Processing the pandemic
From its origins way back in the oral tradition, poetry has borne the task of chronicling history. It shares the facts, and also has the potential to add comment on them, look at their ramifications, consider their effects on the people of the age, and imagine how they will alter the future. Now that such information is stored in print or recalled electronically, poetry is still used to record and comment.
Local and international events are retained via news reporting, but immortalised in poetry. Although both wonderful and terrible events are written about, the negative happenings attract more chroniclers and fill more pages. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves made sure the horrors of the, Simon Armitage’s tour de force poem reflecting on the 9/11 attacks?
