13 July 20 Guest Poets: Poetry in Pandemic

What if only poetry will see us through? 

What if a poem is the vaccine already working inside us?

Poems can be safe spaces during a pandemic. Really, any writing will do the trick.

Isn’t it interesting that until today, no one in our circle of Wannaska Almanac writers has created a post on the COVID-19 Pandemic? I may be wrong, and if so, please correct me. So, when I was deciding who should be our “guest poet” for today’s poet, I happened across two poems that have taken on the subject in their poetry. After these two, I found more and more, plus commentary on poems written during this time of C19. Then more poems, and more, plus journals and letters and portraits and well, just about any form of writing one can think of. The New York Review of Books is even publishing an ongoing “Pandemic Journal” wherein they print entries from all over the world.

I have to ask myself, why we haven’t paid attention to this subject in our posts. Are we oblivious? Maybe with our relatively small number of COVID-19 cases in and around our rural county, the topic feels remote, perhaps, even irrelevant? Does fear come into play? It isn’t easy to write when your stomach is in knots. Maybe we have a false sense of security, i.e., the virus won’t hit us like it has the urban centers. Whatever our reasons, I’m challenging our group of writers to create a response to this post, if anyone is so inclined. This might just be the least we can do for ourselves and for our readers. I hope the two poems below inspire you.

Addressing a heavy rain of losses in the poem below, Kamilah Aisha Moon reminds us that individual voices, individual lives, must be accounted for in any reckoning we do; to hear them and come to know them in poems can provide enlightenment, solace, and strength for the ongoing fight we face on multiple fronts.

Storm

Night squall raging,

black branches

batter every window

as the sky lashes

the city. Without devices,

all I can do is shelter in place—

& wait the latest nightmare

out, find other sources

of power as I sit in the dark

save for a candle burning

for my mother writhing

in an ICU & for the world

to make it against all odds.

In every sense, I burn

in the unseen places, head

filling with smoke, each hour

lived in a dense haze.

Millions weather this

twenty-first-century unholy

Passover, homes

bereft & singed forever.

The unruly rich in charge

deign themselves

gods, maniacal &

merciless. Every warning

unheeded, no bona fide mark

of protection

this time, no choice

in the losses raining

almost everywhere.

Candlelight for two

is a date; I faintly

remember those.

Candlelight

alone

is a séance—

forgive me,

my dearly departed

for crying out

so often, for still needing you

so damn much.

Kamilah Aisha Moon

From: Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic

Edited by Alice Quinn

Knopf,  June 2020

How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?

by Julia Alvarez

Will the lines be six feet apart?

Will these hexameters be heroic like Homer’s?

(Will) (each) (word) (have) (to) (be) (masked) (?)

Will there be poetry insecurity?

Will there be enough poetry to go around?

Will poems be our preferred form of travel?

Will we undertake odysseys searching for Ithacas inside us?

Will poetry go viral?

Will its dis/ease infect us?

Will it help build up antibodies against indifference?

Will poems be the only safe spaces where we can gather together:

    enter their immense silences,
    see snakes slithering inside sestinas,
    listen to nightingales singing on the boughs of odes—
    hark! a lark in the terza rima,

    a hawk in a haiku?

What if only poetry will see us through?

What if this poem is the vaccine already working inside you?

April 27-May 8, 2020. Weybridge, Vermont

Background

Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017) and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013). She received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and she teaches at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Julia Alvarez was raised in the Dominican Republic but had to leave the country when she was 10 years old; her family had supported an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo, and then fled to Brooklyn, New York. The theme of being caught between two cultures can be found throughout Alvarez's work. She explored this in her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Her reading audience continued to grow with her second novel, In the Time of Butterflies, published in 1994. Several more acclaimed works of fiction have followed. She was born in 1950.

Exploration 1: What is K. A. Moon missing in Storm?

Exploration 2: Is it appropriate to use a humorous tone when writing about the pandemic as Alvarez has done?

Exploration 3: Consider the last two lines of the Alvarez poem. Reactions? Thoughts?

Exploration 4: Have you recently been writing about this moment? An essay? A letter or diary or journal?  We all need community at this point. We want windows to be opened and to see what each of us is feeling. We want a kind of touching that can ease our craving for cradling flesh.