PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America | 2021
Poems, Pandemic: Early Thoughts
Abstract
STEPHANIE SANDLER is Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Slavic department at Harvard University. Recent publications include a coedited volume, The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova (U of Wisconsin P, 2019), and A History of Russian Literature, written with Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, and Irina Reyfman (Oxford UP, 2018). She is completing a study of contemporary Russian poetry to be entitled The Freest Speech in Russia. The alliteration of this section’s title, “Poetry and Pandemic,” creates a strangely natural pairing, language’s way of hinting that poetry is ready to respond to pandemic. Signs may be arbitrary, but poems put words together in ways that point the signs in new directions. That impression was confirmed to me by the return of the podcast Poetry Unbound in September 2020, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. He gave a splendid reading of the alliterative genius of Ada Limón’s poem “Wonder Woman,” and he began by reminding listeners that “poetry isn’t necessarily interested in telling the whole story. Poetry is really interested in stopping in small moments and telling the story of that moment.” Poems can of course tell vast, complex stories, and there will surely be staggering, consciousness-changing poems about this pandemic when we are on the other side of it, perhaps sooner. But Ó Tuama rightly pulls us back from the compulsion to tell a finished story and beckons us to look at poems that fix the small moments that will add up eventually to that whole. At this early moment, too, scholarly inquiry might best hold itself to provisional, partial observations. Here are some such thoughts, basically a list of ideas that circle back on themselves, almost like palindromes. The coursing back, the repetitions in form and theme, are by design, the better to study emerging patterns in the pandemic’s poems.