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A Call for Poetic Migration in the Time of a Pandemic

Jennifer K Dick

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To what extent do place and time determine a poet?
To what extent do plague and time determine a poet?

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2Many ancient civilizations abandoned locales (old cities) and some were even lost during plagues. Their mode of survival: movement, migration, dispersal. Sometimes overseas.

3It rained
the day we arrived.
And I have rowed the harbor since,
out the window of Johnny’s Candy Kitchen,
through that glass and rain through which I looked
the first time I saw
the sea. (Olson 1951: 259-260)

4While whole civilizations/whole cities are lost, we talk of music and poetry in terms of movements: of bars and metrical time: feet, rhyme, alliteration, pacing. In poetry we also speak of a metaphor as moving/shifting one thing into another. Poetry as transformation. As freedom. As unbinding. Untethered to the NOW of now, voicing the now, speaking for and through it, running away from it while harnessing its essential in the time (the line as the road) of poetry. As this fragment from Diana Khoi Nguyen’s vizpoem-collage puts it: ‘uncontained even water abandons itself; there is mystery inside migration [...] of the road, it does not move, it is everywhere it has a story, I am in it, you are in it’ (2018: 26-27).

  • 1 Laura Mullen, ‘Virus’, section 14. https://positjournal.com/2020/05/27/laura-mullen/ Video reading (...)
  • 2 In ‘Requiem’, section ‘Instead of a Preface’, anecdote dated Leningrad, April 1, 1957, recalling he (...)
  • 3 Joseph Brodsky, statement made in ‘Russian Poetry: The Silver Age Poets’ course which I attended, M (...)

5The poem is often spoken of as the epitome of recollecting, gathering up the instant for its re-memoration. Poetry as: ‘mute memory vagrant memory’ (Howe, 1983: 11) Poem as voice of the mourned, for the mourned: lament, history, catching the mobility of the moment, even the most dire, difficult, unfathomable moments, in language. Poetry as ‘inside the fractal [...] fractions of seconds trans-/acting through the/ globallocal [...]’ (Zawacki 2020:123) Poetry within ‘What it meant to be/
A planet visible at last’ (Mullen 2020).
1 That which one struggles to name, noted down. Anna Akhmatova’s: ‘Can you describe this?’ to which she replies ‘Yes, I can.’ (Akhmatova 1992:384).2 As Nadezhda Mandelstam in her book Hope Abandoned put it, this is poetry as ‘The merging of the passing moment with eternity.’(Mandelstam 1981:321). For, as Joseph Brodsky stated, ‘The job of the poet is to convey to you the place. Show you life and its changes, and to show you your link in the chain.’3 As Olson claimed “And what I write/is stopping the battle, //to get down, right in the midst of/the deeds, to tell [...] in the fray [...] how his eye flashed // to celebrate // (beauty will not wait)// men, and girls [...]’ (1951: 265).

6Yet the invisible cause of ailment (pre-microscope, evidently, thus pre-seeing/visualizing) unknown to the Anasazi, the Mississippian peoples, the Mayans or Aztecs, the Huns, the Celts, the Vikings... lead to the visible solution: distanciation. Fleeing. To go away from that which you can see (name): people falling ill, dying. For, after all, as Nguyen writes in the opening line of Ghost Of: ‘There is no ecologically safe way to mourn’ (‘A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere’ 2018: 13). What we have learned, are all learning in 2020: There is no safe way to mourn at all.

7Funerals have been disallowed. We may as well leave our dead in large pots on the edge of cave dwellings. Then move on. As Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki wrote ‘No time to grieve for roses, when the forests are burning’ (2014: 19). The following extract from A.R. Ammons’ poem ‘Strip’ encapsulates the quotidian quandary a pandemic (or war) reminds us of: what is an individual’s insignificance/significance? We live among a multitude of beings and yet there is a desire to see, feel, know each single one (ourselves, of course, included) as mattering. As he writes:

[...] few of the dead

lie recalled, and they have not
cautioned us[...]

[...]but is
it not careless to become too local

when there are four hundred billion
stars alone in our galaxy: at

least, that’s what I heard: also,
that there are billions of such

systems spread about, some older,
some younger than ours[...]

[...]I daresay much remains to be learned

however much we learn, tho, we may
grow daunted by our own dismissability

in so sizable a place: [...]
(A.R. Ammons, ‘Strip’,2020) 1997: 33)

8In so sizable a situation, so numerous a pandemic’s life-takings, we are confronting the invisibility of the individual among the attempted counting of statistics: the rocketting-towards-the-moon, directly-upward-rising or plane-ing off of curves, blue, green, orange graphed lines, boxes and categories, percentage calculations, the desire to see numbers go down rather than up, as Laura Mullen writes:

[...] this is the curve
This is the curve we’re trying to flatten [...]
Toward mercy moving in the direction
Of justice belated and transient democracy
A drift toward the recognition that people
Around us might be people might be human
As we might be human connected despite
(Mullen, section 2 2020)

9We revel in our own, blind fascination with wonderfully neutral numerics, stoic statistics. As Andrew Zawacki writes: ‘Technology/bends an elegyscape/to the shape of a sexier/mourning: marine cloud/brightening, synthetic fields/and the closure of work as/a feeling of working—’ (2020: 120-121). Here in this pre-pandemic poem, mourning connects to the loss of both bodies and jobs, two victims of our current plague. Meanwhile military trucks, pop up hospitals, and refrigerated transportation of bodies traverse screens because morgues and crematoriums cannot keep up with the pace of the virus. ‘The number of people who will die is a number/That keeps going up’ (section 4 2020) writes Mullen in ‘Virus’, advising, ‘[....] don’t breathe/Nobody has it then everybody has it/Or is going to have it or already has/Sharing the air infected caught’ (Section 1 2020). Mullen’s brisk tone, her anti-elegiac writing in quasi-manic rhythms breathlessly attempts to keep pace (outrun the outbreak?) encumbered by ever-evolving, revolving sets of facts and news. Such work as hers allude to how Covid-19 scorns our precious rituals, our desire for contact, our sense that each body is in and of itself significant—not only the soul/spirit once contained. At this time when we speak of lungs, the aches, of symptoms including fever, cough, a loss of smell, Nguyen’s work also reminds us that it is ‘Not the body/but the self/that is/a suffering form’ (‘Gyotaku’ 2018: 64-65). Suffering in part because of its inability to effect concrete change, because it is water that in death remains water inhabiting other’s bodies: ‘waves rise and fall, but the sea remains and does the same task over and over’ (ibid.).

  • 4 Zawacki, ‘Haint’, Op. Cit., 119.

10Yet we resist this semblance of derision at our futility, long to connect one to another, and to maintain our rituals, if only for ourselves, in secret, alone. We go in search of ‘[...] The body as a continuation of music by other means.’4 As I wrote following a Megan Burns line in the middle of April at the seeming peak of Covid-19:

  • 5 Jennifer K Dick, earlier version with image work originally published on Self-Quarantine Lines, Apr (...)

‘Let us be haunted’ (Megan Burns)
Our nights reiterating what wisps of
the bodies’ remains return to us.
Ear pressed to plywood, carpet, tile,
a rollicking clatter behind the ceiling /
over rooftop sliding along slate—down
drainpipes with rain, melting clods of snow:
remain(ders) – remnants : a catalogue
of those cacophonous (cathartic) returns—
last words (rites) slipped on memos
scribbled under our pillows.5

11But it is not ‘Lament my loss’ but rather ‘Survive!’ that so many close their eyes for the final time with in dystopic cinematic versions of plague stories and end of days tales. Message to the next, the remaining generation? Survive: take to the road, head away from the danger. As Nguyen writes in her poem ‘The Exodus’ Saigon to Los Angeles, 175-2015:

Why should we mourn?
Isn’t this the history we want
one in which we survive?
(‘The Exodus’ 2018: 33)

12I am not, do not, wish to confound, conflate poems and poetry of war and migration with those of plague and migration. Or do I? Nguyen’s words certainly clarify the evident link between the two. The equal experience: living in a clearly historic moment. Equal goal: survival. But can poetry provide a how-to guide?

13Turn away. On to the next.

14The doctors, EMTs, nurses, various other first responders, work day and night, turn from one recently emptied bed to another just filled. For them, at least the adrenaline allows perhaps for a slight, temporary wall, a momentary reprieve. But the individuals passing away in this time, from Covid or not, are unable to be mourned fully, in the ways we are accustomed to. Ammons’ poem at once manages by its ending on ‘celebrate: it will all be over’ to capture the beauty, capacity and need of the ritual, its role in passing on, sharing, partaking in hope:

[...] no, no: I must

get peanut butter and soda crackers
and the right shoe soles (for ice)

and leave something for my son and
leave these lines, poor things, to

you, if you will have them, can they
do you any good, my trade for my

harm in the world: come, let’s
celebrate: it will all be over
(Ammons 1997:34-35)

15His lines, left to ‘you’ to me/us readers come to us in 2020 and invite us to reflect on them with new, freshly pandemic-filled sight. That elliptic end: it will all be over—unpunctuated, ongoing. The ‘it’: life, the universe, stars, this planet, the poem, the worry, the philosophical debate with ourselves, even covid-19, this pandemic, our individual quarantines (or confinement as the French call it), losses, mourning, struggles. He leaves for his son what nourishes and clothes the body (the peanut butter and soda crackers, the soles for walking on ice without slipping, without injuring oneself), but for us all (son included, self included) lines (poetry), his legacy (to the inheritors), something for the soul, perhaps, certainly for something (greater?): to be able, still, and always, to celebrate (the now, the carpe diem sentiment, the ongoing) for, certainly, ‘it will all be over’ (soon?)

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16An early form of social distancing practiced in the 1300s: abandon one’s home, give over to hunter-gatherer migration patterns, head out into the wilderness. The dangers weighed on scales: wildlife, the hardships of nature, to face the unknown availability of resources or their lack, potential run-ins with other nomadic even hostile tribes vs. the illness and death from disease. Current form of social distancing: remain sealed within one’s home, if you leave for any necessity, measure out, mete out a space of 6ft/1.5 meters at a glance, masks on or face shields up. Partake in a practice of frequent handwashing. The dangers weighed on scales: staying indoors out of work with potential financial bankruptcy, perhaps eventually facing starvation, or exit your home to inevitably encounter disease and a certain probability of (8% overall on average, but likely to go down) death (or longterm treatment, with or without insurance).

Being here, sheltering in a barn [...] where a whole country,
a whole civilization was about to fall, was better than
being there [...]
(McEwan 2001: 190)

17Businesses in the faraway French epicenter of this present plague began to reopen in mid- May. Part time. Like flying a flag at half mast in a valley, like opening the bottom slats of the window, scrolling the security barrier up by half, peeking out from the inside (dark) towards the outside (light, flame) to spot the aura of the invisible menace: Is Covid-19 stalking the streets? On parade?

18Away from home when the pandemic hits, I shelter in place in the USA. My own home in Mulhouse, France, hosts a guest, a visitor also in wait. We remain in a holding pattern. Like planes circling. Time passes. By April, I begin to imagine the overseas flight back, slated for August. Will we still sport masks? Will we flinch at the proximity of others? How will we handle the 9hours in the middle row as, to our left, to our right, strangers from strange lands nod off, lean in to us. Two unknown faces peacefully slumber against our shoulders. Does it make any difference to press them away (awake) vs. accept their warm weight, join the unconscious wave?

19To be destined. To be predestined. To designate an other to speak on our behalf for the best of our bodies, in any case in which we could be deemed no longer capable of doing so ourselves. Advanced Directives. Medical Proxies. Power of Attorney. Documented. Signed. Sighed. Dated. Then: there would be no time. Anyway, what is that beeping in the corner?

20 [...] exactly there at the bridge
Where it goes out and in

I recognize
The country not discovera [sic]
(‘The Twist’ 1951: 261)
The country not uncovered?

21The discovery
Of Covid-19 was made in ________________ on ________________ of the new, no, old year (decade). That of SARS in __________________ on _____________________ of __________________. Of ‘Asian Flu’ in ______________ on _________________ of _________________. Of the Spanish Flu in ___________________ on __________________ in _____________________. AIDS in _________________ on ___________________ of _____________________. Ebola in ___________________ on __________________________ of _________________. Smallpox in _____________ on ________________of ___________________Shall we (could we) enumerate the losses? By country? Per capita? ‘The earliest recorded pandemic happened during the Peloponnesian War. After the disease passed through Libya, Ethiopia and Egypt, it crossed the Athenian walls as the Spartans laid siege. As much as two-thirds of the population died.’
6 In the most recent (our current) pandemic, at 18h25 GMTime on 20 March 2020 the Worldometer site reported 268,062 cases globally with 11,187 deaths and 90,603 recoveries. By the 28th of March I noted ‘It gets harder to be inside. Emotionally. A weird combination of a need for space and for conversation, commiseration, comfort.’ As Mullen writes:

These are the new phrases “social distancing”
“Self-isolation” suddenly no one is lonely or
Everyone is lonely there’s no fear of missing out
These are the symptoms emails saying these
Are the symptoms emails from everyone
Saying this is how you know you have it [...]
(Section 2 2020)

22By the 3rd of April we topped a million cases worldwide with a 20% death rate (58,136) by the 15th of April we topped 2 million and 133,000 deaths worldwide. Now, mid-July, the USA alone has surpassed 140,000 deaths and the global infection rate has risen to 15 million (and counting). Will we reach the 500 million infected and 5 million loses of the 2 years of Spanish flu from last century, or will the promised vaccines already in phase 2 trials provide a reprieve to the ongoing crisis? What choices do we have? The borders are sealed shut, yet we crave movement.

23The density of a population drove even the earliest settlers back in time towards their nomadic days. The radical decreases in population may have been attributed to...

And I wear these particles (this mask?)
as a shield
(anti)-body / -corps/ corpse
from behind the low copse a growl
(JDick)

‘moving
among my particulars, among

my foes’
(Olson 1951: 264)

24The tribe split up at the first trail juncture. Split again at the next and the next. Each individual eventually found themselves wandering along alone: their discoveries and delights so vast and vibrant. ‘Oh!’ they cried out stumbling over, into, beyond the unknown. The longing to share welled up from within, each singularly, each singularity, each single human as if a geyser, a fountain of silent sibilant information: news not recounted in papers, but in the poetry which people were dying for every day (nod to WCW). Each wandered on and on through the light, dark, grey veil. Waiting. Hoping.

‘Surely it cannot go on much longer, this desert oasis.
Surely it cannot go on much longer, this desert

in which the jet black
inkwell of my eye

spills, staining the ants who come to see.
(Nguyen 2018: 18)

25As Rae Armantrout asks in her poem ‘Bees’:

If I lived forever
would the present’s noose

be looser?
(Armantrout 2018: 102)

26*
To close, to conclude, to pause: this page of a dual-page visual poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen, which opens ‘what may exist between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence’ and closes ‘the replay across the year, and longer, it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps’ (2018: 37). On the poem’s surface, the visual absence of the body, her brother’s, lost under different, equally significant circumstances, returns as the/in the ghost of this page. His is a body we can each replace with losses of our own. Replay. It keeps, poetry does, this poem does, me alive:

Nguyen, ‘Triptych’, Op. Cit., 37

27For poetry is an extreme force of movement, it is G-force level movement which, since the 20th century’s adage driving poets, poetry and publishers to ‘Make it new!’, has called constantly for writers to move ideas, objects, reality, perspective from one stable, known place/space to/into another unstable, unknown, place/space of discovery. Ours is not the 1990 mantra of Nirvana’s ‘Entertain us’ but 2020’s demand for poetry to ‘Transform us!’ that we heed, cleave to so completely.

[...] each person
Who died was me us I
Wrote in the invisible ink
Of the virus that made us
Begin to see those we hadn’t
My gratitude for each
Person who was careful
A note to say Thank you
For the care you take of me
Let me take care of you
(Mullen Section 14 2020)

28In this time of quarantine, of intense physical immobility and enclosure, a time when our historical consciousness is being forced to acknowledge we are living through something momentous, relevant to document, this is a time for poetry not as looking at, but lifting up out of darkness (Susan Howe). Poetry as ‘Noise/not white nor phonon/is what nowcasting/everyware, to “hover/forever in mid-air [...]’(Zawacki ‘Haint’ 2020: 118-119). Poetic sound slips one word into another, techniques of rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, pun, meter, visuality in a poem, even of a text block, resists rhythmic stagnancy, just as a poem in visual form stretches the extent of the gaze, vibrates. Is vibrant. Animates. Is animate. Thus breathes. Poetry responds to the stagnancy of time’s (this pandemic’s) clutches by remaining alive. So: keep running. It has always been the most effective response to any pandemic. Spread out. Splay. Write wildly. Build atop the before, find futurity. Be untethered.

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Bibliography

Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Expanded Edition. Roberta Reeder (Ed.). Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer, Zephyr Press, Edinburgh: Boston and Conongate Press. 1992.

Ammons, A.R. ‘Strip’, Best American Poetry 1997. Ed. James Tate, New York: Scribner, 1997: 33.

Armantrout, Rae. ‘Bees’, Wobble. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2018: 102.

History.com editors, ‘Pandemics That Changed History’, April 1, 2020. https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline

Howe, Susan The Defenestration of Prague. New York: The Kulcher Foundation, 1983: 11.

Khoi Nguyen, Diana. ‘Gyotaku’, Ghost of. Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2018: 26-27.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Abandoned. Trans. Max Hayward, Scribner, NY, 1981: 321

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.

Mullen, Laura. Posit Journal n°24, May 2020. https://positjournal.com/2020/05/27/laura-mullen/

Olson, Charles. Selected Writings. New York: New Directions, 1951: 259-260.

Słowacki, Juliusz. “Epigraph to a Zbigniew Herbert poem”. In Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956 1998. Atlantic Books Ltd, 2014.

Zawacki, Andrew ‘Study for Analemma 1’, Unsun. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020: 123.

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Notes

1 Laura Mullen, ‘Virus’, section 14. https://positjournal.com/2020/05/27/laura-mullen/ Video reading and discussion of this poem recorded on April 22, 2020 for Headleands Center for the Arts and Booksmith at:. https://vimeo.com/417832209 If interested in more of Mullen’s pandemic work, read her poetry in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn, Knopf, June 9, 2020, or in Chant de la Sirène, issue 1: summer 2020 The Covid Duration, at: https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/new-folder or watch her video poem ‘Becoming the Other Becoming’ at: http://movingpoems.com/filmmaker/laura-mullen/

2 In ‘Requiem’, section ‘Instead of a Preface’, anecdote dated Leningrad, April 1, 1957, recalling her time waiting to visit prisoners of Stalin’s camps during the Yezhov terror.

3 Joseph Brodsky, statement made in ‘Russian Poetry: The Silver Age Poets’ course which I attended, Mount Holyoke College, Fall 1993.

4 Zawacki, ‘Haint’, Op. Cit., 119.

5 Jennifer K Dick, earlier version with image work originally published on Self-Quarantine Lines, April 18, 2020: https://selfquarantinelines.blogspot.com/2020/04/yes-let-us-be-haunted.html. Quote by Megan Burns taken from a call for work in homage to and remembrance of author Marthe Reed, posted on the Trembling Pillow Press website, spring 2020: https://www.tremblingpillowpress.com/tag/marthe-reed-book-award/

6 History.com editors, ‘Pandemics That Changed History’, April 1, 2020. https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline

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List of illustrations

Caption Nguyen, ‘Triptych’, Op. Cit., 37
URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8313/img-1.png
File image/png, 290k
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References

Electronic reference

Jennifer K Dick, A Call for Poetic Migration in the Time of a Pandemic Angles [Online], 18 | 2024, Online since 01 November 2024, connection on 21 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/8313; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12lxw

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About the author

Jennifer K Dick

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