It’s the sort of glorious May morning, the end of the spring term, on which poet and UC Berkeley lecturer John Shoptaw might urge his students to get outside and aim their faces toward the sun rather than the gloomy glow of screens. As if to underscore the point, he’s joined our online interview from his Berkeley home, framed by a curtainless picture window, beyond which is all leaves and light and shadows. It’s the sort of scene that might inspire a line of verse, maybe this—“A shade looks into its shadow | as you do into a mirror | and longs to immerse itself | in it, as you would in a lake.”
That’s from the poem “A Tree’s Shade Speaks of its Shadow” in his 2024 collection, Near Earth Object, which his former student—writer and artist Jenny Odell ’08—has joined the call to discuss. Her books, How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, make a similar case about the perils of always being plugged in. (Asked if we might extend the interview if necessary beyond the planned hour, she politely but firmly demurs. On a day like this a bike ride beckons, she says.)
The relationship between these two reflects a particular Bay Area affinity—one that exists in pointed opposition to Silicon Valley. Both are close observers of the natural environment, particularly birds. “And in the meantime, as I kept watching the sanderlings with a pleasure I truly cannot explain, I heard a response to my own juvenile question, For what reason should I go on?” Odell writes in the foreword to Near Earth Object, which also appears in The Paris Review. “The answer is in the very first line of this book. For the birds.”
The two writers espouse attention to place as an antidote to technology’s relentless drive. Shoptaw, a native of the “Swampeast Mississippi” floodplain who found his way to Berkeley via Harvard and a career pivot from physics to poetry, has made it a point to learn Bay Area rhythms, daily and otherwise—morning fog, afternoon breezes, the ever ominous dry season that marks California time. Odell, who grew up in Cupertino and watched the tech industry bloom around her childhood stomping grounds, has made a career of articulating the dissonance between the region’s natural beauty and technological fanaticism.
The conversation between these teacher-student-turned-artistic-contemporaries, was rooted in Shoptaw’s most recent poetry collection—with explorations into art’s purpose in times of crisis, the nature of belief and founding mythology, and what it means to pay attention in an age of hyperdistraction.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Poverty is a word that contains the word poetry, but also makes poetry impossible.
John Shoptaw
You both work as artists in proximity to Silicon Valley. What’s it like to create work in that environment?
John Shoptaw: For me, the one tragic flaw in tech’s version of reality is that it’s disembodied. I find this most recently with AI, which I counter with the actual intelligence of poetry and of the art world, which is very much embodied, physically and environmentally.
Jenny Odell: One of my motivations for trying to combine a critique of the attention economy with a discussion of bioregionalism in How to Do Nothing was my lived experience of the dissonance between these amazing hills and mountains —ecologically remarkable and beautiful places—and then at the same time, the beginnings of this [tech] industry.
Why poetry as a vocation in the first place?
Shoptaw: Part of my upbringing delayed my entry into this world—I grew up in poverty. Poverty is a word that contains the word poetry, but also makes poetry impossible. No one goes into poetry from poverty. What people do is make a living. A living is different from a calling, which is what a vocation is.
My degree is in physics, and I just felt something was missing there, that it was not engaging me as fully and completely as a human. I was very much drawn to science and to mathematics, and I thought I was going to be a physicist. That’s the world I left in order to join the poetry world.
How is poetry useful as a container for anger and sadness about environmental destruction?
Odell: In Saving Time I use the metaphor of really dry, compacted soil to describe the attitude of a person who’s overtaken by cynicism or despair—and with a trowel and some water and a little bit of time, maybe something can grow here again. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to do in the book. Oftentimes poetic language is the only thing adequate. There are feelings that are not going to be acknowledged by, say, a standard nonfiction book about solutions—or even worse, about how we’re all doomed.
Poetry is this reminder of what language could be or ought to be. It’s something alive.
Shoptaw: Jenny’s work is not didactic, neither is mine, but it is moving. We are meant to at least unsettle people. The phrase I came up with is reaching people without preaching to them. Jenny does it by learning on the page, not being a know-it-all. That’s what I’m often looking for—putting myself in a position of not knowing everything and learning as I go.
You might think of Saving Time as a kind of environmental writing. Toward the end of Saving Time, Jenny reaches a very emotional impasse where she knows something about an endangered species—the purple ochre sea star—and thinks we’re in this gap called the present: We are still free to believe or disbelieve, to doubt that everything is over, and to hope in the possibility of such wonderful creatures as the sea star continuing.
Speaking of learning as you go, you both work with students. What are you trying to do in the classroom?
Shoptaw: Teach them humility. If you’re reading [Emily] Dickinson, understand that you may love Dickinson, but Dickinson has her own ideas and ways of proceeding that are not yours. Poetry will not mean whatever you want it to mean.
Odell: I actually don’t teach anymore. But I did teach for eight years at Stanford. I was doing digital art classes. Because I was teaching non-art majors, typically, and often students from outside the humanities, I had to do work around what art is, what it means to make a piece of art. What I was really trying to go for was a sense of experimentation—like art as research. So you have a question and then you make this piece in an attempt to sort of answer it—which you don’t. But you’re going in that direction, and the making of that piece, or the piece itself, tells you something about that question. So you go back to the question and you do it again. It’s like this almost spiral motion.
I found that really gratifying and I think some of the students also found it gratifying, particularly because of what I observed to be the culture there at that time, which was very performance-based, perfectionist.
It is true that people feel powerless and alienated. There’s some truth to the discontent, but it’s being funneled into this extremely self-defeating kind of pathway.
Jenny Odell
Do you see your students grappling with nihilism (or a crisis of meaning)—and how, if at all, can poetry help?
Shoptaw: [Students] have two responses to the critical situation: One is despair—going into this kind of recoil. And the other is a radical response—a total revamping, total reorganizing of everything. Radical really means not rooting but uprooting. It means eradicating. It’s radical in that there’s no creative side of it. It’s just saying, no, get rid of this.
I’m just trying to help them get through the life or the semester in which I find them. It’s amazing how critical it has been with some of these students.
One thing I came to an understanding of—reading the end of Jenny’s Saving Time in which we don’t reach complete salvation—was the word impurity. And you know, when Jenny talks about the perfectionist, I want to say, you don’t have to be perfect here. You’re still writing drafts, you’re still drafting papers. It doesn’t have to be all there, and you don’t have to have everything in mind.
For me, creativity is not about purity but impurity.
John, a few of your poems engage with the creation stories from Genesis. What’s your relationship to those stories and to myth in general?
Shoptaw: When I teach ecopoetry, I start with the book of Genesis. The creation story gives us two models of beginning: One is the model of dominion, where humans are in charge of everything—it’s all ours for the taking. The other model is a garden for us to dress and keep. This keeping has to do with stewardship, nurture, and also guardianship. And I feel this is one thing that poetry has now that it didn’t have before: the purpose of advocacy, really caring for something. And both of these models—the ecopoetic model and the anthropocentric model—come out of Genesis for me.
I would say that one basic myth in American history is sacrifice and resurrection. That would go back to [Abraham] Lincoln, as the person who died for us and for the rebirth of the nation, a nation including abolition.
Then you have counter-myth: The South shall rise again. You have the pretender, the false populist, the false man of the people. The last poem in Near-Earth Object is called “Whoa!” where we have the myth of the sun taking the sun god’s chariot for a day and trying to hold onto the reins, which the sun was not capable of doing and [led] to a downfall and near-catastrophe for the Earth.
When I wrote that poem, I very much had [Donald] Trump in mind. When Trump first came upon the scene, he and his family came down an escalator as though gods coming down to impart their wisdom and generosity and their great wealth to the people, to the mere mortals below. My poem begins with this strange young man in a somewhat dreamlike sequence coming up an escalator. But there’s no down escalator. He gets on it, and it starts moving. He says, “Now this is first class. No stepping required.” For me, that’s the essence of the Trump presidency.
Do you find it getting harder to engage publicly with these political and social themes?
Odell: Not for me personally, other than the sort of psychological warfare every day, just reading the news. But I do have a book coming out in 2028 that’s hard to write because I don’t know what things are going to be like. Just from the research perspective, I feel like things are being pulled out from under me. The ground is shifting a lot. Every day I have to wake up and look around like, “okay, this is the lay of the land right now.”
Shoptaw: Jenny, I feel your project now is in competition with this alternate imagination of “great again.” The words you use—repair, restore, research—they all have the prefix “re,” which means “again,” and you have this alternate idea of “again.” We just had this presidential contest of self-aggrandizement and care—dominion and reaching out, caring, restoring, repairing, not making good as new, but finding, you know, the next best thing, the next way on. It seems like that’s the alternative you’re presenting us.
Odell: I am trying to offer an alternative version of repair, but also a competing answer to a sense of alienation that I think has been exploited politically. It is true that people feel powerless and alienated. There’s some truth to the discontent, but it’s being funneled into this extremely self-defeating kind of pathway. I’m trying to channel it towards what would actually be de-alienating, which is some sense of responsibility and involvement in one’s environment and community.
Shoptaw: We need to get beyond “no” to “yes.” We need to find a way in our work to say yes. We need to find a way beyond resistance. Resistance is “no,” and there are times when we need to say no. But ultimately, you need to move toward yes—what do we have to offer?
One of the poems (“Back Here”) in my book Near Earth Object looks backward but also forward because I really do want to make alliances with people. I just want to get beyond polarization and say, wait a minute. We really have so much more in common. And if I can find them there, then I can move them.
John’s poem “Back Here” explores perspective on belief, change, and climate. I’m thinking of lines like, “We believe things were meant for the best. / They just didn’t work out that way. / Still, back here, we live in affirmation. / Like you do. In fear and affirmation. / Naturally, we’ll do what we can. / Only please, don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.” Can you talk about that?
Odell: I noticed, more than the first time I read [“Back Here”], the idea of climate being in the lines. John, you said earlier, a person really is so inextricable from the place where they are and from the culture where they are. I think about where my parents live—they live in Morgan Hill, in a purple area. They’re kind of right on the edge of maybe what would be considered the Bay area. And it starts to get very patchy over there, and if you keep going, then you’re solidly in a Trump area. But if you actually go there and you drive around and you have geographical context, you understand this has to do with a rural way of life, right? These are people with ranches who have obviously chosen that for a reason.
It seems so similar to me to the way ecological communities work, where there are boundaries to things. They’re never hard boundaries—there’s also things like hybrid environments or hybrid species and things that really complicate that boundary. But you can’t simply have something grow in a place where it can’t grow. You can’t just plop something into a completely different context and expect it to survive. I think it’s pretty clear in How to Do Nothing that my model of an individual is very ecological. I do believe in a self, but it is in constant dialogue with its environment. And so that demand or that statement at the end of the poem, that is the reality of what it means to be a person in a place with beliefs.
Shoptaw: I love what you said, Jenny, about soft edges. In environmentalism they call it the ecotone [the transitional area between two plant communities].
Odell: Maybe there are political ecotones that can be exploited.
Shoptaw: Changing people without asking for complete conversion. We’re not going to be completely anti-capitalist and give up capitalism to fight climate change. We’re not going to reach absolute zero [emissions], but we can reach net zero. And that for me is, that’s the impurity that’s the next best thing to paradise.
Geoff Koch is a writer and poet in Portland.
