knitted and wove, dried fruits, they were close, Zdenek said, though they mostly lived apart, yes, once this minor problem was solved, he would have an exhibition of his paintings, he would become head of the film school at the University of Prague.

I have left something awaiting you at the cabin,

Zdenek told me. Green, green, green, stylized trees

and a cloud, white houses, a lake—it was a painting,

I found it when we arrived at the cabin

propped on the table. The canvas was still wet

where he wrote my name, his name, the date.

Because he remembered

how much I loved his portraits of Elishka

that first winter night, how I asked him

to turn the other paintings from the desk and let me

see them, but he did not want to make a spectacle

and refused, now he had given me—me—a painting.

Elishka’s hair was grizzled now, her hands blunt and calloused, but in a heavy skirt and mud boots she was still the most magical woman I had ever seen. We hiked in the May forest, green

as the green in my painting, visited the sheep, washed in a vast stone tub that gushed freezing water. We drove to a nearby town, had stew at a restaurant, walked hundreds of steps up a hill to visit a church. In the mangled German and French that passed for language between us, Elishka said the steps were built so believers must suffer penance. Penance or no penance, beautiful as the church was once we finally arrived, I could barely haul myself up that hill. Next day, we did not eat, Elishka was so full of things to show us that she seemed not to think of food, but finally she made an apple and berry tart, which we fell upon much faster than good manners.

4

Elishka went to stay with her son, where Zdenek would recuperate, and we took a bus to Prague, to the apartment. The phone call came, late that night. We must leave on the six o’clock train

next morning, for the family would arrive, would need the space and privacy. On the operating table, Zdenek had suddenly died.

So abrupt, so unexplained. The night was endless

and too short. Peter held me as I cried

in the little trundle bed. Finally I slept,

but woke after an hour and went to sit by the window

looking down on dark Hybernska—the window,

I remembered, where Elishka had watched the tanks

invading Prague, so many years before. Light

began to touch the things in the room—the table,

Zdenek’s chair, the frayed rug and lace-edged pillows

where Peter still lay sleeping. Soon,

one last time, we would leave.

I would carry them home in my arms—

the painting

and the note he had left for the customs officials,

announcing that I might take this gift across the border—

To the memory of Zdenek Sirovy (1932-1995)

(Published in Literary Matters, 2019).

Interview

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Ann Fisher-Wirth, Poet, Scholar

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with your teaching career, which was successful and productive. For this, you’ve won several awards throughout the years. Having retired from the University of Mississippi in 2022, what did you enjoy most about being in class, how would you describe your pedagogical style, and in what way did all this influence the way you wrote?

AFW: My life as a teacher began in 1968, when my first husband and I moved to Liège, Belgium, to teach at the International School there. It was tiny: during the three years we were there, the school fluctuated between 35 and 60 students, with six teachers. At various times, I taught English, French, drama, fourth grade science, and girls’ volleyball to grades 4 through 10. I’d never had education courses, so I learned on the job. I loved it.

When we came back to California and entered Claremont Graduate School, I spent a year as a teacher’s assistant to a friend who taught first-grade EH classes in Azusa—also a great learning experience. Later, while working on my Ph.D., I was hired as a lecturer at Pomona College, to replace a professor on sabbatical, and then for two years as a lecturer at Scripps College. My first full-time job was at the University of La Verne; then, after finishing my degree, I became an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, and eventually moved with Peter, my second husband, to Oxford, Mississippi, where I spent 34 years teaching American literature to undergraduates in the Honors College; teaching poetry workshops and seminars in our MFA program; and creating, directing, and teaching in the Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies. During those years, I also had a Fulbright lectureship to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair appointment to Uppsala University, Sweden.

I feel very lucky to have had so many different teaching experiences. I loved working with students of all ages and many different backgrounds. My pedagogical style always emphasized a combination of lecture and discussion, and a combination of different kinds of writing assignments (nature journals, reading journals, essays, collaborative projects, and, of course, poems). I liked to teach graduate classes at our house, and undergraduate classes outdoors. I liked to take environmental studies classes on field trips to local farms and Magnolia Grove, the Zen Buddhist monastery founded by Thich Nhat Hanh which is near Oxford in Batesville, Mississippi. Also, since I taught yoga for many years at a studio in Oxford, I would lead classes in yoga nidra from time to time.

Until we came to Mississippi, I was not really writing poetry; my degree and first book are academic. Once I got tenure, suddenly I felt free to write what I wanted to write—I put aside the book on Willa Cather I was writing and began working on what became my first book of poems, published when I was already in my 50’s, Blue Window.

How did my teaching influence my poetry? That is not easy to answer, because they are so thoroughly intertwined; I’ve lived my whole life reading and loving poetry, and I taught it for many years. But one thing, I think, is that both motherhood and teaching taught me the importance of being clear. Also, teaching environmental literature led to and accompanied my writing ecopoetry. And, as William Carlos Williams (on whom I wrote my first book) insisted, there is nothing that cannot be included in poetry, so long as it is apprehended by the senses and revealed to be part of an ever-recurring permanence. My poetry grows out of my life, and for over fifty years, teaching was part of my life.

DG: For your fifth book, Mississippi, you collaborated with Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. What was the collaborative process like? Did you start with an image and then write ekphrastically or were there poems also written before any visual element was chosen?

AFW: Maude Schuyler Clay lives some distance away, in the Delta, but she and her husband come to Oxford fairly often for readings and parties. We would see each other and one or the other would say, “We ought to do something together sometime.” Eventually, we realized we’d better make it happen. So she started emailing me images she had made over the decades of her life as a photographer—images not of people, but of the land, the trees, abandoned buildings, odd objects like a glass bell jar or the taxidermied head of a wildcat—and as I looked at her photographs, stories would speak themselves through me. Though I’m not from the South, I had lived in Mississippi for over 20 years, but I didn’t feel I had the right to write in Mississippi voices until Maude’s photographs released them in me. That project was a great joy. Mississippi bears the legacy and scars of racial oppression, poverty, and environmental degradation, but it is also a beautiful state, and its oral culture is incredibly rich and varied.

DG: As a child, you lived in different places. Were those early years difficult experiences for you or was there perhaps also some feeling of adventure in the changes you witnessed?

AFW: My father stayed in the Army after World War II, until his retirement. I was born in Washington, D. C., lived in Germany until I was three, then Pennsylvania for five years, then Japan until his retirement in 1957, at which point we settled in Berkeley, California. Those early years were great, because even though we moved, and even though my father was in Korea during the Korean War, my mother was always there. Especially wonderful were all the experiences we had in Japan; my parents did not just stay on base, but took my little sister and me to see Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku plays; to visit shrines and temples, moss forests and gardens in Kyoto, Nara, Nikko, Karuizawa, Gora, and elsewhere; to see cormorant fishing, fireworks, and firefly displays; to eat at Japanese and Chinese restaurants and the so-called German Bakery in Yokohama; and to spend hours and hours at Mama’s Toy Store—my sister’s and my favorite—and the Tokyo antique stores that were our parents’ favorites. And I am glad we settled in Berkeley when I was ten, because being uprooted would have been more difficult as I became an adolescent.

DG: After those initial periods abroad you eventually settled in Berkeley, CA. Does your discovery of poetry begin there, in the Bay Area, or later in Pomona, where you embarked upon the university path?

AFW: My discovery of poetry began when I was a baby, when my mother made up a little rhyming song for me. But I became seriously enamored of poetry once I hit adolescence. I loved T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas—in particular, after reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I developed an ardent desire to marry Eliot and cheer him up. Then, at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School, I studied poetry in English from Chaucer to the present, and got a fantastic education I relied upon throughout my teaching career. (It was, however, lacking in women poets except for Emily Dickinson—only later did I discover Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Loise Glück, and so many others who have shaped poetry in our time.)

DG: Let’s stay with environment and talk about your Fulbright experiences. How would you describe your writing process in those periods, and more broadly, what did you learn traveling abroad when it was more your choice, as an adult, and less a necessity, during your childhood?

AFW: In 1994-1995, I had a Fulbright lectureship to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. My husband and our sons went with me, and I taught American literature, Southern literature, contemporary American poetry, and a course on Willa Cather to students who, though bright, friendly and wonderful, had very little sense of what I was talking about. We also had a group of students who met at our apartment to read plays. I loved everything about that year. I gave my first official poetry reading to faculty and students that spring, but I wrote very little poetry, and the publication of my first book, Blue Window, was still some years away.

Then, in 2002-2003, I was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair award to Uppsala University, Sweden. That year, I wrote my book Carta Marina, which was published in 2009. The Carta Marina, created by Olaus Magnus in 1539, is the first accurate map of the Nordic lands. It is a strange and wonderful thing, in which accurate renderings of countries’ sizes, borders, and land formations, and the surrounding seas, are nevertheless thronged with all sorts of phantasmagorical creatures like trolls and horned fishes, with Latin inscriptions describing what’s going on. I would go and sit on the floor in front of its glass case in the university library, the Carolina Rediviva, and write whatever came to mind inspired by its marvels. The book also became a sort of novel in poetry, as I wrote forward in time during a period in which my life underwent various sorts of upheaval and I didn’t know what the future would bring.

I could not begin to describe how my life has been enriched by traveling. When I lived in Belgium with my first husband, right out of college, we bought a VW van and drove all around Europe, camping, every chance we got. Years later, Peter and I and our sons—with our college-age daughters visiting—spent a school year surrounded by the phenomenal beauty of Switzerland, and then in Sweden, we discovered another beloved country. Since then, we’ve traveled in Costa Rica, Czech Republic, England, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Scotland. Last year the State Department under Trump canceled my Fulbright Specialist Award to lecture on ecopoetry in Turkey—another place I’d like to have seen. We have friends all over the world, and it is a great pleasure to continue our visits and adventures. Sometimes I try to decide what are my favorite countries, but the list just grows longer.

DG: From environment, I’ll shift towards the environment and talk about your work in this field. In 2006, you became thirteenth president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, formed in 1992. What is the mission of the organization and what did you do to promote it?

AFW: The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, known as ASLE, was founded in 1992 by a small group of scholars at all levels including undergrads, inside and outside the academy, whose work focused on the environment in literature and film, not just as background for human drama but as meaningful and important in itself. Since then it has grown to over 1000 members in the US, with affiliates in Canada, England/Ireland, Europe, Japan, India, Taiwan, and Australia/New Zealand. ASLE publishes a journal, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), runs a mentorship program for graduate students, and holds biennial as well as regional conferences. I was president in 2006 but I really didn’t have much to do because it was not a conference year. My main responsibilities were to issue the newsletter—which, at that time, was in print and required copious mailing at the post office—and to run the off-year leadership meeting. We held it by a lake and one night took a field trip to Graceland II, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Graceland II was a shrine to Elvis which was maintained by a man and his son with an Elvis haircut who—literally—saved every mention of Elvis on TV or in print, as well as a lot of his stage costumes, records, and other memorabilia including a jail cell with an electric chair to commemorate “Jailhouse Rock.” This freaked my colleagues out.

I have continued my involvement with ASLE all these years; it was central to my teaching and has brought me many friends and happy memories.

DG: Last year, you were appointed the poet laureate of Mississippi—a huge honor. What projects have you planned to bring poetry into the greater conversation of your community and to what extent will environmental awareness play a role in that?

AFW: I love being poet laureate and yes, it is a huge honor. It’s a four-year term, until 2029. So far, I’ve worked on three projects: the Mississippi Poetry Project, the Favorite Poem Podcast Project, and monthly creative writing workshops in Units 25 and 30 at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

At Parchman, I will be teaching poetry and/or life writing, which I have done several semesters in the past. For the podcast project, I asked 25 poets who live or lived in Mississippi each to choose a poem in the public domain and record (with me, either in person or on Zoom) a 15-minute podcast in which they read the poem and talked about it and its author. This has been wonderful; we’ve had Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hopkins, Margaret Walker, H.D., Marianne Moore, so far. But the biggest project is the Mississippi Poetry Project, which is an annual poetry contest for grades K-12 statewide. Students write poems to a prompt; this year, my prompt was to write about an experience they loved or an experience they hated in nature. The teachers choose the three best from each class and send them to me. I received over 350 poems, which I sent to volunteer judges who helped me choose winners at each grade level from among them. Then I put together a huge anthology with all the poems sent to me, it will published as a book, and there will be celebrations at next fall’s Mississippi Book Festival where the kids get to read and their families get to cheer for them.

We also just chose our first Mississippi Youth Poet Laureate as part of the nation-wide YPL program. So there’s a lot happening here, and the Mississippi Arts Commission and Mississippi Humanities Commission are both wonderful for all they do for literature and literacy in the state.

DG: You have talked about William Carlos Williams’s dictum of poetry as a tool for healing. In this capacity, you’ve co-edited, last year, with Laura-Gray Street, an ecopoetry anthology called Attached to the Living World, but this is so much more than a project about ecological awareness. It’s political. It’s social. It’s ultimately about challenging injustice. Could you talk about how you assembled the poems, the choice of the title, and anything else you might want readers to know about this work?

AFW: Attached to the Living World is actually the second ecopoetry anthology I coedited with Laura-Gray Street; the first was The Ecopoetry Anthology, published in 2013 with a third printing in 2020. Both anthologies are published by Trinity University Press. The first has 625 pages of US nature poetry from Whitman to around 1960, when the term “ecopoetry” came into general parlance, and ecopoetry from 1960 to about 2010; it includes an amazing long introduction by the poet Robert Hass, which contextualizes the poems in a number of different ways. The ensuing years just brought an ever-worsening environmental crisis, to which many poets are responding, so in 2023 Laura-Gray and I proposed a second volume, to contain poems written since 2010 by writers not in the first volume. This new anthology, half as long as the first, is remarkable for its diversity (we included some poets from other countries who had spent significant time in the US) and its passion. Both anthologies work brilliantly for use in schools and universities and have reached wide audiences among general readers as well. I can’t claim the title; it comes from a phrase by Melissa Ginsburg that we included, “So attached we are to living in the world.”

These days, so many poets in this country are trying to figure out what role we may play in a time of crisis—how we may speak against, or speak to, some of the injustice, destruction, and cruelty that we see enveloping the country, and also how we may celebrate what is beautiful in the world. We believe wholeheartedly that poetry, like all art, has the power to make us see and feel—and then, to make us live more abundantly and to bring about change. Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology is our offering.

DG: In addition to William Carlos Williams, you’ve named T.S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, and Robinson Jeffers as the biggest inspirations. If you could spend a day with only one of them, who would you choose?

AFW: Certainly T. S. Eliot has been a big inspiration for me, though I don’t share most of his beliefs and don’t write like him. I first discovered him in high school and inched my way through the book of his poems that my mother gave me for Christmas in 1964—now held together with duct tape and still one of my most cherished possessions. I discovered William Carlos Williams in graduate school and spent the next years writing my dissertation and then, revised, my book The Autobiographies of William Carlos Williams: The Woods of His Own Nature. Williams, who opposed Eliot in so many ways, completely expanded my views of poetry and its role and possibilities in contemporary life. One of the facts I love about Eliot and Williams is that they wrote some of their greatest poetry—Four Quartets and Pictures from Brueghel, especially “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”—in their older years. That is a great and heartening model for aging poets.

e. e. cummings was a poet I especially liked in high school, and Robinson Jeffers wrote a few great ecopoems, which I still return to. But the poets besides Eliot and Williams who have been the most important to me since adulthood would include John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Gary Snyder—others too many to say. And whom would I spend a day with? Hmm. Lucille Clifton.  

DG: Yoga has been a big part of your life. Are you still practicing the art and how does it influence your creative process?

AFW: I first started practicing yoga when I was a graduate student in Claremont, California, with three little kids, no money, a dissertation to write, a part-time lectureship, and a husband also in graduate school. Yoga gave me a quiet hour each week at the local rec center and confirmed a lot of the feelings and awareness I’d gained studying Eastern religions at Pomona College. I continued yoga classes a little bit in Charlottesville, then picked them up again once we moved to Mississippi. For a while I taught yoga in a converted railroad depot through the University of Mississippi’s Continuing Education, then, when Southern Star Yoga Studio opened, I was invited to teach there.

I stopped teaching yoga during the pandemic. I have both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, and these led to a hip replacement at the end of 2019. Then, in 2025, I had another hip replacement, which led to a broken hip and another hip replacement. During that whole grisly experience, yoga breathing sustained me. My physical yoga practice is limited now, but everything that yoga has brought me in the way of endurance and peace through both physical and emotional hardships has been at the center of my life and my poetry.

Author Bio:

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems, Paradise is Jagged, appeared from Terrapin Books in February 2023. Her sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Her fifth book, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). Her other books of poems are Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces, and the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. With Laura-Gray Street she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press early in 2013; a third edition appeared in January 2020. In 2025 Ann and Laura-Gray published Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.