When poetry tells of current events — this time it’s coronavirus - Press-Enterprise

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It may be difficult to get the news from poetry, but poetry is the journalism of the soul. That’s the thought that has sustained me through 15 years as a publisher.

Poems aren’t just pretty snippets of speech capturing the memorable moments of our lives — they’re harrowing reports from the front lines of the subconscious, that battleground of sensemaking at constant war with the complexity and chaos of existence itself. We’re a linguistic species, and poetry is the flaming forge where meaning is made; it’s the essence of what we are as humans.

It was no surprise that the aftermath of 9/11 brought a kind of poetic renaissance, with W.H. Auden’s WWII poem “September 1, 1939” finding its way into untold millions of email inboxes, and snippets of verse pinned to corkboards and taped in windows around the world. In the foreword to the “Poetry After 9/11” anthology, it’s said there was so much poetry written in New York that one fire chief had to plead: “Thank you for the food and blankets, but please — no more poetry.”

So it should be no surprise that COVID-19, a kind of slow-motion 9/11 hitting every town and city simultaneously, would bring an even larger wave of poems.

For the last six years, Rattle, the magazine I edit, has been publishing a weekly Poets Respond series, featuring verse-reactions to current events, and lately we’ve been receiving so many poems about the coronavirus pandemic that it’s difficult to read them all — well over 6,000 have come our way in the last two months, keeping me up but enthralled late into the night.

We’ve been publishing several each week online, and they’ve become a kind of journey around the world and through the heart of what we’re all facing.

It began on Feb. 23, with Anthony Tao’s six-part epic from Beijing, “Coronavirus in China,” following the virus as it moves through his city, through the streets and bedrooms, the Imperial Gardens, and finally through the inhabitants themselves, who end up masked from their own humanity. “We walked the streets like sorrowful ghosts,” it concludes. “With two fingers we rubbed our chest, / wondering what was missing.”

Reading the poem then felt like peering into our own future — a future that has now come to pass as we alter and limit the ways we encounter each other.

The poems kept coming.

March 1: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach of Philadelphia writes about her worries over flying to the annual AWP writing conference in San Antonio — two days later the decision was made not to cancel the massive conference, though many writers with similar concerns chose not to attend.

March 8: Sarah Dickenson Snyder (Vermont) shares a moving tribute to those glorious vectors of transmission, our hands.

March 12: Sherman Alexie’s “A Dispatch from Seattle,” his just then locked-down home, becomes the most-read poem in Rattle’s 25-year history, with over 70,000 shares on social media. Alexie wonders: “Maybe the true pandemic is/ immodesty.”

March 15: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (Colorado) comes up with the best metaphor for pandemic that I’ve read so far — it’s the distant rumble of an unstoppable avalanche.

March 17: Dorianne Laux (North Carolina) shares her vision of the coming dead: “The rich will be last,/ top of the pile as they were/ in life. Dressed in their finery./ Oh the ball gown shrouds./ The worthless pearls.”

March 28: Francesca Bell’s “Love in the Time of COVID-19” (Bay Area) becomes the second most-read poem in Rattle’s history, recounting her desperation to wash hard enough to protect her older husband. “I held my hands steady/ in the water’s reassuring scald,/ trying and trying/ to save you.”

April 4: Robert Wrigley (Idaho) pens a tribute to one of the first celebrities to die of Covid-19, jazz trumpeter Wallace Rooney. Wrigley plays records to a small bird perched outside his window. “Every time the song ends, I ask ‘Again?’/ and the bird just says zee, or whit, or wheep.”

April 5: Anthony Okpunor (Nigeria) reacts to the governor of Abia saying that the state will not record any coronavirus case because it was mentioned in the Bible.

April 19: Tashani Doshi (India) finds sweetness in a story about seven migrant men living in a tree to prevent the spread of the virus to their village. “My god, how this living is a hymn.”

Those are just a few highlights from over two dozen poems we’ve been able to publish about the pandemic this spring. Read them all or share your own at Rattle.com/respond. We also host a livestreaming open mic for poems about the news at 9 a.m. every Sunday on YouTube.

Timothy Green is the editor of Rattle and author of the book “American Fractal.” He lives in Wrightwood with his wife, Megan, and their two children. 

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When poetry tells of current events — this time it’s coronavirus - Press-Enterprise
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