What can we learn from poets and writers during the pandemic?

Physician/writer William Carlos Williams once wrote, "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." In the quiet of quarantine, can we cultivate the ear to find ourselves in poetry?

Posted 12:12 p.m. Apr 19, 2020 — Updated 12:12 p.m. Apr 19, 2020

Liisa Ogburn

It is cherry blossom season in Japan, a ten-day period when people take time off work and flock to the parks with picnics. Having lived there before moving here, I am aware that it is celebrated not just for the ethereal beauty, but especially because it is a tangible reminder of how fleeting beauty (and life) is.

I have spent the last three days in my garden, dividing and moving the lenten roses and heuchera, trimming the dead fronds of ferns, weeding, weeding, weeding, and mulching. I found gardening quite by surprise thirty years ago while attending a Finnish Folk School, which had a farm attached to it. All students and teachers were required to work ten hours a week. It could be in the kitchen, on the farm, preparing the sauna, or in the winter, cutting the hole in the lake beside the sauna. I enjoyed the solitary nature of digging potatoes, carrots and parsnips, picking strawberries or currants. The truth was I had gone there after graduating from college because I hadn’t known what else to do with myself. Finland, where my mother’s extended family lived, made as much sense as anything.

There was a simplicity to life there then that is echoed now here in this period of quarantine.

It’s taken awhile to adjust, or rather, to unravel. I feel my brain loosening like the hard-packed roots I loosened when subdividing the primrose. Neighbors walk by. We smile. I watch the parade of house finch that are building a nest in my gutter leave to eat and find nesting materials and return. Back and forth.

There is only so much news one can take in these days. For a period, because I could not remember the exact figures, but felt it critical I should, I made neat columns in my day book from the most reliable sources (covid cases and deaths globally, nationally, and in our state). My brain was running at 120 rpm’s. Every moment had to be “productive.” I’m learning a different kind of productivity now.

Yesterday, I listened to farmer/poet Wendell Berry read, from his kitchen table in Kentucky, his poem, “How to be a poet (to remind myself).” It begins, "Sit down. Be quiet."

In the podcast “On Being,” Ellen Davis, a theologian at Duke and friend of Berry's, said one cannot read a poem with half concentration, like one might a technical manual or newspaper. One must apply one’s full attention.

In her book Nine Gates, poet Jane Hirshfield, referenced some of the ways well-known writers would prepare themselves to write. One cannot dash off a poem like a grocery list. Sure, here and there, a poem like “Kindness” by Naomi Shihad Nye, may come in a flash, may “write itself,” but undoubtedly, Nye and Berry and other artists we know and love were preparing the soil of their imagination for many years beforehand.

It is hard to have the kind of imagination required of poets and writers, filmmakers and artists, required really of anyone applying the art of good parenting or doctoring, teaching, ministering cleaning, or working the cash register in a culture that propels us to be productive at every moment, even when we are retired.

And I know that having a livelihood and purpose are cornerstones to a good life, but is busy-ness part of that equation?

In a conversation writer Cheryl Strayed recently had with writer Pico Iyer for her new podcast Sugar Calling, Pico told the story of the California wildfires that burned down his home some thirty years ago and all his belongings. All the notebooks of notes that were to become his first book. In a moment of insight, he decided he wasn’t going to simply rebuild. It was the radical opportunity to start anew. At the moment, he is slowly writing his thirteenth book from his desk in a small apartment in Nara, Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife without a car or bicycle or even a cell phone.

I’m not suggesting that one needs to give up their cell phone after this global pandemic has recessed enough for the schools and stores, churches and YMCAs to re-open. I am wondering, though, if there are equivalent things one might "give up?"

After all, the cherry blossom season is so beautiful, and also, so fleeting.

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