Between Attention and Limitation: On Reading Poetry in 2021

Early in the pandemic I made a faulty assumption. If my poet friends could stay safe, I thought, this time would be a boon. We were confronting a great crisis, but many of us were doing so from our homes. Extraordinary things have been made in isolation, and this would be an isolation like no other. For those whose circumstances allowed it, I imagined a great focusing, poets and artists turning inward, forced out of the distractions of social life and into their work. But that didn’t seem to happen, at least from my perspective. Even for those in relatively unburdened situations—income uninterrupted, no children or family to take care of—the pandemic was crippling. Few artists I’ve talked to flourished in 2020.

When I began reviewing poetry collections in 2021, it was in the context of these new questions: who has been able to make poems, and how have those poems been dealing with the crisis of COVID-19? Harriet Books is filled with the answers. For my part, what I learned right away is a lesson we’ve known throughout the pandemic: COVID-19 isn’t our only crisis.

The first book I reviewed was Stephen Collis’s A History of the Theories of Rain, which wrestles with climate change from a particularly anxiety-riddled position. Collis’s approach is multifaceted, but his foundation is logic; he uses literal if-then statements to calculate how and when we must respond to our carbon emissions and other destructive impacts. Dread permeates: his analytic deductions become a doomsday clock driving poems that surmise, with overwhelming evidence, that it’s already too late. In Ceive, her novella-in-verse, BK Fischer imagines the world after doomsday, via a climate-change-era adaptation of the biblical story of Noah’s ark. Fischer’s poems are terrifyingly prismatic, gripped by interior dialogues that evince the psychological effects of apocalyptic isolation. I felt oddly comfortable in both books, perhaps because after many years of interacting with apocalyptic works I have come to accept a foreclosed future. In coming to terms with my own reaction, I realized the paralyzing effects of the pandemic—how the immensity of a problem prevents us from imagining anything beyond it.

For other poets I’ve read this year, the future is an opportunity for revolution. Simone Muench and Jackie K. White’s Hex & Howl conjures spells to counter sexual violence against women, and in doing so it realizes a material orientation to language, which through its sounds and contortions can levy power, in this case one shared between the dual agents of its making. For Tongo Eisen-Martin (Blood on the Fog) and Rodrigo Toscano (The Charm and the Dread), revolution is an ongoing practice aimed at dismantling historical structures of social oppression at the same time that it fortifies continuity with a long line of poets of political witness, rancorous refusal, and visionary meditation—the Beats, Black Arts poets, performance poets, and others. Reading these books over the past year was like throwing my body at the necessary, forcing my being over and over again to face a raw truth: that racism, sexual violence, and the demands of capital so deeply infect our body politic that their reach is nearly beyond our view, even as their effects are horrifyingly evident every day. All-pervasive and infinitesimal, they are like a virus.  

Of course, there remained that other virus. The best COVID poem I read this year was by Nimfa Despabiladeras, from Coronavirus Haiku, a collection of haikus by essential workers in the Worker Writers School in New York. Her poem reads: “Boiling water / At 6:00 a.m., I realize that / my bird clock is dead.” There is so much in these twelve or so words. The early morning death. Death as absence of early morning bird song. The artificiality of that bird song. Then the boiling water, Prufrock in it (“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”). Boiling water as sanitary practice. Work, impending. The experience of COVID is in every cubist angle of this short poem. It’s a heartbreaking piece, but it showed me how form, especially one as severe as haiku, could provide a coping strategy for the pandemic. Form can be trusted. It is something definite during a time of great uncertainty. In my personal life, I found the comforts of formal poetry analogous to those of physical exercise—the repetitions I could count, the weight I could measure, the movements I could make for their own sake. It isn’t perfect. There is pain in it. But I could rely on it, like I could rely on a poem’s proclivity to break at each line.

Other poets engaged a kind of athleticism not by adhering to form, but by exceeding it. One of my favorite books this year was Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night. It’s a book-length paragraph of unimaginable scope, filled with astronomy, evolutionary science, economics, but then, also, all the facets of a personal life, the relationships, the hopes, the cautions, the indifferences. Yet it reads so easily. It’s a maximalist work that made me think the world wasn’t so complicated after all, even as it proffered one knot after another. I don’t know how you can write like that; except that you try.

There was so much I did not read, that I could not get to. My colleagues brought themselves to a great deal of this work, in brilliant reviews, from the angles of their own distinct readerships, but still there is more that is worthy of our attention, which is brutally limited. Those are the funny words readers move between—attention, limitation. I could feel it more this year than any other, that my reading was urgent. I had a function: to review. But the seriousness was personal. It was an exercise of my very presence, to sufficiently meet a body of works written and published under extraordinary circumstances. I was glad to have the reassuring proof that the poets have been making poems, but of course it’s gone beyond that. Over the course of the year, reading has increasingly felt like a great privilege—a way of being alive during these profoundly difficult times. I’ve seen, in person, this year, exactly none of the poets whose books I’ve reviewed. How I want to see them. How impossible it seems. Where are we? What place do we share? You know the answer. I do. The poems.