Edward Smallfield : about a journal of the plague year

 

 

 

When I first heard the word “coronavirus,” my wife Valerie and I were visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, where we lived for many years before we moved to Barcelona. So much was happening; readings, visits with family and old friends, the good fortune of cool luminous spring days with everything in bloom. And, at the same time, in the media and in conversations, a developing sense of what coronavirus might mean to us.

When I travel, I usually write poems in a notebook, which is also what I do at home. I tend to think of the travel poems as “the London poems” or “the Mexico City poems” or “the Berkeley poems.” Last year, though, when we returned to Barcelona from the US, I realized that there would be a continuity between the travel poems and the “at home” poems because of the pandemic.

Whatever I wrote—on whatever subject—became (for me) a kind of journal of the epidemic because the effects of the virus were pervasive enough to color every experience. That included my dreams: one of the projects that I started to work on was “night void messages,” which involved writing my dreams as clearly and accurately as possible (even though many of them seemed to have nothing to do with the virus).

The other project, “meditations in an emergency,” (a title stolen from Frank O´Hara’s great book Meditations in an Emergency) had a more explicit connection with Covid 19. One of my habits is writing in public: cafes, park benches, and any other locations that seem possible. Then Barcelona was completely locked down. Cafes were closed, and, if I had started writing on a bench, a cop would have asked me to move on. So I started writing on our balcony, which had the advantage of being the same and different. The weather was different, and the action in the street and on the other balconies, and I could pay attention to those things or to what was in my head, and the virus could come into the writing directly, or not.

When rob generously gave me opportunity to do a chapbook, I was thrilled to be able to put some of the those poems together. What a gift it was to be able to collect poems from a moment in that moment! Of course the title had to be a journal of the plague year—because this isn’t our first plague, and won’t be our last.

 

 

 

 

Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson), equinox, and to whom it may concern. He is also the author of several chapbooks: locate (with Miriam Pirone) and lirio and anonymous (both with Valerie Coulton) and, most recently, americana (from above/ground press). His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, parentheses, Parthenon West Review, talking about strawberries all the time, where is the river: a poetry experiment, 26, Wicked Alice, and many other magazines and websites. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.