Emergency Meditations: Poetry in Urgent Times as… | Poetry Foundation (2024)

In 1954, on a small coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the United States detonated a weapon designed to annihilate every living thing in its path. That year, Frank O’Hara wrote “Meditations in an Emergency,” capturing an uncanny mood of dread and possibility, the feeling of sitting with a view to the end of the world. Returning to this poem in the elastic spring days of 2020, its title suddenly made sense: we are still in the eye of a hurricane; what we sing is what survives. Poets report on the storm to bear witness to its force, to give voice to our futures, to build song from its rubble. I read somewhere that spring that scientists were surprised to discover life around Bikini Atoll thriving decades after the blast. Coral the size of cars. We forget the word emergency comes from the Latin verb for emerge, which is to say at the root of all this mess is what rises up, what grows out of change. At the swirling sky, Frank O’Hara shakes his fist: “the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.”

From the darkest hours of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, poets writing from the margins with urgency have played an essential role in their communities’ pushing forward through catastrophe. To document for a future audience is by nature an act of hope. Assotto Saint, a poet who understood urgency in an intimate, corporeal way writes in Sacred Life: Art & AIDS: “hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process.” Saint, facing institutional discrimination and their own mortality at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, found in poetry not an escape from crisis but rather a world to build: Saint continued publishing anthologies, producing poet’s theater, writing stark but deeply felt transmissions from the edge. Saint understood the power of poetry’s immediacy, its capacity to respond to emergency.

Assotto Saint begins the short poem “Soul”: “I remember the beginning / a dream as ancient as dawn,” the speaker drawing upon a collective memory older than the day itself. Writing from a perspective rarely granted its place in the pantheon, Saint conjures for the reader a surrogate timeline, tugging at a deeper lineage. From this alternate history, Saint invents an alternative future: “a dream we were once one / soul.” In an era defined by the fear of physical connection, when gloved nurses left trays of food to twenty-somethings dying in isolation, Saint reaches out across all of time to offer to the reader a gentle hand. To connect.

Building on this lineage of responsive poetics, Cameron Awkward-Rich provides his own “Meditations in an Emergency,” wherein the speaker imagines the world beyond its heartbreaking reality, a world with no borders, only wind. In poetry, we consider the function of tense: when is the poem happening; what does the speaker know; what can they still imagine? Awkward-Rich here takes the temporal leap I like to call time travel—how within the space of even a line the poet can jump from one time to another, blending our present with our histories and our possibilities.

Blueprint for the Future: In your journal, write out a blueprint for a better world—however you imagine it.

What is the built environment?
What role does nature play?
How do people gather?

Now, try to report on the conditions of today. What do you wish would change? Using Awkward-Rich’s poem for reference, note which plain images come to mind when considering what about the world breaks your heart. From this present, try to open an exit door into your imagined better world. For Awkward-Rich, it comes through a dream, but you can take the temporal leap through a screen or a subway car or a distant song. See if you can let the future in within just one line.

While some emergency meditations make a case for dreaming out a better tomorrow, some find their power in documenting the specificity of today. Tim Dlugos, facing his own HIV diagnosis, made this gesture in poems like “G-9” and “Ordinary Time,” which opens with the query “What are the magic moments in ordinary time?” Carving out a place of peace in an era which was anything but ordinary, Dlugos summons miscellany from black fur chaps to quippy asides to a slice of blueberry peach pie. He names friends and old haunts, creating an archive of ephemera before building to a celestial final flourish—Dlugos gives room to the magic of “everyone / and everything and every / other place, the undescribed / and indescribable”—and answering the poem’s first question: the magic moments are right now, us as we connect.

Feeld Notes: After reading “Ordinary Time,” consider the power of documenting what you feel in the moment. Take a deep breath and allow in whatever emotion you’re experiencing right now. Writing automatically—hand to pen, pen to paper—respond to each question as it comes. Have someone read the following questions aloud if possible, or set a timer for 30 seconds for each question.

What does your feeling look like?
What is its shape?
How does it sound?
What does it look like when it moves?
Is your feeling close or far away?
When you call it, does it recognize you?&
Do you share a history?
Do you share a homeland?
Have you seen it before in nature?
Do you see it change?
Can you trust it?
What does it look like in the light?
What of it remains in shadow?
Where does it sleep?
Who does it love?
Where will it go now?
What part of you will it take?
What happens if you give it a different name?
How will you keep its memory?
How do you let it go?

We have come to rely upon clouds to keep our memories and often forget the necessity to note the small things that pass. Inundated with images fed to us through algorithms, we take for granted the power of paying attention. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “What Kind of Times Are These,” she points to what kind of verse will get elevated in the attention economy: “because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.” The poet as witness must understand the responsibility of choosing where we point our eye, that there is always an ethical implication in who and what and where gets our attention.

The poet must understand, too, that to pay attention is an act of love. Ross Gay, in the seminal poem “A Small Needful Fact,” writes an elegy to Eric Garner—in the year after his choking death at the hands of a New York City Police Department officer—in which he does not replay the violence. He does not even refer to the crime; rather, Gay focuses on the small, needful fact that Eric Garner was a horticulturalist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and that he had very likely planted something that is still growing, that is still giving us life.

to talk about trees: Choosing to direct the reader away from the end of Eric Garner’s life and into the details of his living, Gay gets us to listen—in Adrienne Rich’s terms—and to feel more deeply the human toll of police brutality. Imagine the natural landscape of your own emergency—on what earth is the battle fought, near what river is the emergency, what trees are at stake? Try to write about the disaster without naming its details; consider the persistence of its environment, reaching backward and forward to imagine context and consequences.

Writing from a sense of urgency, the poet can utilize form as a tool for empowerment: structure to exert control; reclamation to rewrite the rules; containment to tame time. In Francisco X. Alarcón’s “L.A. Prayer,” the poet distills the chaos in the days following the Rodney King verdict into bone-bare language and quick, clipped lines. Each enjambment becomes imbued with necessity, and the thin column of the poem on the page becomes itself like a lit match. A poet might be tempted to respond to the injustice with a sprawling, swirling crowd scene, but in Alarcón’s restraint we find a potent rejoinder—an empowering reclamation of order, its halting breaths a raging prayer.

limit/lament: First, make a glossary of words related to your emergency, as many as come to mind. Next, make a history of your emergency: list as many words you can think of that relate to what has come before, what has led to this. Now, build a future: make a glossary of what you hope will change. Finally, using your word banks, try to craft a prayer of your own that looks back and forward.

Against feelings of powerlessness, one of our greatest defenses is poetry: here is the place where we can dream beyond these broken systems, recycle the rubble and build without borders, nurture joy. It is the responsibility of the poets to feel through these crises, deeply, and to translate their attending grief into song. As Assotto Saint notes in Why I Write: “the writings of our experiences serve as testaments to those who passed along this way, testimonies to our times, and legacies to future generations.” An emergency meditation blooms out from what has come before, reaches forward to what’s next. What we sing is what survives: the coral that continues, always, to grow.