Envisioning Better Things

Corvid, not covid

Envisioning Better Things – A Practice of Hope, During a Plague Year

So, things have been rough this week. It’s been dreary, rainy, and too cold to go outside much. America hit the 450,000 mark in people that have been lost to covid, as variants with higher contagion rates and seemingly slightly more dangerous consequences are spreading around the world.

Washington State has still got a shortage of vaccines, and they don’t seem to prioritizing the chronically ill or the disabled. I’ve been struggling with anxiety about that and at the same time, trying to get better from a sinus thing and a stomach thing (not covid, just the result of my normally crappy immune system.)

Meanwhile, a literary magazine I’ve respected and longed to get into for twenty years, about ten months after my work appeared in it for the first time, decided to publish a former professor-pedophile who abused students and kept a gigantic collection of child rape films. This triggered a lot of sadness and anger from a lot of abuse survivors, including me (I was raped when I was six years old). The literary magazine then published a non-apology. The whole thing left me feeling sick and disappointed in the poetryworld. Meanwhile, I’m sending my manuscripts out into the world, hoping for a good press to pick them up. Have we decided what a “good press” means to us?  What are we even hoping for?

Pink Tulips

So, What Next?

Most pandemics in history have not lasted forever, even with a lack of soap, vaccines, or N95 masks. So we know that this will not last forever, no matter what we do. The vaccines may help squash the numbers of the dead, and help propel the economy back to health, if they can actually be gotten out fast enough to do any good.

Washington State’s lack of prioritization of the chronically ill and disabled may mean a wait for me of some months, but in the meantime, they’re probably going to approve the third vaccine for the US – the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which might be slightly safer for people like me with a history of anaphylactic reactions to shots. The earliest we can hope to get the shots from them is April, I’ve read. But every person that gets the vaccine now helps slow the steady growth of the virus, slow the ability to mutate safely within each person, and makes the entire planet a little safer.

So, I have reason to think things will get better, gradually, for us in terms of what feels for people like me like an endless quarantine, and for us all in general. Things will get better. Pandemics do not last forever. However, this pandemic has changed the world in ways that might not be reversible. Will we ever feel the same about screaming at a concert, or even singing in a choir?

Resting deer

And as Far as the PoetryWorld

PoetryWorld can feel like a strange and mysterious planet. Like a world of science fiction, with secret languages and disguises and scary monsters.  Sometimes this can be overwhelming. You can make friends with other poets, you can help support other younger poets, and you can try in your own way to support journals and presses by buying their books or subscribing or sending in your work. You can review the books of poetry you respect and admire, poets who might not get as much of the limelight as they deserve. But how do we work to make things better for, say, child rape victims, or any victims of sexual abuse in a Poetryworld that seems like it’s still (Still!) run by people either abusing or making apologies and excuses for abusers? Is there a way forward in that goal?  Can we just make the poetryworld a better place by staying in it, or staying apart from it? I do not have an answer for this. I wish I did. The truth is, you and I are part of the Poetryworld. We may not run things, but if we stick around and make our voices heard, eventually things might get better. Someone tell me so.