Poetry of Praise in the Time of Pandemic

In this year of many losses, a first-time poetry teacher found solace in reading, writing, and teaching odes in the South.

by Joshua Martin

Poetry is the art of the specific. In order to write about big universal themes, you must first explore the small, seemingly unrelated details of our world. You want to write a poem about love? Good. Start by writing about bread, how the music of yeast and the rhythms of enzymes rise a world of flour from nothing. Death? Even better. Write about heirloom tomatoes bleeding over a chef’s knife in a restaurant that’s a week away from closing. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining,” Russian novelist Anton Chekhov once said, “show me the glint of light on broken glass.” 

Bread, tomatoes, broken glass: poetry is fundamentally about praise, and I think in order to write truly worthwhile poems, you must learn to praise that which we have been conditioned to accept as mundane. This is especially true when finding joy in anything seems as difficult as ever.

I taught my first introductory poetry workshop in the spring of 2020. To say I was excited is an understatement. I savored the prospect of teaching my favorite poets, and I wanted my students to appreciate the power of an unexpected internal rhyme in a poem that appeared as formless and chaotic as Waffle House hash browns. I spent the better part of Thanksgiving and winter breaks poring over my syllabus, fine-tuning my schedule to include a survey of poetic forms and contemporary poetics, ranging from free verse to villanelles and sonnets. Curiously, I neglected to include my favorite form — the ode, that poetry of immense praise that, at its best, flows with the fervor of a spiritual chant. 

There is only so much time, I reasoned, and for the first two months of the semester, that scheduling decision carried us through John Keats and Lucille Clifton, through Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. I even threw in some Tupac, for good measure, discussing how the first line of his poem “In The Depths of Solitude” — “i exist in the depths of solitude” — is Keats-ian in its Romantic impulse toward negative capability, that state in which the self is comfortable in uncertainty.

Though most of my students had never written poetry before, after a while they felt comfortable exploring their distinctly Southern landscapes through imagery — from Jacksonville’s “winding, foggy, disreputable night-alley / linking every rusted-out seaport / from Newport News to Punta Gorda. / alligator farms, Stuckey’s, drag strips / and half-hearted tourist traps” (Joe Page’s “Bottom”) to middle Georgia’s “cracked salty sunflower seeds / throbbing highways / blistering suns” (Logan Knapp’s “On The Road To Middle Georgia.”) As the weeks progressed, I was happy that their voices were beginning to be shaped by the places they called home. And because my students grew up in the South, using the act of sucking a honeysuckle stem to discuss metaphor did not fall on deaf ears.

When COVID-19 forced my class online in March, the schedule that I had so meticulously prepared seemed, at best, pointless and, at worst, unnecessarily rigid in a world that demanded fluidity. How could I make my students study iambic pentameter and other metrical forms when their lives were losing structure daily, when their experiences with the external world extended — if they were privileged enough to not have to work to help support their families — from their bedrooms to their kitchens?

Having been laid-off from my second job as a server and resigned, like most, to the social awkwardness of Zoom, I, too, was feeling the effects of quarantine. Yet, I was also feeling compelled to write poems of praise — for the shrinking of my world to my apartment led to a greater reflection on the objects and environments that I felt would either disappear or, if they made it to the new post-quarantine reality, take on much greater significance. 

I began writing poems centered on to-go boxes and buffets, on the absence of toilet paper on the shelves of Kroger and the abundance of community in cities such as Barcelona, where people gathered on their balconies to hear pianist Alberto Gestoso play “My Heart Will Go On,” laughing and crying as the Rioja flowed. And I returned once more to the visceral odes of Pablo Neruda, that master of the mundane who could turn socks into objects of veneration, and celebrate the onion with such exuberance you would have thought he was proclaiming the beauty of the Hope Diamond. 

In this new world of face masks, I turned to the ode as a means of finding some joy and semblance of normalcy, and I encouraged my students to do the same.

* * *

The contemporary ode relies less on structure and more on spirit; the great odes approach the person, object, or experience with a sense of childlike wonder.

Consider the opening lines of Neruda’s “Ode To Tomatoes,” a poem that, like all of Neruda’s odes, imbues the material with the spiritual:

The street

filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
the light
splits
in two
halves
of tomato,
the juice
runs
through the streets.

Here, the ordinary tomato is complicated through an insistence on its corporeality. That “the juice / runs” is supremely important, for it is through the personification of the fruit that we can imagine the tomato as something capable of transcending its vine, something worthy of veneration precisely because it is human, and, like many great humans throughout history, it is to be sacrificed for a “nobler” purpose:

Unfortunately, we have to

assassinate it:
the knife
plunges
into its living flesh,
it is a red
viscera,
a cool,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun  

Though Neruda’s ode is set in Chile, this tomato could very well have been “assassinated” in my grandmother’s kitchen in Nitro, West Virginia, its red juices covering not the streets, but the gnarled mountains of the Kanawha Valley.

Ode to the Microcosmic

What is it about the ode that makes it especially relevant — and necessary — in this time of pandemic? I think the answer lies in both the form’s ability to “presume a future” and its unrelenting demand that we listen to the people, the experiences, and the objects that have gained so much more importance in this world of increasing isolation. For most of us, our worlds have been restricted to the confines of our homes. What better time than now to praise that which is right before our eyes, to expound on the virtues of the microwave, the sourdough starter, the pizza box? If we dig deep enough into these material objects, we can feel their spiritual reverberations, their ability to connect us in a time when separation is both problem and panacea.

The more common the object or experience, the better equipped it is to communicate the feelings of love and connection that we so desperately crave.

In our Southern food and rivers and church pews, there exists an almost unparalleled attention to place. We hold an understanding that a bowl of collard greens, for instance, is more than a side dish — it is a savory nexus of family and history, deep religiosity, and, for better or worse, an almost frenzied insistence on tradition.

Other regions listen to the rhythms of their landscapes, but the Southern ear is magnified, trained to listen to even the faintest echo of history in each plucked pokeweed. And if the value of the ode stems from its ability to complicate that which has been heretofore considered static and unworthy (by most) of deep contemplation, then the South, by virtue of its intense fissures and contradictions, is the perfect landscape for poems which seek to both praise and interrogate our sociocultural and political mores. Odes become fundamental — and vital — ways of understanding a world undergoing immense change, for they allow us to explore these shifts on a microcosmic level.  

In his “Ode To The Maggot,” the great Southern poet Yusef Komunyakaa forces us to pay attention to these microcosmic shifts by praising what many would consider revolting: the miniscule maggot. In the poem, Komunyakaa posits the maggot as the great historical equalizer:

Brother of the blowfly
And godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork

And flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus, Christ, you're merciless

With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.

No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.

Komunyakaa honors the cycles of life, acknowledging that “beggars & kings” alike must first enter the maggot’s digestive tract as if the larvae itself symbolized a writhing “gate of heaven.” Or, looked at another way, the spiritual world must first find its truest expression in the realm of the material. And by centering death, the poem lends itself to the traditions of the Southern Gothic: the primeval, the haunted, and the macabre. Yet there is also joy here, a praising of the magic and luster of living, of the land as a sustaining force.

If Southern culture is portrayed as well versed in the spirituality of its landscapes, then the ode — through its ability to worship the land down to its smallest organic properties — is its quintessential psalm. Praising the maggot allows us to understand life and death as intertwined, and it forces us to come to terms with large cultural shifts through images of the specific. When we write about the ordinary — even the grotesque — things of this world, the big “universal” themes come into focus. And we can begin to imagine a future.

In the Stars

The ode did not “save” my workshop last semester, but I believe it opened my students up to new ways of experiencing their quarantined worlds. Rather than trying to write about their fears, loves, and anxieties in abstract terms, they focused their final poems on specific objects and/or experiences that deeply resonated with them. One student wrote an ode to the bags under her eyes. Another wrote an ode to the 16-pack of crayons they had in elementary school, how though they wanted the “elite” 64-pack — poverty meant the absence of the other 48. There were odes to an abuela’s arroz con leche and a celebration of a beloved aunt who, due to COVID-19, can no longer “labor over fried fish / Greens, and mac and cheese” (Skye Edwards, “Ode to Aunt Cynthia.”) There were odes to Atlanta’s Five Points MARTA station and to the earthworms that a student noticed only because quarantine had restricted the natural world to her backyard. And there were odes to blueberries and the immigrant fathers who pick them. In each of these odes, my students used the specific to both find joy in their quarantined lives and express their enormous concerns and anxieties. In many of their lines, one could detect hope, however small, for the future.

Ode to Aunt Cynthia
By Skye Edwards

Up one flight of concrete stairs.
First bright blue door on the left.
Two beds, one bath, squeezed
into as little space as possible.
A brown suede couch with a cover on it.
You made old look new.

You lived
Your life here,
From childhood
To the end.

You never felt labor pains,
Yet you raised a child here.
She will be married soon
To a manager of Whole Foods
Who brings vegan pies to Thanksgiving.

You labored over fried fish,
Greens, and mac and cheese
Every Sunday
Filling your home
Barely made for 2
With 13 extra mouths to feed
Insisting that everyone get seconds.

How you fit so many stories
in less than 900 square feet.
How alive you are
In the stars.

None of us knows what the post-COVID-19 world will look like. I suspect that colleges and universities will change dramatically, focusing more on online education as opposed to in-person instruction. I hope that poetry, specifically poetry of praise, will experience resurgence as we reflect on the unfathomable number of lives lost. In doing so, we must also reclaim the objects and experiences that have been forgotten in the hustle of living. 

I have found more joy now in holding a tomato in my hand than at any point in my life. I find myself increasingly turning my ears to its “cool, red viscera,” and, if I am lucky enough, it is willing to speak. I am trying to listen.

Even As We Breathe

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