The World Poetics of Lockdown in Pandemic Poetry

Abstract

This essay uses contemporary theories on World Literature to discuss two anthologies of pandemic poetry: Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown, and And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic. These anthologies develop a new criticality on issues of migration, biopower, and inequality that have long “plagued” cultures of late capitalism. As they represent various states of lockdown imposed around the world due to the spread of the coronavirus, the anthologies grapple with the paradoxical experience of the “singular-universal” that comes with living in a pandemic. By emphasizing the untranslatability of diverse bodies, races, cultures, and languages, these anthologies deconstruct the perceived synchrony of experiencing lockdown. This essay reveals how they attempt to deconstruct the Eurocentrism of “World Literature” by reconfiguring the category of the “global” and representing collective trauma.