What do you want to read, or watch, or listen to these days? Friends are reporting strange twists to their usual choices: a chill mom I know suddenly wants to watch horror movies, a music critic can’t abide “serious” music these days, my husband and I are watching “The West Wing” for the first time and retreating into its aw shucks earnestness. I bet you might also be retreating into history as a tonic and salve.
Did you catch that great podcast from the New Yorker Radio Hour last week, with Jill Lepore talking to David Remnick about her research into previous polio outbreaks in the 1950s? It reminded me of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book, “Kyrie,” from back in 1995. Blackbird magazine, led by the brilliant Mary Flinn, re-printed a suite of poems from the book in Spring 2019. Blackbird writes: “Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book-length sonnet sequence Kyrie remains the dominant contemporary treatment of the 1918 influenza pandemic. She published the book in 1995, mindful, as well, of the epidemic of her historical moment. (The book appeared the same year that the CDC reported 500,000 cases of AIDS in the United States.)”
Here is one of Voigt’s sonnets, untitled and set during the 1918 influenza pandemic
How we survived: we locked the doors
and let nobody in. Each night we sang.
Ate only bread in a bowl of buttermilk.
Boiled the drinking water from the well,
clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam.
Rubbed our chests with camphor, backs
with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback
and buried the rind. Since we had no lambs
I cut the cat’s throat, Xed the door
and put the carcass out to draw the flies.
I raised an upstairs window and watched them go—
swollen, shiny, black, green-backed, green-eyed—
fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them.
Read the rest of the stunning suite of 8 poems. Listen to Kyrie set to music in “Voices of 1918.”
Your assignment is simple: take some character or moment from prior history (personal or public) and start a series of poems. You can steal Voigt’s first phrase, “how we survived,” to get started. Have you written a series before? If not, just start with one poem and try to get three in the next few days. Writing a series gets you thinking about the space between poems and what it can do for you.
Our cocktail today, the Bee’s Knees, pays homage to yesterday’s poem, “Bee 3,” by Nan Cohen. It’s a Prohibition-era old cocktail with orange and lemon juice. Like yesterday’s rosemary gimlet, it requires a simple syrup—this time it’s just honey and water. It’s a great way to elevate that crusty old honey in your cupboard. See you tomorrow!
