• Poetry for a Pandemic
• Richard Levine (bio)

If Wallace Stevens were alive today, he might well write "Seventeen Ways of Looking at a Pandemic," the additions to his baker's dozen for viewing blackbirds being for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse–sword, famine, wild beasts, plague. Alice Quinn, editor of the anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness (2020), gives us eighty-five views, or more precisely eighty-five American poets looking at how the COVID-19 virus has changed our lives. The title is drawn from Pablo Neruda's poem "Keeping Quiet." "The poems in this anthology were gathered quickly," Quinn says in her introduction, "within forty days, beginning March 27." The pandemic and the developing protocols were still very much "a sudden strangeness" to us all at that time, so the poems look and feel like fresh prints in unmarked snow. By necessity, they were made more of first impressions, imagination, and discovery than of knowing. And looking out the window offered by each poet/poem, we can see tracks leading away, approaching, circling, all impressions of our own uncertainty. For all their diversity of form, focus, objective, and personality, each poem feels alive and wrestling toward some as yet out of reach understanding. It seems akin to the research into the COVID virus that we read about so hopefully in the news. The scientists, like poets, begin in observation and arrive at conclusions that nonetheless often pose more questions than answers.

Good writing is often characterized as making the ordinary extraordinary. And while the writing here is consistently fine, many of the anthology's poems strive to express a longing for the ordinary to again be ordinary, or as least the way our lives were. "I want to go back to who I was," pleads Dennis Nurkse, in "Conversation Behind the White Curtain." "The house with a beehive in the pines, / the brook breaking all night over stones. / ... I want to go back to being a body. A voice with eyes."

Similarly, in John Freeman's "Cards," a man calls his wife to a window to "see a couple across the way / playing cards at their dinner table." Watching, he envies their casualness, their contentment, the seeming ordinariness of their lives; "oh, I see them most nights" his wife tells him. "They / eat dinner and then move over to play cards. They laugh / and laugh."

In Joshua Bennett's "Dad Poem," a father-to-be is deprived of the always extraordinary yet ordinary experience of seeing your tadpole-sized child's first sonogram image. "But I'm the father," he insists, when a nurse bars him from following his wife to the examination room, saying "No visitors allowed." Alone, he appeals to his as yet [End Page 24] unborn child, "What can I be to you now / smallest one, across the expanse / of category & world catastrophe, / what love persists / in a time without touch."

In "The End of Poetry," Ada Limón also acknowledges the absence of touch as a characteristic of our pandemic lifestyle. There is perhaps a hint of Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much with Us," in the twenty lines in which she inventories the earnest but inadequate ways we try to occupy or distract ourselves from our sheltered-in lives. Seventeen times she cries, "Enough," in response to all the efforts to evade boredom and the frustration of experiencing too much closeness and remoteness at the same time. Even language, or perhaps especially language, fails to get at the problem, until, in line twenty-one, she asserts: "I am asking you to touch me."

In the villanelle "In My Heart I Cannot Accept it All," Susan Kinsolving advances and defends the idea that we can and must restore the ordinary to the ordinary. "Forgive yourself for thinking small // ... it's the little stuff that brings delight: / a book, a drink. Keep thinking small." But in the final lines of the closing quatrain she reverses from prep-talking us, to begging...

• 流行诗
• 理查德·莱文（生物）

如果华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens）今天还活着，他很可能会写“十七种看待大流行病的方式”，这是他面包师一打中观看黑鸟的补充内容，它们是为启示录的骑士们准备的-剑，饥荒，野兽，瘟疫。艾丽丝·奎因（Alice Quinn），《突然发生的奇怪事件》选集的编辑（2020年）给出了八十五种观点，或更确切地说是八十五名美国诗人，研究了COVID-19病毒如何改变了我们的生活。标题取材自巴勃罗·聂鲁达（Pablo Neruda）的诗《保持安静》。奎因在引言中说：“从3月27日开始的40天内，这种选集中的诗歌很快就被收集了。” 大流行和不断发展的协议在当时对我们所有人来说仍然是“突然的陌生感”，因此这首诗看起来和感觉都像是未标记雪中的新鲜印刷品。必然地，他们更多地是受到第一印象，想象力和发现的影响，而不是由于了解。看着每位诗人/诗歌所提供的窗口，我们可以看到轨迹在驶离，接近，盘旋，这些都是我们对自己不确定性的印象。由于形式，重点，目标和个性各异，每首诗都充满生机，正在朝着某种难以理解的方向努力。似乎类似于我们希望在新闻中读到的对COVID病毒的研究。科学家们像诗人一样，开始观察并得出结论，尽管这样，他们提出的问题往往多于答案。

好的写作通常被描述为使平凡与众不同。尽管这里的写作总是很好，但许多选集的诗歌都在努力表达对平凡再次成为平凡的渴望，或者至少表达了我们的生活方式。丹尼斯·努克塞（Dennis Nurkse）在“白色帷幕背后的对话”中恳求说：“我想回到原来的状态。” “那栋房子里有一个蜂巢，松树丛生，/小溪整夜在石头上挣扎。/ ...我想回到身体上来。一个带有眼睛的声音。”

同样，在约翰·弗里曼（John Freeman）的“纸牌”中，一个男人叫他的妻子到一个窗户上，“看到对面的一对/餐桌上的纸牌”。看着他，他羡慕他们的休闲，满足，生活中看似平凡的生活。他的妻子告诉他：“哦，我整晚都看得到他们。” “他们/吃晚餐，然后移到玩纸牌。他们笑/笑。”

在约书亚·贝内特（Joshua Bennett）的“爸爸诗”中，准父亲被剥夺了看到extraordinary大小的孩子的第一张超声图像的一贯非凡而又普通的经历。“但是我是父亲，”当护士禁止他跟随妻子到检查室时，他说：“不允许来访者。”他坚持道。他独自一人呼吁尚未出生的孩子[第24页]，“在分类和世界大灾难中，我现在能成为您/最小的一个，/爱持续存在/在没有联系的时候。”

在《诗歌的终结》中，艾达·利蒙（AdaLimón）也承认缺乏触摸是我们这种大流行生活方式的特征。在二十行中，华兹华斯的《世界对我们来说太多了》可能暗示着她盘点了我们试图占领或分散我们庇护所生活的认真但不充分的方式。她为逃避无聊和同时经历太多亲密和偏僻而感到沮丧的一切努力，她哭了十七次，“足够”。甚至语言，或者也许是语言也无法解决问题，直到她在第21行中断言：“我要你碰我。”

苏珊·金索芬（Susan Kinsolving）在影片《我心中我无法接受一切》中扮演恶棍，提出并捍卫了我们可以而且必须将平凡恢复为平凡的观念。“原谅自己想小，//……带点欢乐的小东西：/一本书，一杯酒。保持小脑子。” 但是在最后四行诗的最后几行中，她从准备谈话变成了乞求...