Poets take on the pandemic in anthology
What are poets for? One answer arrives in Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” when satirical poet Baal comments that “a poet’s work” is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
If this is our measure, then editor Alice Quinn’s COVID-era anthology, “Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic” (184 pages, Alfred A. Knopf,
$27), falters on every front. This lukewarm book, largely uncompromised by alert feelings, political insight, wit, striking intellect or lightning of any variety, is — to borrow a slab of Orwell’s Newspeak — doubleplus ungood.
Quinn, who was the poetry editor of the New Yorker for many years, has good feelers, except when they fail her, as they do here. She compiled and published this anthology as an ebook in the spring, shortly after lockdown began. She has revised it now for a print edition, adding 22 poems.
Much of the tepid free verse is about flowers. Or birds. Or trees. Harold Ross, when he edited the New Yorker, was wise to rage against tree poems.
Three poems talk about senior hours at the supermarket. Others consider Netflix, pesto, almond tarts, tidying up the pantry, going for a drive, owning six boxes of penne that is gluten-free. “Free the Glutens!” was Tom Waits’ memorable chant. “They’ve never had a country of their own.”
A few of these poems evoke the realities of blue- collar life, but mostly they’ve been written as if by comfortable indoor cats.
Sarah Arvio, in a poem called “Crown Prayer,” listens to birdsong, mentally blesses delivery boys and girls, and utters an insight for the ages: “from day to day there’s no certainty / of another day / though this has always
been true / from the beginning of life.”
Rick Barot, in a different pseud’s corner, writes: “During the pandemic, I noticed the pencils.” His poem goes nowhere good from there.
Nathalie Handal’s “Voyages”
is made up of verses like “be certain of your direction / your heart knows the road” and “always be kind to / the healing earth.”
Marin’s Jane Hirshfield writes about rescuing an ant. Stephanie Burt’s washing machine breaks down. Elizabeth J. Coleman, in the kitchen, posts this update on her internal Slack channel: “I hadn’t thought about how an orange is a miniature / replica of our planet until that afternoon.” Because both are round.
Wild is the wind, in Rigoberto Gonzalez’s poem, “Desert Lily.” He writes: “The wind arrives not because it’s called / but because it’s forgotten.” This arrives on Page 46, which is about the place where many readers will gently set this book aside, hitch a mask up over the ears and leap out the window.
The pandemic has taken a toll on everyone, writers included; malaise is widespread, omnidirectional, multilayered. But because one’s body is not as free as it was, does it follow that the mind should be so fettered as well? The best poems in “Together in a Sudden Strangeness” speak from unusual promontories.
Danielle Chapman’s “The New