Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous CHamoru poet from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of five books of poetry and the coeditor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University of Hawaii–Manoa. His poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Virus” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Virus?”
I have always enjoyed Wallace Stevens’s poem for the way it envisions a subject from multiple perspectives. Viruses are such complex beings who cause complicated effects on bodies, societies, economies, etc. As the coronavirus began to spread across the globe, I started reading more about viruses, as well as watching documentaries and news reports. I turned to Stevens’s poem to help me grasp this multifaceted topic.
The COVID-19 virus, as you describe: nesting in “our gasping-lungs,” is still rampant in our world and lives. What was your experience writing about a reality that is still unraveling and affecting us everyday? Writing about our massive current events, did you ever feel like you were constructing a historical artifact of sorts, one that would become integral for the understanding of our moment in future generations?
I often write about current events. My most recent book, Habitat Threshold (2020), is all about environmental disasters and the impacts of climate change. For me, poetry creates a space to process my thoughts and emotions of traumatic and difficult realities that affect us every day. I don’t self-consciously think about constructing a historical artifact for future generations; more so, I just hope to capture what I’m feeling in the present and to express it in a creative, memorable form.
Writers often discuss the need for “emotional distance” from charged, intense events before delving back into them on the page. Did you ever feel that it was too soon to be writing this poem? Or, not soon enough?
Yes, I often need emotional distance from intense events before writing about them. I wrote this poem in September 2020, so about six months after lockdown here in Hawai’i. For me, that was the right amount of time to process some of what I had been thinking about during the pandemic.
In this poem, you emulated Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and closely followed the original form and syntax of each stanza. For you, at what point did “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Virus?” become the formal “mutation” of Stevens’s poem?
The idea for the poem came from the very beginning of its composition. I believed by “mutating” Stevens’s form and syntax that I could see the virus in new ways.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
It has been nearly a year since the coronavirus has reached Hawai’i. My family has been living in lockdown and sheltering in place. My wife and I have been working from home, and our kids’ schools have been shut down. During the precious little free time I have (after my kids go to sleep or before they wake up) I have been writing poems (sonnets, mutations, and haiku) about our lives during the pandemic. I don’t know whether it will grow into a book someday, but I am just grateful to poetry for helping me reckon with these difficult times.