Poets give voice to our collective experience during the pandemic
Washington state’s Stay Home/Stay Healthy order will remain in effect in some form for at least several more weeks. As people adapt to the new, temporary, normal, many of us our turning to the arts for diversion, comfort, or just a new perspective on the world.
KUOW’s Arts and Culture reporter Marcie Sillman talked with three poets about how they’re responding to the pandemic.
Claudia Castro Luna is Washington State’s Poet Laureate, now in her third year in that job. In March, she launched a statewide initiative called Poetry to Lean On, soliciting poems that she’s posting online. The project was scheduled to run through April, National Poetry Month, but Castro Luna may extend it.
As far as her own writing, Castro Luna says she and her three live-at-home teenagers have started a family pandemic blog. She posts short poems there, inspired by her daily life.
This one is untitled:
Spring knows nothing of Corona Virus
she heeds only its seasonal north
on my walk this afternoon, daffodils lined garden borders,
sprouted between rocks, clumped cheerfully around tree trunks their buttery faces, absent bread and jam, waved innocently like the hand of a lucky toddler looking at the world
behind the windowpane of a happy home
Seattle Civic Poet Jourdan Imani Keith has been writing, but says she doesn’t have the bandwidth to do any serious editing or revisions. Keith turns to work by other poets she loves: Ntozake Shange, Rumi, even biblical King Solomon. One of her poems that resonates is called “Sound of Seeds,” written in 2010:
listening to the same CD over and over again
the sound of silver
spinning notes into the cooled office air
is the closest thing I can find
to ocean now. repetition is necessary for safety
the waves laughing and breaking at regular intervals hush
the sound of sand being pulled under. life always comes in pairs.
two by two, joy and disaster. Maybe disaster isn’t.
we are just not use to the sound of seeds breaking.
death puts our ears so close to the soil.
the brown earth has gotten rich with the bodies and bones
of eyes that hunted through the night
before regurgitating sound into the stars. Gravity has so many meanings, without it my feet would not make it to your door.
Former State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen has been reading other people’s poems, finding comfort in particular in work that reminds her of the resilience of nature, and the human spirit. She finds poetic inspiration in her daily walks:
March
every mouth a cove a cave a controversy
on our coat buttons and phones
we carried out of winter unaware
seeds of spring’s invisible bloom
nonetheless house finches bathe in the flooded flowerpot
plum trees publish daily reports of unredacted enthusiasm
and the little free library stays open all night
