“I feel like there should be a word for this … ”
That thought from Naomi Buck Palagi emerged as she considered the effects of months of global pandemic on her craft — the writing of poetry. Palagi moved to Columbus from Sewanee, Tennessee, this past summer. In a way, it was a homecoming; she’d lived in Mississippi for a time after college. In essence, she said, it’s often a challenge to write much these days that isn’t colored, overtly or not, by the pervasive state of COVID-19.
“You can’t write anything that’s not about the pandemic,” she said. “Even if you want to write a love poem, it’s like, a love poem during pandemic times. Or, going to the farmers’ market — during pandemic.”
Palagi and several other area poets share some insights, as well as poems, today. They are part of a creative community that has been interpreting the pandemic impact in ways that come most naturally to them. For some, it surfaces in current work. Others are absorbing, processing, storing away impressions that will nurture future poems, paintings or songs.
“I have a notebook that I keep, and I’m always adding notes in my phone,” said poet Catherine Pierce of Starkville. “I hope someday I’ll be able to sit down with these notes and make something out of them.”
There have been fewer quiet hours for writing in recent months, Pierce said. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University and co-director of the university’s creative writing program. Her recent focus has been on the Oct. 15 release of “Danger Days,” her latest collection of poems. The pandemic also sent her 6- and 9-year-old children home for virtual learning, and that requires more hands-on parent time.
“But I like to think I’m storing things up,” said Pierce. “Writing has always been a way to process how I’m feeling about everything. I like poems that don’t offer answers. I like poems where I see the thinking on the page.”
■■■
For poet and music producer Teon Taylor of Columbus, the pandemic has actually given him more creative time because his job hours changed.
“Even though COVID is like a dangerous time for people, it’s also like a coin with two sides, a double-edged sword,” he said, describing the additional free time he has to devote to his passions. He began writing poetry seven or so years ago, mainly inspired by music and his intense interest in lyrics.
“I guess poetry was kind of like my outlet, writing and expressing my mind,” he summed up.
Thomas Richardson is an English instructor at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science and also teaches a creative writing class. During the pandemic, he has been editing his original poems he anticipates will be out in book form next year. Like Pierce, recent changes at work and home have reduced writing time.
“When we switched to all virtual in March, that was pretty world-changing at school,” he said. His 3-year-old son also was at home full-time when his preschool closed. Richardson believes, though, that poets have an important role to fill.
“I think what poets can do is help us kind of take a step back from how quickly the news cycle is spinning … To me, that’s the poet’s task in the moment that we’re in right now, to help, I think, slow us down and value mourning. I think one thing we don’t do very well in our culture is we don’t do a very good job of national mourning. … We see we’re up to 220,000 (lost), and I don’t think we have really dealt with that. We just keep seeing it as a number. I think we’re just looking at numbers and taking in data and charts, and there’s a real human loss on a huge scale.”
Poets, he continued, are truth-tellers.
“They should be able to take what’s around us and cut to the core of what’s happening.”
Other poets, such as Kendall Dunkelberg and C.T. Salazar, both of Columbus, join Richardson and fellow wordsmiths in recognizing the power of poetry to reflect, interpret, inspire, console, heal. And, in the end, help us look forward.
In reflecting not only on the pandemic but also a larger civil unrest, Salazar, senior librarian at Columbus Air Force Base, said, “I think (poets’) role is to help us imagine a better future, to imagine where we live, but in some better way. … Poetry can help us humanize each other … I think the way that can happen is actually realizing and respecting each other’s humanity.”
Ash Wednesday
for Jane
by Kendall Dunkelberg
Olive-green cedar waxwings,
brushed with red tips and black eyeliner,
form a stark contrast against the brilliant
blue morning sky as they feed on berries
in the bare branches of your dogwood.
This after weeks of heavy rain
and dark skies, when we haven’t
seen you letting the dogs out or
keeping watch over the neighbors
on Fourth street from your porch.
We don’t yet know that you lie
in a hospital bed, that the cancer
has recurred, followed by a stroke.
Your daughters haven’t told us
you’ll be able to come home to die.
How can we know that you will miss
the even darker days to come, the news
of global pandemic and our own social
distancing, when neighbors will only talk
over the fence or wave from the road.
How can we know, in the midst of it all,
the wren will still belt out his love song
from atop a water oak’s broken crown
or that fleabane and butterweed
will still bloom in profusion
in every spring ditch and field.
■■■
The Catalpa Tree Poem
in memoriam for a mentor, and others, June 2020
by Naomi Buck Palagi
Today I saw a catalpa tree in a field, the first
since my return to Mississippi, and I thought
Catalpa! — my heart!
As if I would run to it.
The word itself, catalpa, a joy, a puzzle on my tongue.
Yet there stands the tree, solitary in a field I cannot enter.
Each leaf a giant heart dangling
mid-air. Each heart kindred to the negative space
where mine sits now numbed
from a death, deaths, so many deaths, so much
fragility.
Long black seed pods like so many guns
aimed at so many souls. And the flowers that will come, ahh!-
flowers I so admire, cream
dotted with burgundy slid down the throat, deep
solid cups, strewn
like the aftermath of a wedding, raided
mid-festivity.
I want to write an ode to the catalpa tree,
which grows so fast, so wily and strong by city sidewalk
or by southern field, tall, twisting, confident,
silhouette to wintered streetlamp or to open,
orange moon. I want to write an ode, I want
to write an ode, and
I have sorrow,
where this ode should be.
Catalpa,
generous heart, hardy seed, showering
of summer flowers, wait for me.
Sorrow is a season —
I shall sing to you soon
■■■
Unnamed poem
by Teon Taylor
Steady transitioning from graphite, ink, and keyboard.
Head on a swivel
tryna’ write my wrongs like a rite
so, I can turn right back into the little
young lyricist. Got my sword and my crystal
to cut off my limits.
Lineage blessed me with an oracle for penance.
Gift and a curse, but I remain headstrong
till I’m driven in a hearse.
Cruising down the street till’ I’m buried underneath.
And … COVID got me dancing with two left feet!
In my room conjuring wordy cuisine.
When you’re backed into a corner
your true self shows and now you’re the performer.
Shining all bright like a diamond in rough,
and dropping jewels in the water
my ancestors waded in and drowned
from the slaughter.
New age slavery of the mind is still in order
like Amazon online we’re still gifts from the borders
Straight from the Motherland to man-made marker…
■■■
Four Snakes Makes Our Flag
by C.T. Salazar
Said swallowtail and we butterflied. Said
there’s nothing to fight for and all the guns
broke. Said smoke. Motor finally broke down.
Needed a plural for river, needed
riven. you look just like your mother when evening lets on.
In the beginning, the Volkswagen was a bloodrust splotch.
a smear in the river, a heart half-buried. And in the
beginning was a barn full of horses kicking it down.
Said barn and the birds had somewhere to throw
their shadows. Said beauty and our mothers
smked like movie stars, our daddies whiskey-
darkened, bruise-giving. In the beginning,
a man said I love you but the river didn’t know how
to take that. By the time they found him he was something else.
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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