Poetry for a Pandemic

Correction [06.10.21]:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected from the print version in this electronic version.

If Wallace Stevens were alive today, he might well write "Seventeen Ways of Looking at a Pandemic," the additions to his baker's dozen for viewing blackbirds being for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse–sword, famine, wild beasts, plague. Alice Quinn, editor of the anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness (2020), gives us eighty-five views, or more precisely eighty-five American poets looking at how the COVID-19 virus has changed our lives. The title is drawn from Pablo Neruda's poem "Keeping Quiet." "The poems in this anthology were gathered quickly," Quinn says in her introduction, "within forty days, beginning March 27." The pandemic and the developing protocols were still very much "a sudden strangeness" to us all at that time, so the poems look and feel like fresh prints in unmarked snow. By necessity, they were made more of first impressions, imagination, and discovery than of knowing. And looking out the window offered by each poet/poem, we can see tracks leading away, approaching, circling, all impressions of our own uncertainty. For all their diversity of form, focus, objective, and personality, each poem feels alive and wrestling toward some as yet out of reach understanding. It seems akin to the research into the COVID virus that we read about so hopefully in the news. The scientists, like poets, begin in observation and arrive at conclusions that nonetheless often pose more questions than answers.

Good writing is often characterized as making the ordinary extraordinary. And while the writing here is consistently fine, many of the anthology's poems strive to express a longing for the ordinary to again be ordinary, or as least the way our lives were. "I want to go back to who I was," pleads Dennis Nurkse, in "Conversation Behind the White Curtain." "The house with a beehive in the pines, / the brook breaking all night over stones. / ... I want to go back to being a body. A voice with eyes."

Similarly, in John Freeman's "Cards," a man calls his wife to a window to "see a couple across the way / playing cards at their dinner table." Watching, he envies their casualness, their contentment, the seeming ordinariness of their lives; "oh, I see them most nights" his wife tells him. "They / eat dinner and then move over to play cards. They laugh / and laugh."

In Joshua Bennett's "Dad Poem," a father-to-be is deprived of the always extraordinary yet ordinary experience of seeing your tadpole-sized child's first sonogram image. "But I'm the father," he insists, when a nurse bars him from following his wife to the examination room, saying "No visitors allowed." Alone, he appeals to his as yet unborn child, "What can I be to you now / smallest one, across the expanse / of category & world catastrophe, / what love persists / in a time without touch."

In "The End of Poetry," Ada Limón also acknowledges the absence of touch as a characteristic of our pandemic lifestyle. There is perhaps a hint of Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much with Us," in the twenty lines in which she inventories the earnest but inadequate ways we try to occupy or distract ourselves from our sheltered-in lives. Seventeen times she cries, "Enough," in response to all the efforts to evade boredom and the frustration of experiencing too much closeness and remoteness at the same time. Even language, or perhaps especially language, fails to get at the problem, until, in line twenty-one, she asserts: "I am asking you to touch me."

In the villanelle "In My Heart I Cannot Accept it All," Susan Kinsolving advances and defends the idea that we can and must restore the ordinary to the ordinary. "Forgive yourself for thinking small // ... it's the little stuff that brings delight: / a book, a drink. Keep thinking...