Fisherpoets: Confronting Climate Crisis through Art and Work

Every February, hundreds of people gather in Astoria, Oregon to hear the performances of “fisherpoets”: people working in the commercial fishing industry who write and share poetry about their work and lives. These fisherpoets include commercial fishermen spanning the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. They write of the dangers of the fishing industry, of loss and grief, of nature, and of strenuous labor. While the Fisherpoets Gathering has been held in Astoria since 1997, preliminary data have shown that the cultural significance of the gathering, and fishermen’s cultural production, have evolved amid the context of escalating climate crisis. Today, commercial fishing is both blamed for and affected by climate change. This duality leads to commercial fishermen being portrayed as blights on the environment, when in fact many fishermen perceive themselves as fierce advocates for the ecosystems that comprise their livelihoods. In this paper presentation, I will share observations from my in-progress ethnographic and interview-based study of this community of fisherpoets. I will explore the social side of the climate crisis by demonstrating how, when, and why commercial fishermen employ artmaking and storytelling to make sense of climate change and create political pressure for sustainable fisheries. My preliminary findings suggest that many fisherpoets engage in resistance through artmaking on a variety of fronts. So far, four themes have emerged from the data: resistance to loss, resistance to erasure, resistance to climate change, and resistance to gender roles. Sociologist Rebecca Elliott (2018) frames the sociology of climate crisis as a “sociology of loss.” This paper seeks to make space for the complexity of loss—cultural loss, ecological knowledge loss, material and environmental loss—while also documenting the individual and community practices that resist this erasure.