Social Distance Sing

The title of this book was inspired by the videos of Italians in quarantine singing from their balconies that circulated around social media in mid-March while Italy was on lock-down to help stem the rising tide of the COVID 19 coronavirus outbreak that was devastating that country. As of the date of this writing, according to the website worldometers.info, the COVID 19 strain of the coronavirus is confirmed to have infected 3,810,709 people and killed at least 264,020 worldwide. Tracking the rise of the virus became a part of this book as the writing process went along. All of the statistics which appear herein are from the Worldometers site. Those confirmed numbers are certainly lower than the actual numbers. Many people found dead in their homes in New York City, for example, have not been autopsied to determine if the virus was a factor in their death and, therefore, are not included in those “confirmed” numbers. Likely, many of them would have been if autopsies had been performed. We know that the rate of testing here in the US has been woefully inadequate and now, right as people are becoming so itchy to get back to “normal” that armed protesters have stormed the capitol in Michigan and gathered in other states as well, it appears that we have not even reached the peak of the first wave of the virus. According to a recent New York Times article, a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington here in Seattle estimates up to 135,000 deaths in the US by early August, more than double their earlier prediction on April 17th of 60,308 deaths by August 4th. That number has already been surpassed well over two months earlier than predicted. The number of confirmed US deaths as of today is 74,121. My mantra lately has been “stop starting and finish.” I've been writing nearly every day for almost forty years and the projects-in-progress have piled up. I've always chosen to emphasize writing in my free time after work and on the weekends more so than spending time sending work out to seek recognition. It's a pastime I do for enjoyment, not a career. I'm not in the game, I'm off to the side but eventual publication was always part of the plan. Now I'm getting old. I'm running out of time. I could die of the 'rona any day now! I should be finishing the old projects and releasing them one way or another, not beginning new projects. On April Fool's Day, I saw a Facebook thread of poets writing “quarantine haiku” and (foolishly or not) joined in. “Pandemic poetry” was (as one might have expected) becoming a thing. I wrote a couple more on April 3rd and a bunch on the 4th. I decided that for the remainder of the month I would take a little time each day to think in short poetic forms about our current situation. Poetic form is really kind of a misnomer. Poetic pattern is more accurate, and a poetic pattern is first and foremost a mode of thought. While most of what I wrote was English language approximation of senryu, haiku or tanka, the scope expanded beyond that to include a variety of other shorties such as acrostics, cinquains, limericks, naani, nonets, and one triolet. Other little blips of consciousness I included — sometimes aphoristic, sometimes impressionistic — don't fit under any of those classifications. Blips. I just think of them as little mind blips. We should slow down. We need to change our ways. The voracious materialistic appetite of the industrialized world for more and more stuff is unsustainable. We shouldn't need a global pandemic to recognize that the way we are living and the way our society is organized is quite insane and has been for many years. It is difficult for anyone who is paying even the slightest bit of attention to be optimistic these days, but maybe this pandemic is what we need. Maybe it will force us to finally recognize, as Otis Redding put it so many years ago, “a change has gotta come.”