Why has poetry enjoyed such a renaissance in a time of pandemic? Writing in The New Statesman, Katy Shaw of Northumbria University suggests, 鈥淚n moments of crisis, certain cultural forms come to the fore, and in the midst of Covid-19, poetry has found its calling. . . . The unique intersection of time and space provided by lockdown鈥 has 鈥渃reated the conditions . . . for a poetry renaissance.鈥[1] This season, Poetry Matters explores how, as we emerge from the first season of living with pandemic, poetry has come forward as a cultural mode that speaks both to our current situation and efforts to imagine a future beyond the season of Covid.
As a first step, this initiative considers the range of forces that have brought poetry to the forefront for so many this past season鈥攚hy poetry, as Vanity Fair notes, has been 鈥渉aving a moment,鈥[2] why poetry as a mode of language feels both so appropriate to, and valuable for, our times. We also consider the potential of poetry, as formed language and aesthetic experience, to serve as resource for imagining days beyond this season of pandemic鈥攁nd for thinking toward what we call, building upon a concept from G.H. Lewes, 鈥渞eemergence.鈥[3]
This project initially grew from a hunch that during the first weeks of Covid-19, as we were living in isolation from one another, withdrawn into our own rooms and on our own time, poetry鈥攁s mode of expression, register of language, and art form鈥攃ame to matter more. We had more time and better conditions than usual under which to read; many people took books down off shelves that they鈥檇 meant to get to at some point and could turn to, unexpectedly, now. As Catherine O鈥橬eill Grace notes, many felt somewhat like Emily Dickinson as recluse, working on a small scale even while grappling with cultural and philosophical issues of great magnitude.[4]
The mode of 鈥渟low time鈥[5] many entered fostered the kind of attention that belongs to poetry鈥攗nhurried, quiet, involving patient focus, conducive to gradually unfolding awareness and discovery. Britain鈥檚 Poet Laureate Simon Armitage observes: poetry 鈥渁sks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative [鈥, to be considerate of language, to be considerate of each other and the world.鈥[6] Conditions were right for such ruminative work, the slow and close reading that poetry demands and rewards. Poetry also felt welcome because it was quickly shareable as a mode of communication, as we sought to create bridges through language to one another鈥攕end signals of connection, empathy, encouragement across distances, often via email.
Moreover, poetry evoked the sensory vibrancy that daily life during the early days of Covid could not offer鈥攕enses of vivid sight, fragrance, sound, and touch. Poetry brought such sensory richness to the confinement and mutedness of our immediate surroundings. It provided sensory wealth amid what often felt like sensory deficit. It also helped to make the most of what felt like 鈥減andemic time鈥濃攈elped to hone states of mind and modes of language equipped for attending both to the details of the moment, the fine grain of days at home (as Shaw notes, poetry is especially well prepared to capture 鈥渢houghts on the rapidly-shifting contexts of lockdown life鈥) and to the archives, as people were ready to reach to the past and savour the fourth dimension鈥攖o bring to the surface photos, letters, songs and essays from other times.
And as a mode of language alternative to ordinary language used for daily communication,[7] poetry also offers eloquence for extraordinary times. It helps to bring to fine articulateness states of mind and feeling that are radically unfamiliar, as we seek to make sense of what we are navigating.
Reemergence
Our working hypothesis is that at this point, after the first months of pandemic, poetry can help to guide cultural thinking toward 鈥渞eemergence鈥 from what we have been living this past year鈥攁nd help us imagine a changed future. One leading idea issuing from times of pandemic has been that, as exceptional circumstances are forcing a sea-change in our practices, we have opportunity to move toward new paradigms. We consider how poetry offers resources for transformed and transformational thinking.
Accordingly, this project explores how poetry, beyond helping to bring order, relief, and fluency during a time of confusion, can also destabilize in generative ways. This project looks to the potential for poetry to make us uncomfortable鈥攁nd to do so in constructive ways that can help us imagine, as Shaw notes, 鈥渢he kind of world we want to think beyond lockdown.鈥
How and why might poetry offer such resources? Pursuing this collaborative inquiry, we turn less to the themes of poetry, more to its forms鈥攁nd rather than address poetry that is readily accessible, we accent challenging poetry which diverges in idiom, sometimes defiantly, from mainstream language practice. Such poetry provides, first, a register markedly alternative to the practical discourses of 鈥渟tay safe鈥 that surround us now. It can us venture beyond what can feel like the aridity of terms such as 鈥渟ocial distancing鈥 and 鈥渟elf-isolation鈥濃攚hich, if useful for maintaining balance at this cultural moment, also mark limits beyond which we seek eventually to reach. Poetry, with its sensory richness and wildcard language, can help to move beyond the discourse of safety and the sanitizer.[8] Through its nonnormative verbal work, poetry can also offer a language for resistance. As Shaw suggests, 鈥淥ver the last four months, poetry has emerged as a dynamic form capable of contesting statistics, government briefings and media reports by offering a counter-narrative about our lives in lockdown.鈥[9]
To invoke Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, in circumventing ordinary usages, poetic language also serves to 鈥渞oughen鈥 language, defamiliarizing our habitual ways of thinking and reading environments and experiences, pressing us beyond these.[10] Given this, it can also help to cultivate unusual modes of attention, in kind and direction, through engendering what media theorist N. Katherine Hayles theorizes as 鈥渄eep鈥 attention different from, even counter to, our pervasive modes of internet-attuned 鈥渉yperattention.鈥[11] The aesthetic experience of poetry often also alters our sense of time鈥攁way from 鈥渃lock time鈥 to alternative senses of temporality.
Building on the thought of early twentieth-century theorist and critic I.A. Richards, we further suggest that through the aesthetic experience it generates, poetry can help to form and re-form pathways of thought.[12]Central to this step of the exploration are Richards鈥 pioneering conceptual investigations of the 1920s into the 鈥減lasticity鈥 of the mind and what he called the 鈥渕ind of the future,鈥 formed through aesthetic experiences, which Richards often reads as fostering beneficial coordination of neurological impulses.[13] We join his conceptual forays with contemporary thought on neuroplasticity and the concept of 鈥渆mergence,鈥 from theorists such as Norman Doidge, Daniel Levitin, Jessica Grahn, Laurel Trainor, and V.S. Ramachandran.
For this project, especially of interest are ways that poetry can help to attune attention to what phenomenology calls qualia鈥攁 register of sensory experience often muted by ordinary experience. The contemporary emphasis on high-speed communications and efficient workflow often interferes with conditions under which to attend carefully to the richness of moments, objects, and spaces, states of mind and feeling, which the early days of Covid brought so vividly to the fore鈥攂irdsong out the window, sensory abundance, a sudden flowering of sight, sound, or fragrance鈥攚hich can foster states of larger awareness beyond the practical, a sense of grace sustained under pressure. We read attention to qualia as newly eroded by current efforts during a time of pandemic to achieve a 鈥渘ew normal,鈥 with all that this discourse involves. Heightened attention to qualiathrough poetry, involving organizing aesthetic experience toward a sense of what I.A. Richards calls 鈥渇reedom and fullness of life,鈥[14] can help to counter such erosion. Poetry also helps to engender states of attention ready to engage the experience of the qualia of the archive鈥攖he fragrance and texture of musty letters, the details of photos and handwriting, and the specifics of lives of other times toward which these gesture.
Ultimately, we suggest that engagement with poetry can help to counter some of the more unwelcome implications of current reconstructive discourse associated with pandemic, and contribute in diverse ways to transformed states of mind, awareness, and cultural practice. These, in turn, can help to imagine a transformed future, for when we reemerge, on the other side of these times.
--Miranda Hickman, with Poetry Matters (2020-21)
[1] Katy Shaw, 鈥淲hy Poetry is Enjoying a Renaissance.鈥 The New Statesman 21 July 2020.
[2] Keziah Weir, 鈥淲hy Poetry is Having a Moment Amid the Global Quarantine,鈥 Vanity Fair 30 April 2020.
[3] On 鈥渆mergence,鈥 see also Paul Humphreys, Emergence (Oxford UP, 2016).
[4] Grace O鈥 Neill, 鈥淎 Solitude of Space,鈥 Wellesley Magazine Summer 2020.
[5] With 鈥渟low time鈥 from Keats, 鈥淥de on a Grecian Urn,鈥 we point both to a temporality distinctive to the season of Covid and link it to the context of 鈥渟low鈥 movements that have appeared over the last twenty years, associated with commentators such as Carl Honor茅 (In Praise of Slow, 2004). On 鈥渟low time鈥 and Romantic poetry, see Jonathan Sachs, 鈥淪low Time,鈥 , 134.2 (March 2019): 315鈥331.
[6] Simon Armitage, 鈥淟ockdown: Simon Armitage Writes a Poem About Coronavirus Outbreak.鈥 Guardian 20 March 2020.
[7] See Viktor Shklovsky, 鈥淎rt as Technique鈥 (1917), on the distinction between 鈥減oetic鈥 language and 鈥減ractical鈥 and 鈥渙rdinary language.鈥 Shklovsky engages the Aristotelian idea that poetic language appears 鈥渟trange鈥 and 鈥渨onderful,鈥 in part through what he calls 鈥渞oughening鈥濃攖echniques aimed to disrupt ordinary perception. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3-24.
[8] This dimension of our thought is indebted to Nicole Brossard, 鈥淧oetic Politics,鈥 on instances in which 鈥渄esire鈥 clashes with 鈥渙rdinary usage,鈥 and how poetic language can both avoid replicating the assumptions of dominant culture through exploration and ludic practice and allow for 鈥渋ntervention.鈥 Nicole Brossard: Selections (Poets for the Millennium), introduction by Jennifer Moxley (University of California Press, 2010), 179-192.
[9] See Brossard on poetic language as allowing for forms of 鈥渢ransgression鈥 and 鈥渟ubversion,鈥 distance on ordinary usages and experience, culturally dominant frameworks of values.
[10] Shklovsky, 鈥淎rt as Technique鈥 (1917). 鈥淚n studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark鈥攖hat is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created 'artistically' so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity. Thus 鈥榩oetic language鈥 gives satisfaction. . . The language of poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language鈥 (Lemon and Reis, 21-22).
[11] N. Katherine Hayles, 鈥淗yper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.鈥 Profession (2007): 187-199.
[12] I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). Routledge, 2001.
[13] Richards, Practical Criticism (1929), Harcourt Brace & Company, 2009: 鈥渕ind of the future,鈥 322.
[14] Richards, Principles, 121.