Is Poetry Still Possible in our Covid Age?

The glory of youth is the glory of illusion, the specter of unlimited possibilities in a world as magnificently mysterious and thrilling as it is daunting. I was fortunate, so I think, to have been raised in an era of extraordinary popular art — by which I mean the prevailing music of the day, the late Sixties and early Seventies, an era that embraced my formative teenage years. Then again, I suppose I am sure that Generations X, Y and Z feel a similar warmth towards the music that marked their ascent, notwithstanding the fact that this music leaves me cold.

I was fortunate too to have been brought up in a neighborhood where those popular artists of my formative youth passed through. I saw and heard every major group of the day at the now-no-longer Spectrum — with the exception of the Beatles who had played the larger JFK stadium venue before I was of age. The Moody Blues, Traffic, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Allman Brothers, the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, The Who — who performed the entirety of Tommy — were among the groups I heard live and free, thanks to a neighborhood knack for sneaking into the Spectrum.

And, later, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, I absorbed Paul Simon and James Taylor and Carly Simon and others, whose audiences were more intimate.

I was also lucky enough to have heard — during the slightly more mature years of my growing up — the Philadelphia Orchestra, night in and night out — and the many classical artists that graced the stage of the Academy, including Segovia, Horowitz, Pavarotti, Sutherland, Callas, Di Stefano, Rubenstein, Fischer-Dieskau, Nilsson, Szeryng — not to mention conductors Ormandy, Giulini, Abbado and Muti.

In that world of young, youthful and virtually limitless aspiration and potential adventure, adventure was sought, and adventure was possible, notwithstanding the concurrent and destructive debacle of the Vietnam War, which I fortunately escaped.
Poetry seemed to be the essence of human expression and freedom, and though the chains of societal institutions may have been felt, they were, for me, in the main, casually disregarded.

Sadly — perhaps tragically? — enough, the passage into manhood meant choice, strictures, and definition, an immersion into training for a profession that characterized the majority of my adulthood: Medicine, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis. Yet poetry lurked amidships, that secret satisfying craft of creation that had always drawn me and was, in fact, my capstone, or my guiding aspirational light.

I have a very great deal to be very thankful for.

Yet I wonder, in the wake of covid, with its aftermath of threat, and in the world that both spawned this deceitful pandemic and finely tuned its instruments of control, whether poetry of any sort may be possible.

Creation requires freedom — of thought, fancy and whim — and freedom of thought and fancy is precisely what our burgeoning Security State most abhors. Every technological advance enhances the power of the Security State’s ability to restrict and to surveil. CO2, the production of which is a consequence of our very breath of life, is at this very moment being proposed as a measure of societal fitness: produce too much and you are under the gun.

When the iron heel of the State becomes a ubiquitous choking web of 15 minute cities, social credit monitoring, forced medical interventions and other emergency measures for the ‘inevitable’ next so-called pandemic, is poetry possible? Can the human spirit feel free enough to create anything while the noxious fumes of globalist control and murder — yes, murder — predominate?

The intimations of freedom and beauty and rebellion against war resonated loudly and clearly in the raucous past. There were glimpses, in the best of the popular music of my day, of the essential liberty of the dream; and in the older artistic works there was always, it seems, a magnificent transcendence.

I find myself asking whether, in this uniquely oppressive environment of facial recognition, bank account invasion, and globally mandated directives ostensibly designed to preserve our ‘health’ while keeping us under a supranational thumb, poetry is possible anymore. Whether the caprice and imagination and the challenging questions of a genuine art can be realized and pursued despite a tyrannical environment of unprecedented reach.

Breath and vision and the daringness to believe in the truth of the word — they will never die away, though they may become as rare as a Jab-enthusiast’s confession of malfeasance.

But they require sustenance to thrive.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

April 2024