Covid Looming between Poetic Lines, behind Ambulance Windows and in the Margins of Screens

Abstract

This article analyses a selection of poems written during the 2020 pandemic and which all look at the Covid from a distance: the virus is represented (and circulated) by passing ambulances whose swiftness and opaque windows block all visual access to the suffering patient that lies inside. In these poems, the ambulance is therefore much more than a mere emergency vehicle: it tends to become a “vehicle” in the metaphorization of vulnerable existence as an urgent race. In other poems, the virus is evoked, glimpsed at, on a TV or phone screen, within the limits of the transiently shiny rectangles. In both situations, the presence of the virus is hence merely evoked or only metonymically suggested, and yet it is blaring, for it is everywhere in everyone’s mind. A selection of poems by various poets – Simon Armitage, Deborah Harvey, Keith Hutson, Greg Rappleye, Jacqueline Saphra, Alan Shapiro and David Tait – hence reveals how spectators of passing ambulances or of news feeds turn out to be at once drawn and deterred, their eyes both allured and frustrated. Standing safely at a politically imposed distance, these unusual spectators of unusual performances, imagine, fear, hope or despair, in any case somehow empathise.Poets here studied have managed to spectacularize an impossible spectacle—to embrace the imposed distance and seize the ambiguous tensions there at stake.