Around the Ides of March in 2020, it became clear that Rome would never be the same. The news turned ominous shades of fire, while emails and texts began to let me know I would not be traveling as much this year as I am used to. One by one, the lights went out in the city of my career, and income. Every reading, conference, workshop, and music gig I had scheduled from April forward began to drop off the calendar, and I felt a strange mix of both thrill and fear at the prospect of being homebound for a time. But when I wrote the check for my half of the next house payment, I knew what hell awaited me come June... or maybe July. Even poets can do the math when there is only "outgo."
In those early days, my wife was having a Zoom Happy Hour with two friends, Sarah Flournoy and Liz McIlravy. I mention their names because the concept for this project-of writing commissioned poems for a donation of some kind-was their idea. And what I owe them, I haven't quite calculated yet. But that "idea" has turned out to be the saving grace of my year, and career. I couldn't have imagined the effect and reach this would eventually have.
In the Days of Our Seclusion: March - May 2020, Book 1 in the Pandemic Poems Project, contains the poems that came out of March through the end of May-the first "season" of this new era we were now living in, and through. They reveal our awakening to the great change in reality that looks to be the foreseeable future. Many of these pieces have blinking eyes and big question marks on their faces about strange beginnings.
Book 2, In the Days of Our Unrest: June - August 2020 picks up where In the Days of Our Seclusion leaves off. This book follows the heated season of the summer, when temperatures and social turbulence led to historic wildfires, relentless hurricanes, and an unbroken chain of protests against incessant injustice that resounded through the streets of most American cities, and around the world. And during all this, the pandemic refused to give us a break as well-in other words, an overabundance of material for this daily report.
In the Days of Our Undoing: September - November 2020, Book 3 of the Pandemic Poems Project, picks up where In the Days of Our Unrest leaves off. It tracks our descent into the political season of the fall, when one of the most significant and perilous elections in our history fomented fear, division, and a deep scarring of this nation. The mental and intellectual devolution of many of our leaders and officials became all too clear, the pandemic surged yet again, with the help of what could be described as an outright materialistic refusal to curb the big block party of consumerism, and we were forced to hold our country up to the mirror for an unprecedented number of reasons.
The Fire Pit Sessions, the video series of live online readings of the poems, got quite a bit sweatier, and a bit more fiery too. These have grown in popularity and can still be viewed on Nathan's Facebook page: https: //www.facebook.com/chinacoman
