Vanity Fair on Joyelle McSweeney, Patricia Lockwood, and More Poetry in the Woodwork

"Poems are shooting up like roadside daffodils," writes Keziah Weir for Vanity Fair in a new piece about poetry's quarantine moment. "The world-disordering pandemic has infused new collections, written years ago but publishing now, with topical significance. Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne, published by Nightboat a month into America’s fight against the novel coronavirus, depicts a world of chemical spills and pestilence," she continues. Later:

But for many, the psychological and physiological toll of the pandemic has curtailed the ability to produce new work. “[C]an’t concentrate to read/work but I did manage to add one line to my Nabokov piece today,” poet Patricia Lockwood, presumed positive with COVID-19, tweeted alongside a photo of an otherwise blank word document that reads, “I will never look at the harlequins, bitch.”

For poet laureate [Joy] Harjo, at least part of the impetus to create is contractual: She has a memoir due in June. “That overrides any anxiety,” she says. While she hasn’t yet directly addressed the pandemic in her music or writing, the bound nature of her existence is influencing her work. In confinement, she says, “you wind up sitting there at the kitchen table with your demons who have haunted you and harassed you from day one. You’re confined, so you either have to make friends with them or continue the fight.”

Read on at Vanity Fair.