Pandemic Meditations
OSGF
Advice I have would be – if you haven’t bought a pair of binoculars – buy a pair of binoculars! Just being able to see the world around you more clearly and closely, even if you don’t want to learn birds, if you just want to look at squirrels or whatever it is that lives in your backyard, it has really helped me feel centered. It’s a way to get away from screens, to feel focused, and focus on focusing. It’s a gift to yourself – even a cheap pair can really help you engage with nature in a new way.
Pandemic Pantoum – Birds
Commentary: The birds featured in this poem turned out to be yellow-crowned night herons, which is certainly the most thrilling bird sighting I have had in my life. These herons are relatively uncommon in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and have built their nest in a tree behind an apartment complex, fairly far from pond or river. I am not sure what drew them to this spot, but they have been excellent company during this pandemic.
Pandemic Pantoum – Desire
Commentary: Early in the pandemic I began writing pantoums, which seemed like the perfect poetic form for this crisis. Pantoums have a variety of rules and I admit I followed only some of them, and at times loosely: in each stanza, lines 2 and 4 become lines 1 and 3 of the following, for however many stanzas you like. The poem should then end with the line with which it began (if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can also employ a rhyme scheme to this maddening form; I however, couldn’t handle that challenge).
I was drawn to this form since my days, now, often feel maddeningly uniform in their patterns. This structure allowed me some release from the frustrations of these days, a way to turn their sameness into something new. The pantoums featured as part of this project are part of a longer and ongoing sequence.
In the Age of the Virus
Commentary: This is one of the first poems I wrote during the pandemic. It has been interesting returning to it over the last few weeks, as social isolation guidelines begin to loosen. I feel like the poem comes out of my desire for this moment in human history to be transformative and educational, an opportunity for us to, collectively, as a species, despite the many differences in our backgrounds and situations, to envision a different way of being in the world. A way that is gentler to each other as well as to those with whom we share the planet.
Battered and Shiny
Commentary: This poem was written in response to a prompt provided by MTSU Write, an from-home mentoring program housed in Middle Tennessee State University’s English department. The prompt was shared during a Facebook live event in support of National Poetry Month, featuring Jennifer Kates, Director of MTSU Write, Kory Wells, another local poet, and myself. As a community, we generated words and ideas in relation to the prompt and this is what came out of this exercise for me. I found the prompt lent itself to expressing the mix of tedium, longing, and observation that has characterized my experience of the pandemic.
Here are the prompt guidelines if you’d like to try it on your own:
1. Write down three phrases that begin with “I’m tired…”
2. Write down three images from nature. Feel free to move these parts around as you work on the draft.
3. Insert the word ‘dangerous’ somewhere in the poem.
4. Insert the name of a specific plant.
5. End the poem with a question.
Title the poem after you’ve finished writing it, not using language that occurs in the poem itself.
Q&A With Amie Whittemore
Where have you been the past few months?
I’ve been in Murfreesboro, Tennessee since the beginning of the pandemic. This time in quarantine and isolation has forced me to engage with what’s close. There is a park near me I go to a few times a week that I really enjoy – I get to see a variety of birds I never even knew were nearby, and I’ve just been trying to cultivate a deeper relationship with my neighborhood. In terms of ‘emotional place’ I move and cycle through moments of hope that this is a moment for humanity to change some of our troubling choices – as well as despair because it seems like we are not taking this opportunity for what it could be. Personally, I’m trying to use this moment to take stock of what I value in my own life.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
I am a bit of a magpie. There are few topics I think are completely off limits. The main issues I keep circling back to would be those surrounding intimacy – whether it be intimacy with the self and trying to understand the self and or intimacy with the world we inhabit – especially with nonhuman characters or living things, and how to de-centralized the human voice in writing about them. A lot of times I think we mourn climate change because we think about what we are going to lose and not about what we are doing to these other life forms and what they are losing. So, I see part of my work as a poet as trying to find ways to be intimate with that grief but not make it my own, I guess. And then, I would also say intimacy with other humans is another keystone of my work, be it exploring relationships that are familial or romantic or friendly, but just really thinking about what it means to trust and be vulnerable in a world, especially now, when that feels very threatening.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
I’m not very good at sticking in one spot – even in a day of writing. One, I am writing poems that directly respond to the pandemic. And those have taken a variety of forms. I’m really in a revising mode – I’ve drafted a lot of poems in the last year that I’ve printed and gone back to – so there’s a series of poems entitled “Vulnerability Study” where I am trying to explore what it means to be vulnerable. There’s a series called the “American Dream” where I try to examine a lot of myths that I feel are handed down to a lot of people in the United States. There’s also a series of mandrake poems in the voice of a female and male mandrake speaking to each other through the weather. So, working on everything is the short answer! I’m trying to see how all of these pieces might fit together.
How has your artistic practice changed during this time?
I think it’s become a bit more inward facing – one of the first things I questioned when I was getting into quarantine mode was what is the future of publishing – what does it even mean to publish or to publish well? It’s so easy to get caught up in that in poetry. Because it feels good when people want to publish your work, but if you’re so caught up in that game that you lose sight of why you’re actually doing the writing, you’ve lost what initially drew you to the work. So, for me that has meant letting go of caring as much about prestige publishing as I once did. A local group asked me to share a poem on Facebook – that’s something I normally would never do. I would say “no it needs to be published in a ‘real’ place,” but this time I thought “you know what, what does this matter?” And it was nice to have that immediate response to something I was working on about the pandemic and the community – and to give it to the actual audience who cares about it, not an audience of distant poetry peers that I’m trying to impress or something. So, I think that’s one of the big things, and two, just trying to be in the world, to be in nature, to go on these walks but not to always be looking for material, to harvest something from the world. To just be in the world and let that be enough.
Has COVID-19 shifted how you think about the natural world?
I should start with saying I’m someone who has been waiting for the apocalypse to hit for a while. I’ve thought about what that would look like – I’ve read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and other novels featuring apocalyptic scenarios. I guess I just never thought it would be a pandemic. I thought maybe a drought or other severe weather plus the resulting climate refugees, some scenario along those lines would be the crisis (of course, it still could be!) – and how society would break down or, in a more positive spin, begin to transform because of such a crisis. I guess the pandemic has made me realize that even though I think about our impact on the world, I’m still so clueless on how so many things work, the many many levels of interconnectedness in which we are ensconced. I’m reading Spillover by David Quammen now (about, no surprise, viruses migrating from animal to human hosts) and I realized “oh I didn’t know anything about this!” In the book, Quammen really argues against romanticizing virus spillover. He’s like “this isn’t the revenge of the rainforest – viruses don’t have motivations.” But to me, the world is out of balance and the virus is a symptom of that imbalance. I see the pandemic, if not as nature’s “revenge,” as a consequence of capitalist, consumerist, imperialist relationships with the earth.
I mourn the many losses we are experiencing, the lives we are losing, and I am frustrated with our government’s handling of this crisis. I also recognize that the suffering the pandemic is causing is disproportionately felt by the working class, by people of color, by those who have been historically oppressed. We need to dismantle the systems that sustain white supremacy and wealth inequities, systems that value profit over people and planet. These systems devalue both human and nonhuman life and carry with them severe consequences, this pandemic being just one of them. I hope the pandemic is a call to action (as if our warming planet wasn’t already such a call!) and that we, as a species, find a way to live more gently on the earth, but I don’t know if we will.