In March, 1743, plague struck the port of Messina in Sicily. Suspicious deaths had been recorded on a cargo ship in the harbor; the ship was duly burned, but too late. Almost three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants perished. More than a thousand miles away, in London, where the Great Plague of 1665 had not been forgotten, an enterprising bookseller published a compendium of information for anxious fellow-citizens. The volume offered an explainer of contemporary British law on plague and quarantine, reprinted a parliamentary proclamation requiring ships to “perform Quarantine, that come from Infected Places,” and gave a horrifying account of the disease “now raging at Messina.” But it wasn’t all practical. People didn’t just want to be told what to do if the worst happened; they wanted fragments to shore against their ruin, voices and stories that proved disaster could be overcome and transfigured into something else. The book opened with Thucydides’s eyewitness account of the plague of Athens and segued into two modern verse translations from Lucretius on the same topic: “What drives a Pestilence, swoln big with Fate, / To waste, and lay a Nation desolate.” The bookseller had sensed the time was ripe for an anthology.
This year, desolation is back, and so, accordingly, are anthologies—promising to capture what the present feels like and remind us that we’re not alone in what we’re going through. In two waves during the spring and early summer of this year, the scholar Alice Quinn (who is the former poetry editor at this magazine) solicited work from poets across the country, gathering more than a hundred pieces in “Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic” (Knopf). Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground. It documents body bags in refrigerated trucks, Mardi Gras superspreading floats, lonely eels in public aquariums who miss human contact, the exploding price of toilet paper and milk.
Etymologically, “anthology” refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s modern origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision in one volume of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force. In Quinn’s alphabetical ordering of the poems, points of connection between them are left, as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes wrote in their 1982 anthology, “The Rattle Bag,” to “discover themselves”—much as private fears coalesce into shared conversations and strategies in times of crisis. Several poets share a wide-lens approach, looking to history as a way of muffling the shrillness of the present. Influenza in Europe in 1918 or yellow fever in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century: we have been here before. Others narrow their aperture, looking no farther than out the window. Nature serves both traditional and untraditional functions in a pandemic. From one perspective, it’s there as it has always been, getting on with things, sticking to the familiar cyclical rhythms that poets have tracked since Hesiod, while human life takes a sharp turn for the worse. In “Two Days in March,” John Okrent catalogues a civilization left behind: “The café is closed. The bar is closed. The daffodils / are heedless. Today, the first death in Tacoma.” On another view, all catastrophes are connected, and the natural world’s slide toward ruin—“glaciers melting far away and faster / than we knew”—both holds a mirror up to the human disaster and suggests that our disappearance from the planet might be no bad thing. As Katha Pollitt writes, “Perhaps it is best that we go away now.”
Writing about and to a moment always requires finding a poetic form that feels particular, but the imperative to “make it new” looks all the more urgent at times when institutions seem on the verge of collapse. Quinn’s anthology collects several not-quite-sonnets, in which poets’ deliberate coloring outside the lines reflects the messiness and intransigence of the facts. Claudia Rankine’s “Weather” turns line endings into bait-and-switch traps, swerving between meanings to disconcert and unsettle: “Social distancing? Six feet / under for underlying conditions.” Susan Kinsolving’s villanelle obsessively circles the same two rhymes, keeping pace with the anxiety of a mind trying to cope.
Formal disruptions also dramatize the “malign inequities” that the pandemic has revealed in the population’s access to health care, food, and safe working conditions. In Edward Hirsch’s “Eight People,” disconnected couplets and short, broken lines process how it feels “to be living / at one remove / from each other.” In Evie Shockley’s “an inoculation against innocence,” the division of lines into two halves, like the columns of a balance sheet, measures the widening gap between “the folks who can stay / at home” and “the ones who can’t.” Throughout, poets interrogate the use of their work and the limits of the imagination when reality presses in. Enough of verse’s rhetoric and deixis, its empty “pointing to the world,” Ada Limón writes in “The End of Poetry,” what we want is contact: “I am asking you to touch me.”
Exceptional times ask to be recorded and responded to as they happen. We don’t need a historian to tell us that the events of 2020 will have enduring effects; we’re already processing their strangeness and bearing the marks of trying to adapt. Quinn’s isn’t the only anthology of the past few years to take urgency as its curatorial principle. The poetry we’re told that we need right now is hot off the press, immediate, reactive, political. There are “Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration,” “50 Poems Now,” “Poems of Protest and Revolution”: collections cast as miniature insurgencies, reckonings, defenders of truth. Such anthologies present themselves not as distillations of the very best ever written, or gatherings suited to particular seasons or moods, but—either modestly or immodestly, depending on how you look at it—no more or less than what the times demand, records that have to be kept.
Contemporary anthologists emphasize the diversity of their contributors, the way they range in gender, sexuality, age, and social background, while taking care to point out affinities and connections. If the point of poetry collections now is to speak up for our present concerns (to “amplify a nation,” in the poet Richard Blanco’s phrase), they have to represent who we are: they speak for us if they speak like us, offering through their inclusive coverage a model of society in microcosm. Pandemics are disconcerting because they reveal that people are not only more similar than they like to think but, in some essential ways, identical—made up of the same cells, the same weaknesses. At the same time, they’re disconcerting because they point out demographic differences we’re ordinarily able to ignore, like the chasms between rich and poor. Anthologies, with their diverse voices but convergent ideas, envision a public sphere in which solidarity doesn’t require uniformity. They show us bound—literally—by sympathy and ideals rather than mere biology.
Publishers and editors have long seen the anthology as a means of intervening in political or social affairs. At the turn of the eighteenth century, anonymous collections of “Poems on Affairs of State” appeared every few years, containing satires that smeared monarchs, politicians, and their mistresses (Charles II’s favorite, Nell Gwyn, was dismissed as a “hare-brained, wrinkled, stopped-up whore”) and fuelling anti-court discontent. A hundred years later, as the British government strove to quash homegrown radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution, conservative satirists compiled an anthology of vicious “anti-Jacobin” poetry to sway public opinion. During the Great War and Spanish Civil War, poets published anthologies with subtle or not-so-subtle propaganda aims, designed to stir up outrage against the common enemy. The British poets Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, in their introduction to “Poems for Spain” (1939), assured readers that many of the pieces they collected were “written from inside Spain; they have the merits and defects of being extremely close to experience.” In their view, being on the ground mattered for poets, just as we think of it mattering now for correspondents or protestors or essential workers. Once the war was over and the register of crisis lost, poetry, they feared, would return to being “the exalted medium of a few specialists”—art made on high that could only observe history, never enact it. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” their friend W. H. Auden wrote that year.
The same couldn’t have been said of other places in Europe in 1939, or of Britain in previous centuries, when censorship crackdowns against anthology compilers who overstepped the line made it clear that what they published had power to do damage. Now, of course, anthologists are hardly worth persecuting. “How can a poet write truth to power when power doesn’t read poems?” Amit Majmudar asks in the introduction to his “Resistance, Rebellion, Life” anthology.
What version—or versions—of “truth” might a modern to-the-moment anthology supply? Majmudar argues, as many have, that in dark and mendacious times we need poetry because its careful, precise way with language is a form of truth-telling. The thing about careful and precise poetry, though, is that it takes a while to write, requiring solitude and second thoughts. Though it may present as immediate, unfiltered—Quinn’s introduction emphasizes that her anthology was assembled “quickly,” at the pace at which everything from vaccine manufacturing to grocery shopping happens these days—its immediacy is always to some degree feigned, a dramatic fiction that the reader is in on. Trump “spits out every coarse thing that crosses his mind, as it occurs to him; we agonize over and refine each phrase we put out there, wondering if it rings true,” Majmudar writes. If truthful poetry comes of agonizing, refining, and redrafting, it can’t be immediate and urgent in the way that journalism or propaganda can. Nor would we want it to be.
As documents of collective action, anthologies may have manifesto-like qualities—Spender and Lehmann’s contemporary Michael Roberts connected the idea of bringing together politically like-minded writers with the Communist struggle in his anthology “New Country” (1933)—but their “call to action,” in Quinn’s phrase, is unlikely now to be the reason people take to the streets. What they offer instead is the historical moment seen long-sightedly, from many directions—a collective account of the times that’s more considered, more patient, and more productively ambiguous than other kinds of record can manage. People aren’t always practical or philosophical in a crisis; sometimes they can be trivial. Anthologies allow them to be all three. “There’s a pandemic and I think my arms are fat,” Catherine Cohen writes. Truth-telling comes in many forms.
