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Collaborative Writing and the Poetics of the Occasion: The Pandemic Sonnets of Cindy Tran and Craig Santos Perez

Laura T. Smith

Abstract

During the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, writers turned to the practice of sonnet-writing to connect with others, stem isolation, and take stock of the multiple crises presented by the pandemic and its complex social contexts. This essay examines two collaboratively written pandemic sonnet projects, The Poetry Society of New York’s May Day 2020 crown and Cindy Tran’s Sonnet Crown for NYC, along with the pandemic eco-sonnets of Craig Santos Perez. These pandemic sonnets articulate our complexly connected identities while highlighting the pandemic sonnet’s capacities for meditating on and interrogating our expanding webs of connection. As collaborative writing projects and works of occasional poetry, these pandemic sonnet projects reposition the sonnet in contemporary American poetics as a social and socially-embedded practice, linking contemporary sonnet practice to the highly social poetic exchanges associated with the sonnet from its earliest roots. 

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1It has long been a commonplace to see the sonnet as a solitary form for “turning inward” and meditating on the individual self (Oppenheimer 1989: 3-4). Despite the many developments in the sonnet tradition, especially in the twentieth century, Stephen Regan can still fundamentally characterize the form as “an intense kind of verse soliloquy” (Regan 2019: 3). During the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, however, perhaps due to the broad familiarity of the form and its clear structure, a number of writers turned to the sonnet to reach outward, connect with others, stem isolation, and take stock of the multiple crises presented by the pandemic and its complex social contexts. Cindy Tran’s Sonnet Crown for NYC,1 a sonnet redoublé and accompanying 23-minute film, for example, was generated from interviews she undertook with New York City small business owners who discussed with the poet their lives and experiences during the pandemic. As each of the connected sonnets repeats and augments others’ lines, as required by the sonnet redoublé form, the poems highlight the interconnectedness, contingency, and collaboration that characterized both the project and its pandemic context.

2Tran’s sonnet crown is just one of a number of collaborative pandemic sonnet projects, including the Poetry Society of New York’s May Day 2020 crown,2 which involved 103 pairs of writers, often strangers, who “went line for line and sent it back and forth” (Belew 2023), adapting a correspondence-based method for collaborative sonnet writing. This essay examines such collaborations in relation to another site of the pandemic sonnet—the 2020 eco-sonnets of Craig Santos Perez. Perez’s individually-authored sonnets examine connectedness through an ecological lens, highlighting the complex systems through which our pandemic safety measures (single-use plastics, sanitizer, bleach) simultaneously spell environmental disaster. The pandemic sonnet practices of Tran, Perez, and the May Day Crown’s authors articulate our complexly connected identities—including those “multicultural, multilingual, transnational identities” (Malech and Smith 2023: 3) we see frequently in American sonnets—while highlighting the pandemic sonnet’s capacities for meditating on and interrogating our expanding webs of connection. As collaborative writing projects and works of explicitly occasional poetry, these pandemic sonnets resituate the sonnet in contemporary poetics as a deeply social and socially-embedded practice, linking contemporary sonnet practice—and lyric practice—to the highly social poetic exchanges associated with the sonnet from its earliest roots.

Sonnet as Dialogue, Pandemic as Occasion

3We think of the sonnet as an internalized, introspective form in part because of the way the sonnet evolved out of troubadour song: in his classic formulation, Paul Oppenheimer writes that in the sonnet, the sonneteer does not address his complaint outward, but “discovers… the way out of his predicament … through a process of dialectical self-confrontation” (1982: 299). From their earliest roots, however, sonnets are also associated with dialogue and exchange; in the tenzone tradition originating in the 13th century, sonnets are exchanged in poetic conversations, often competitively as literary duels that ranged widely to include subjects of philosophical, literary, political, and aesthetic interest (Kleinhenz 2011: 83). Christopher Kleinhenz explains, “What motivated the earliest Italian poets to write, or, better, to initiate, a tenzone? It seems clear that the motivating factor was the desire to communicate, to enter into a conversation with other poets on matters and issues that were deemed important” (2011: 85). While the tenzone tradition is heavily associated with poetic sparring, its uses extend across the tradition into a wide range of affective and relational spaces. Fabian Alfie documents a fifteenth-century tenzone exchange between Christian and Jewish poets, directly engaging their religious and cultural differences to praise each other and affirm their friendship, illustrating the broader social uses of tenzone (Alfie 2003: 96).

4As primarily occasional poetry, “the tenzone is usually considered a minor genre” (Kleinhenz 2011: 105), and often not counted among the major works of a given poet. Occasional poems are frequently thought to have lesser value and to be fraught with “hopelessly inextricable relations on one hand and a moral, philosophical inferiority and parasitism on the other” (Sugano 1992: 4) due to the “incessant demand for compositions” within court contexts and patronage systems (Eggertsdóttir 2014: 291). Yet Marian Sugano reminds us that much occasional poetry took the form of poems exchanged in letters, written within circles: “the other face of the occasional” is “verse written in a lighter vein, not for the public at large but for a private circle of friends or lovers, a poetry commemorating birthdays, containing invitations, expressing condolences, offering gifts, and so on” (1992: 5).

5The pandemic poetry projects I examine in this essay return us to this sense of poetry's occasionality, embedded in communities of practice and relationships of writerly exchange. The New York Poetry Society May Day 2020 Sonnet Crown, for example, arose from member Kate Belew’s Pandemic Poems, itself a correspondence-based practice created among isolated coworkers and friends during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Belew’s project established a method of writing dialogically: “going line for line. …each poem traveled back and forth between partners until it was complete” (Belew). Belew explains that the dialogic process may have come to mind as “my take on the Exquisite Corpse party game of the Surrealists,” but primarily served an emotional function: “I was honestly just really lonely and afraid and wanted to make poems with my friends” (Belew 2024). The practice allowed participants “to create with little pressure or expectation, except to remind one another that none of us are alone” (Emery). Belew’s Pandemic Poems was explicitly occasional, the project title denoting impetus, recurrent subject, and constraint. On the website, Belew writes, “I started to write with other friends, and my friends took the project into their own worlds too. Suddenly, I was creating poems with people I had never met before through my e-mail address. Maybe poetry is quicker than cells multiplying, and maybe it’s a remedy in itself” (Belew).

6The Pandemic Poems of Belew and her collaborators introduced the hallmarks of the collaborative, correspondence-based writing practice that the Poetry Society of New York adopted for the authors of its May Day 2020 Sonnet Crown, a day-long experiment through which participants around the world were recruited via Instagram and Twitter and paired up “to collaborate on a series of Pandemic Poems” (Poetry Society of New York), again gesturing toward the explicitly occasional nature of the experiment.

Figure 1. The Poetry Society of New York Instagram Post, April 20, 2020

Figure 1. The Poetry Society of New York Instagram Post, April 20, 2020

7While pairs could interpret the sonnet’s formal constraints as they desired, all were given a first line and a last line, drawn from Belew’s earlier Pandemic Poems, along with the explicit instruction to write dialogically, sending the poem back and forth between collaborators through the 24-hour writing period. The resulting poems were assembled into a linked crown of 103 sonnets. The process and the crown form underline the project’s ethos: according to Belew, “We never really make anything alone” (Belew 2024).

8“The poems of the May Day 2020 Crown frequently reference the specificities of their writing—the pandemic, New York geographies, the grief and uncertainty that characterized the period of the early pandemic—but there is also a sense of seeking to overcome isolation, of reaching toward a “we,” of touch and the future. Here is, in full, the 103rd and final sonnet in the May Day Crown, written by New Yorkers Alexis Wanzell and Nicholas Adamski:

and here is the window and here is the door
a choice between touching clouds or resenting their altitude 
between busting them with our minds or lying on our backs in the long grass, playing that game with the shapes, that one
it's a witty puzzle, where they all exist on the same playing field though will never truly fit together,
unless we sink into a deeper kind of silence, of listening, and touch the ground in a way that teaches us to
see ourselves in skies that feel too out of reach
and to remember that every shape that exists is constantly shifting, changing into some other form, the only difference is speed
And we start to find grace in our pace, in each phase of the evolution that defines the mass of our silhouettes
What joy, to feel the weight of this shadow, to stand between the sun and the earth, to exist
As the intersection between certainty and surrender 
to remember the mud and that time, by the stream, in the springtime, when the bank gave way beneath you, and you fell,
and you sunk to depths that have been waiting to show you a new surface,
to help us lift this veil and finally with luck we’ll trim these sails,
for there are stranger seas ahead, my dear, and I have seen them.
(Poetry Society 2020)

9The poem begins by marking the immediate, interior landscape, “the window” and “the door” (1), and also indicating ways out, toward the outside of the home or the self or pandemic time. This outside looks like “touching clouds” or “playing that game with the shapes” (2-3), which are blending and blurring here, “constantly shifting” (7), pointing toward uncertainty, possibility, and liminality, but also peace: “a deeper kind of silence” (5). At the start of the sestet, the speaker says, “What joy…to exist/as the intersection between certainty and surrender” (9-10). Until the final four words of the sonnet when an “I” emerges, the speaker has spoken in the voice of an undefined “we”; in the sestet, the plural speaker addresses a “you” who exists in both memory and in a hoped-for future: “finally with luck we’ll trim these sails” (13).

10This poem, like many of the crown, exhibits attributes of what is frequently called an American sonnet—often seen as a looser version of the form that deviates while building upon, referencing, or dialoguing with the European tradition. Wanzell and Adamski’s long-lined sonnet follows in the model of long-lined, maximalist American sonnets by Robert Hayden, Lyn Hejinian, and Diane Seuss, but still features a clear division between octave and sestet and a notable volta. And in keeping with the constraints of a sonnet crown, which demands that each poem begin with the last line of the previous sonnet, the 103rd sonnet opens with the 102nd’s last line.

11In addition to “we” and “you” voices, the 103 poems in the May Day Crown are full of questions: “We question if our roof hen is legal/if the compost we hide in black bags will return to elements/or become conscious, a landfill of people (“71. Allison Sylvia + Bernadette McComish”). “Is that/shock gone now too, home blending so tightly into everyone?/ I’m cold. Are you cold? (“59. Yasmine Chokrane + Theresa Senato Edwards”). “Will the truths of isolation bring us to wake fully one day?/Or will we bury them in history?” (“28. Asa Johnson + Lydia Binotto”). The questions are domestic and existential, and they speak explicitly to shared pandemic concerns using a voice that slips between a lyric “I” and a collective, lyric “we.” While the “we” here may be a specific symptom of the collaborative writing process, it evokes the same “inclusive we” that Christopher Spaide describes as characterizing much twentieth and twenty-first century poetry as poets aim to “open up the lyric, that genre of solitude, and speak with others, for others, using an ever-shifting plural pronoun.” He argues that “an inclusive ‘we’—accommodating and even cherishing difference…has become a mainstay of public poems” (2020: 93).

12In the context of this sonnet, the “we” additionally speaks from a collaborative writing situation, binding together writers who are, in most cases for the May Day Crown, strangers, bound together by the confines of the project and their experiences of the pandemic, common or disparate. Lorraine York, in her study of collaborative writing, emphasizes the “writerly-readerly dynamic” (2002: 137) of the collaborative writing relationship, as authors switch between writing and waiting, particularly in turn-taking poetic forms such as renga, or in the “going line for line” method of these sonnets. York notes the risk and responsibility of negotiating between individual writers and transforming the often private space of writing into a more public space of collaboration: collaborative poetry “is an art form that posits encounter as a necessary given” (2002: 133, quoting Michelut 112). In his essay on renga circles in contemporary Japan, David Lanoue further notes that “When renku poets collaborate—quieting the clamoring inner voices of ego to hear and welcome the voices of others around the writing table—something similar to the miracle of Izanagi and Izanami occurs,” referencing the Japanese creation myth in which the birth of the Japanese islands is “not the product of a solitary Creator” but of a creative duo (Lanoue 2021: 37).

13For the May Day Crown writers, the slippage between “I” and “we” includes York’s sense of “encounter” as well as Spaide’s “speak[ing] with others, for others,” as the writing pair reaches beyond the individual through the lens of the occasional. In an interview with the Library of Congress, former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Philipe Herrera, a strong advocate of the capacities of the oft-derided occasional poem, states that it “is the place where we all can meet—to offer our words, the news, and the heart of our lives—in a time of crises.” Herrera suggests that it is at those difficult places and times where “we hesitate to truly meet each other” where “we must labor—even against our hardened views—to find our larger self.”

14Herrera’s insight here comes partly from his particular widening of the poetics of the occasion beyond the poetry of the official commission or ceremonial context. Rather, Herrera’s notion of poetry’s occasionality seems to include any response to crisis that reaches outward toward others, toward a “larger self.” This sense of the occasional prioritizes poetry’s rhetoricity. Sugano invokes a similar distinction in her discussion of occasionality, noting a transformation at the end of the patronage system as “the impetus to write occasional poetry was no longer predominantly external but internal, and consequently the notion of the occasion became so blurred as to be confused with mere lyric impulse” (1992: 9). Reasserting and reframing occasional poetry in this way speaks to contemporary concerns about poetry’s lyricization; the rhetoricity of occasionality pushes against poetry’s genre collapse into that “music that could no longer be heard, an idea of poetry characterized by a lost collective experience (Jackson 2012: 827).

15Herrera’s sense that occasional poetry gives us entrance to “our larger self” further aligns with York’s sense of the capacity of collaborative writing, which is also its challenge to individualistic poetic norms: “collaborative art departs from the constructed centrality of individual authorship, property, or power relations” (York 2002: 136). Like occasional poems, collaborative works are often seen as “whimsical,” “poetic play” in contrast to the writer’s individual, “serious” work (York 2002: 121): “all collaborations are, in some miniscule measure, challenges to the status quo at this particular historical moment in many countries and cultures” (York 2002: 3). In the face of collaborative authorship’s tendency to be seen as “strange, queer,” linked to weakness, dilution, miscegenation, or feminization (York 2002: 11, 13), or simply marginalized in relation to a writer’s solo work, the May Day 2020 Crown centralizes a collaborative and social practice using the minor genre of the occasional poem. Given the sonnet’s frequent alignment with the beginnings of contemporary lyric poetry and the invention of lyric subjectivity itself (Fineman 1986: 25), it is important that these pandemic sonnets prioritize a collective, participatory practice that embeds lyric as a social form with an immediate interlocutor and a concrete social function through sonnets that are rhetorically coded as public and communal.

Cindy Tran and the Sonnet Crown for NYC 

16Like the May Day Crown, Cindy Tran’s Sonnet Crown for NYC presents the sonnet as something already social—a response, an extended hand. Tran’s poems, commissioned by The Shed’s Open Call program which supports early-career New York City artists, honor the New York City small business owners who served the public, often at risk to their own health, during the COVID pandemic of 2020.

17As a whole, Sonnet Crown for NYC follows an arc that begins before the pandemic, in one case, with a business’s earliest days, opening and establishing itself newly in the city. As the crown moves into the pandemic’s losses, it catalogs the persistent, everyday losses of customers and street life, but also the larger personal losses and accompanying attempts to balance grief and work. Early on, the poems also begin to emphasize many forms of healing and hope–as these are differently conceived by the tattoo artist, the druggist, the refugee services provider, the salon proprietor, the pet shop owner, and the florist, among others. And as each sonnet opens, it addresses a “neighbor.”

18The second poem in the crown is a sonnet based on the experiences of Sam Salameh, owner of Teba Pharmacy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This sonnet begins before the pandemic: “When we opened, I stood outside this store/Alone, in the sunshine and in the rain/Passing out candy, opening the door” (2-4). From the crown’s earliest sonnets, Tran’s crown establishes certain patterns: these sonnets stake out a position of offering–whether offering greetings in multiple languages, offering neighborliness, or offering pain management, perspective, and advice. Unlike the solo-voiced, introspective sonnet, these are outward-reaching, social sonnets. Here and elsewhere, the speaker is depicted as a community figure who, because of his status as a small business owner and as a bicultural, bilingual figure, possesses resources that can heal and support his neighbors.

19Tran links Salameh’s biculturality directly by including words and expressions from his own language; here, Salameh’s Arabic words appear throughout Tran’s English sonnet and the English-language reader is asked to reach outward beyond a monolingual reading.

Figure 2. Tran, still from film “Sonnet Crown for NYC,” 02:39

20As the poem moves seamlessly between Arabic and English, it translates, “[One language is not enough]/ So I said hi, I said wassup brother,/ I said [hello]” (5-7). In all, the sonnet crown’s fifteen poems include fourteen languages other than English, including Taishanese, Cantonese Arabic, Thai, Spanish, Greek, and Korean. In the film version, the poems are read by the shop owners, so we can hear the sonnet’s musicality across languages as English and Arabic slide right into the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme of the English sonnet form.

21In a conversation about her project, Tran explained, “people imagine that only a handful of places represent New York, often through what we see in movies and television” (Tran and Amin 2021). Tran’s sonnet crown focuses on the pandemic experiences of New Yorkers from “the neighborhoods that people might not often think of.” Further, she explains, “The first requirement I set for myself was to identify neighborhoods and what [stereotypes] they’re known for, if anything, and then I eliminated that kind of establishment from the list of possibilities. My second requirement was that the business owners speak a language other than English, because I wanted to incorporate other languages into each of the poems” (Tran and Amin 2021). The words and expressions drawn from languages other than English convey specialized linguistic and cultural perspective, which is applied in each poem to the pandemic’s circumstances.

22Sonnet four’s speaker is based on Kit Keys, owner of Yant Studio, a tattoo studio in Forest Hills in Queens that is rooted in “a form of tattooing originally introduced by the Khmer people [which] consists of sacred geometrical, animal, and deity designs accompanied by Pali phrases that offer power, protection, fortune, charisma, and other benefits for the bearer” (Yant Studio). In the sonnet, the speaker meditates explicitly on processes of pain, scarring, and healing:

A tattoo begins with a dream inside
A closed fist. Then, flowers bloom and fan
The memories of times we tried to hide
From pain. If we dare to look, เสื้อเหลียวหลัง, [a tiger looks back]
And lies with the flowers, the shaded future,
This fortitude beneath our skin. (Tran 4: lines 6-11)

23In the yant tattoo tradition, the tiger looking back is a figure of power and protection, especially for those who hold positions in which they must use power in a responsible and compassionate way (Yant Studio). As in sonnet two, the speaker of sonnet four offers resources and insights from their area of linguistic, cultural, and professional expertise in the face of the pandemic’s uncertainties, “the shades of what may never happen” (2). As the sonnet closes, the speaker says she hears “the rumor/ About Hope coming back with scars is true” and she asks, “What is invisible when Hope sees you?” (13-14). Sonnet 4’s final question filters the pandemic’s uncertainties through the tattooist’s lens, through the layers of surface skin, scar, memory, dream, and what remains hidden.

24Two-thirds of the way through the sonnet crown, sonnet 10 focuses on Karho Leung, proprietor of 12 Pell, a barber shop and lifestyle store in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In the poem, the speaker uses his own history to explain the importance of what he offers: “Truth be told, 我以前肚餓 [I used to be hungry]—/I wanted Jordan 7s and my mom didn’t think twice/ When I asked. I learned looking fresh ain’t free” (2-4). The poem continues to meditate on the particular currency of style, of self-making: “I could walk through the world and be seen./ I know that looking fresh is how the eye /Pays respect to desire” (6-8). At the end of the poem, he explains, “The men who sit in my chair ask/ For what they want. No one in this country/ Asked before. Now they are learning to choose/ To see Hope untangle the laces of new shoes” (11-14). This sonnet pays tribute to 12 Pell’s particular offerings of grooming and styling—forms of bodily care and contact that were threatened during the pandemic—but also to the broader power of self-styling, of self-invention and re-invention.

25One of the final sonnets features Dr. Agnes Nagrad, whose dentistry practice in Briarwood, Queens draws upon Dr. Nagrad’s Romanian roots. Using a Romanian expression, the poem notes the daily tasks that must be done by hand: “it looks like frec menta, but the moon-slow/ Work of setting gives Patience a place to stay” (3-4). Frec menta—literally rubbing mint—signals doing nothing, wasting time. But this doing nothing, frec menta, is the “moon-slow Work” that the sonnet continues to unfold: “Once upon a time, before I made crowns,/ I drove a yellow cab to make my way/Through school. I’ve shown teeth to the ups and downs/ Of days” (6-9), drawing upon a Romanian idiom. In Romanian, the poem instructs us to take your heart in your teeth, in other words, to be brave and to dare: “you can mold the worried hours/ Into a kiss, into a flowerfield, busy/ With beauty. We have these clear, bare powers” (10-12). Again, by documenting the dentist’s life experiences through the knowledge built into her language, the poem offers its neighbors particularly situated guidance for facing difficulty and necessary risk. For English-language readers, the many untranslated words and phrases throughout the sonnet sequence present a challenge to understanding, asking the reader to reach outside a monolingual, monocultural perspective.

26The sonnet crown forms as each poem repeats the previous poem’s final line: sonnet one ends, “This is what I know about naming pain” (14) and sonnet two begins, “I’ve learned something about naming pain” (1). After sonnet four’s speaker asks the final question, “What is invisible when Hope sees you?” (14), sonnet five recasts it: “And what is invisible? I see you/ with your family and without/ your family” (1-3), introducing a new sonnet that tells the story of Hind Almashhadani, owner of Almashhadani Services, an immigration services company based in Staten Island. In the sonnet crown form, the poems’ disparate speakers come together as the crown’s formal requirements ask them to reuse and adapt each other’s words in the repeated lines, creating side-by-side double-voicings. In the film version, as each proprietor reads their own poem, we hear them adopting others’ words and ideas into their own voices, as if building upon each other’s thoughts, even across their disparate contexts: “what is invisible?” when asked by the tattooist takes a different meaning than “what is invisible?” when asked by the immigration services provider. Repetitions and rhymes bind together the voices and concepts even as speakers and contexts require differing meanings and inflections. Tran writes, “In interviewing these people and then writing the sonnets, so much of the work is about how we’re making sense of the past, how we are thinking about the future, and then whether we’re even present in the moment. So I love rhyme as a structure to make meaning and move across time” (Tran and Amin 2021). In this way repetition and rhyme build linkage and resonance across the crown’s disparate stories, contexts, and times.

27The final poem, according to the form of the sonnet redouble, repeats one line from each of the previous sonnets; in the film version, the poem is literally read in fourteen voices that weave together, each voice beginning and ending others’ sentences. The film version emphasizes the extent to which the small business owners become co-collaborators, transforming the sonnets into collaborations between the poet’s craft and the business owner’s linguistic, professional, and personal experience. Tran’s crown produces an insistently metropolitan and multilingual sonnet, reasserting lyric’s sociality as well as the sonnet’s centuries-deep roots in translation, dialogism, multilingualism, and networks of exchange.

Figure 3. Tran, still from film “Sonnet Crown for NYC,” 20:01

Conclusion: Pandemic Interconnectivities and the Eco-Sonnets of Craig Santos Perez 

28Regan warns that “even when they appear to be radically transgressive and disruptive, sonnets are often shaped by ideas and techniques that are already part of the tradition” (Regan 2019: 4-5). In this way, pandemic sonnet projects, through occasionality and collaboration, return us to broader possibilities for lyric that are “already part of the tradition.” In particular, the pandemic sonnet returns us to a rhetoricity of lyric as well as a sociality of lyric that the sonnet’s and the lyric’s long association with self and interiority often elide or make hard to see. Yet, as Michael Spiller reminds us, from its origins in the court of Frederick II, the sonnet has long been a socially embedded discourse, though often one that managed to fall “just under the level of political explicitness” (1992: 82).

29By way of conclusion, I would like to consider one final and very different instance of the pandemic sonnet. While not collaboratively composed, Craig Santos Perez’s pandemic sonnets emphasize interconnectedness, but through an ecological lens which broadens the scale of connection beyond the human experience. Here, interconnectivity is both care and catastrophe as “we buy bottles of sanitizer,/bleach, and water” because “‘Plastic is hygienic’ (2-3). The “we” of this poem may be understood as the speaker’s immediate household, but it is large enough to contain everyone whose routines have been changed by pandemic safety measures: “When we leave the house, we wear plastic gloves and N95 masks” (4-5). “Patients in overcrowded hospitals” are also part of the plastic world of the poem’s “we,” breathing “with plastic ventilators and tubes” (7-9). The quoted, italicized plastic statements (“Plastic is hygienic,” “Plastic keeps us safe from contagion”) that recur throughout the poem form a second and separate voice with a governmentalized, corporatized tone, but also invoke a “we” which intersects with the previous “we,” acting together to take precautions and manage risk. Through the “we” voice and the extension of the “we” voice into the italicized, official language, the poem collapses distinctions between people and between individuals and institutions just as “The price of oil/and virgin polymers collapse” (10-11). There is a sense here of inevitability, even hopelessness, as safety measures intended to protect oneself and others result in global environmental devastation. In its final couplet, the poem asks, “Does plastic finally feel essential?/ Is our single-use body disposable?” The transposition of familiar terms, making plastic “essential” (evoking front-line “essential” workers) and bodies “single-use,” highlights the category and system collapse of the poem. In the face of well-meaning efforts, Perez’s “Plastic Sonnet During the Pandemic” suggests a broader, systemic collapse beyond the immediate crisis of the virus.

30Perez’s ecological view of the pandemic, however, also renders viruses and pandemics as part of the order of all living things in a more-than-human world. In “Flower Sonnet During the Pandemic,” the speaker says, “if a forest remains intact,/viruses will live in harmony/ with all other species” (3-5). Later: “The next pandemic is already ready to bloom” (14). In Perez’s pandemic eco-sonnets, the pandemic with its human costs and losses is not separate from larger ecological cycles; interconnectivity in these pandemic sonnets extends beyond the human world.

31These pandemic sonnet projects show that during 2020, the sonnet often operated outside of its customary associations, especially its association with the meditative poetics of the individual self. During isolation, the sonnet paradoxically emerged as a highly social, socially-embedded, participatory practice that emphasized and facilitated interconnection. Further, the sonnet’s transformation into an interactive, social, and dialogic form can be partly attributed to its association during the pandemic with historically devalued writing practices—collaborative writing and occasional poetry, in particular. These collaborative, multilingual, community-based, occasional poetry projects rhetorically resituate the sonnet, and thus the lyric, as a public form, associated with exchange and collectivity.

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Tran, Cindy. Sonnet Crown for NYC. 2021. Film, 23 min. https://www.theshed.org/program/195-open-call-cindy-tran

Tran, Cindy and Aisha Amin. “Between Artists: Aisha Amin and Cindy Tran” The Shed.org. May 22, 2021. https://www.theshed.org/program/in-the-works/213-between-artists-aisha-amin-and-cindy-tran

Yant Studio. “What is ‘Yant’?” https://www.yantstudio.com/what-is-yant. Accessed December 1, 2023.

York, Lorraine. Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing: Power, Difference, Property. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1. The Poetry Society of New York Instagram Post, April 20, 2020
URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8072/img-1.png
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URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8072/img-2.jpg
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URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8072/img-3.png
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References

Electronic reference

Laura T. Smith, Collaborative Writing and the Poetics of the Occasion: The Pandemic Sonnets of Cindy Tran and Craig Santos PerezAngles [Online], 18 | 2024, Online since 01 November 2024, connection on 09 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/8072; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12lxq

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About the author

Laura T. Smith

Professor of English at Stevenson University in Maryland, Smith’s research and teaching focus on poetics, African American literature, and queer studies. With Dora Malech, she co-edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (2023), which showcases the cultural and aesthetic diversity of the American sonnet tradition. Contact: ltsmith@stevenson.edu.

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Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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