Toward a Pandemic Poetics: Contamination, Infiltration, and Dispersal in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet

Abstract

This paper draws a parallel between the anxieties of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the historical context of “nuclear anxiety” (Cordle 2008). Considering Inger Christensen’s 1981 collection Alphabet alongside Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality, this paper begins to develop a poetics of the pandemic by turning to a poetics of the nuclear, where contamination, recurrence, and dispersal are established as key formal techniques. This poetics of the nuclear, with its textual manifestations of anxiety and contamination, offers us a new lens with which to approach the emerging corpus of pandemic poetry.