Poetry and Pandemic

Poetry is often engendered by isolation, which perhaps is why there are so many poems written in prison, like Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. And if you are not in the unhappy situation of finding yourself imprisoned, there is always the option of self-isolation. Yeats, for example, was able to find the inspiration for his most haunting collection, The Tower, in the Hiberno-Norman tower of Thoor Ballylea, which bears a striking resemblance to a dungeon, and which has been described by Seamus Heaney as the most important building in Ireland. It’s no wonder, then, that the Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to a lot of poetry – suddenly it was as if the whole nation was on a Hawthornden retreat. There were poems of loss, of refinding nature, of melancholy, and, as restrictions loosened, of nervous celebration, in a variety of forms from instagram poetry to doggerel to free verse to experimental poetries. There was even one anachronistic mock-epic in rhyming couplets, Armando Iannucci’s Pandemonium. What many of these poems lacked was a sense of a form appropriate to the pandemic, and this was something I began to explore in a long sequence of poems, still in progress, entitled P is for Pandemics. Among the more successful writings to emerge from the pandemic were Gabriel Josipovici’s 100 Days, which made use of an Oulipian alphabetical form, a form that I’d anthologised in The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which came out shortly before the pandemic; and Alec Finlay’s curated Scotland’s Covid Memorial, which again made use of an Oulipian ...