10 Poems to Read in Isolation
During social distancing, social media is becoming increasingly key. Being cooped up indoors all day can cause disastrous outcomes such as trying yoga, or at worst, turning to TikTok. In between working out how much cheese is too much cheese and being self-tasked with writing a literature article of some sort, I have been gently pushing myself to read some poems. I’m not going to pretend this piece is coming from a sunlit bed with crisp, clean sheets while I effortlessly arrange my perfect morning hair and take a sip of herbal tea against the gentle hum of my vintage vinyl. This is a messy, messy time. None of that working from home stuff is sitting well with me. We are isolated during a pandemic, trying to create new normal. Once I started to accept this to be true, amidst the pressure of focussing on deadlines and wondering why I cannot come up with any more excuses not to go on a run, I started to accept the “failures” of my isolation life as reminders that I am still lucky and alive. Suitably, I am sitting in a cat hair-covered armchair with my feet propped up on a polar bear teddy on a longboard.
While reading this article, feel free to brush past my annotations or return to them after reading the poems. As per copyright, this piece lists only snippets of most poems, but they can all be found online for free through The Poetry Foundation. So here it is. A collection of a few of the best poems for our new normal, whether that’s to be cherished, shared, read aloud, dog-eared, or whispered to yourself at 3am on your second trip to the fridge. The world is your inkwell.
1. From, The Universe as Primal Scream by Tracy K Smith
“Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes,
Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space.
Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father,
Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready
To meet what refuses to let us keep anything
For long. What teases us with blessings,
Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great
Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor,
To sweep our short lives clean. How mean
Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle.
The neighbor chopping onions through a wall.
All of it just a hiccough against what may never
Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it,
Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something
They have no name for has begun to insist
Upon being born.”
The attractiveness of the messy versus the all-too-perfect-ness of the clean in this piece feels good in my soul. While social media - like a wizard, thief, or a great wind - attempts to sweep our short lives clean, we might find solace in the knowledge of our insignificance. Or, it might scare the living daylight out of us. But that’s half the fun.
2. From, The Blue Dress by Saeed Jone
“Her blue dress is a silk train is a river
is water seeps into the cobblestone streets of my sleep, is still raining
is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles…”
Saeed Jones has a way of turning words into liquid gold. This piece sounds like home and like magic. I have very little else to say about it. Drink it in.
3. I would not paint – a picture, Emily Dickinson
“I would not paint — a picture —
I'd rather be the One
It's bright impossibility
To dwell — delicious — on —
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare — celestial — stir —
Evokes so sweet a torment —
Such sumptuous — Despair —
I would not talk, like Cornets —
I'd rather be the One
Raised softly to the Ceilings —
And out, and easy on —
Through Villages of Ether —
Myself endued Balloon
By but a lip of Metal —
The pier to my Pontoon —
Nor would I be a Poet —
It's finer — Own the Ear —
Enamored — impotent — content —
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts — of Melody!”
Let’s throw a couple of classic pieces in this list. I would not paint - a picture is by the eccentric, mysterious poet whose work has permeated through the cultural fabric of America and beyond for well over a century now. This piece is peppered with interruptions; it resists being breathed aloud. And yet the tone in its sturdiness through so few words, if you’ll forgive the cliché, manages to resist this resistance. Dickinson is a historically crucial artist. Right now, I am finding a new empathy for the poet who spent so much of her life in isolation.
4. From, Cocktails with Orpheus by Terrance Hayes
“The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands
me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind
I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound
as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid
out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made.”
If you haven’t read Terrance Hayes, I strongly encourage you to make yourself a cuppa and embark on a YouTube deep dive. There’s something leveling right now about our noise making “a kind of silence.”
5. From, Taking Off My Clothes by Carolyn Forche
“In the night I come to you and it seems a shame
to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.
You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.”
Forche is a force to be reckoned with. Her work, particularly that which reflects her experience with human rights advocacy, is confronting and unabashed, and rightly so, award winning. This piece is brilliant in its concision; it’s short, simple, and not-so-sweet.
6. From, Bullet Points by Jericho Brown
“I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in.”
Check out Jericho Brown on YouTube. This poem isn’t a specific choice for our “new normal” but it is a piece I return to again and again.
7. To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship by Katherine Philips
“I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.
This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept,
So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceived.
For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;
Which now inspires, cures and supplies,
And guides my darkened breast:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My joy, my life, my rest.
No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth
To mine compared can be:
They have but pieces of the earth,
I’ve all the world in thee.
Then let our flames still light and shine,
And no false fear control,
As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul.”
Here is another classic piece. Katherine Philips is a seventeenth century poet and one of the few, pitifully, few female writers of her era recognised in the all-too-patriarchal, white and heteronormative cannon. Perhaps she was a queer woman or perhaps she just felt strongly enough about her circle of women to establish a Society of Friendship. Regardless, this piece is an example of how her work undoubtedly matched up with her male contemporaries.
8. From, Toy Boat by Ocean Vuong
“toy boat
toy leaf dropped
from a toy tree
waiting
waiting
as if the sp-
arrows
thinning above you
are not
already pierced
by their own names”
Born in Saigon and raised in Connecticut, Ocean Vuong’s poems are beautiful and brief masterclasses in challenging form. Toy Boat achieves brilliant things with little more than a whisper.
9. From, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors by Richard Siken
“Deep footprint, it leaves a hole. You’d break your
heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull
when the mind swells. A thought bigger than your
own head. Try it. Seriously. Cover more ground.
I thought of myself as a city and I licked my lips.
I thought of myself as a nation and I wrung my hands,
I put a thing in your hand. Will you defend yourself?
From me, I mean. Let’s kill something. The mind
moves forward, the paint layers up: glop glop and
shellac. I shovel the color into our faces, I shovel our
faces into our faces. They look like me. I move them
around. I prefer to blame others, it’s easier. King me.”
A very dear friend gave me Richard Siken’s book Crush for my 21st Birthday. It was hers from her teenage years, and so the book is filled with pencil annotations and little notes. It’s such a precious gift. I often feel that Siken’s poems are, rather fittingly, windows into other selves. Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors combines ruminations on colossal events - colonisation, war - with coming-of-age against socially conditioned masculinity.
10. From, We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky
“I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.”
Last but certainly not least, a piece by my favourite contemporary poet, Ilya Kaminsky. Born in the former Soviet Union, Kaminsky’s work deals with war, terror, culpability and human resilience. This piece is an excerpt from his 2019 poetry book, Deaf Republic. It is not a means to a blissful escape right now, but it’s a beautiful and challenging collection. I hope these pieces have filled a much-needed break or perhaps even sparked some inspiration. A world without art is unbearable to think about.
Explore: https://www.poetryfoundation.org
Meg Edwards is a third year student at the University of Edinburgh studying English Literature and History.