Kit Robinson’s Quarantina

 

Viruses are older than poetry, older than language, older than humankind. They have the edge, having endured the preceding millennia to emerge, protean, anew, efficient, reborn.  They predate us, and may in the end outlive us, whatever we might by now have thought or said about them, which perhaps accounts for the futility we feel in trying to explain their purpose in the grand scheme. 

 

Things we cannot see (such as microscopic contagion) may seem somehow less important, or perhaps more insidious and frightening for being invisible. We go about our business; what else can we do?, except side-step precarious chance and live to see another day. Or write another poem. Pre-modern man discovered that avoidance is the first law of medicine—that separation—sequestration, removal, seclusion, confinement, segregation, insulation—actually works. Quarantine. Early practitioners—without the means to defeat certain curses, infections, attacks—understood that the only sure way to escape illness and death from contagion, was to put distance between oneself and the source or the procession of transmission. It was intuitive, and empirical, and it worked. Against an enemy of superior strength, the only response, short of capitulation, may be escape. And escape is exactly what quarantine means. 

 

Kit Robinson’s new book, Quarantina, exists provisionally within the interregnum of Covid, during a time of general fear, confusion, disruption, and inconvenience—in short, a period of negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” [Keats]. Except that reason equips us with the tools to do just that, in philosophy, literature, science, or cosmology. 

 

            You take your life in your hands

            Every time you go to the store

            We think about things

            Like supply chain disruption

            While watching the market crater

            The sky is still beautiful

            Fluffy white clouds      

            In endless air

            With no events to look forward to

            We have to reinvent each day 1 

 

            Then might we learn

            The lesson the virus

            Is trying to teach us 2

 

  

Self-consciousness flows like a river, navigating through space and language. Words and phrases are thrown up on the screen of attention, in a continuous thread, floating there momentarily, only to disappear, leaving faint after-images of intention. Robinson’s poems are free-wheeling, open-ended meditative snapshots of the daily grind. What is it like to be Kit Robinson? To be inside his mind? That’s what good poetry can do—tell us intimately how a singular consciousness feels, chooses, feints, dodges, waits, acts. In these poems, each line is cross-examined by each succeeding line, a continuous dialectic--commenting, agreeing, disagreeing, expanding, dismissing, reacting. 

 

            Shit happens

            Just like in this poem

            Which is like an elixir or vaccine 3

 

A poem may be a temporary stay against chaos, or it may be a place to hide. Is aesthetic isolation a kind of quarantine? Is the garret an escape, sufficient unto itself? Did we mistake cabin fever for infernal inspiration? Or is fate like a narrative in an apocalyptic dystopia, complete with universal war, environmental catastrophe, and rampant contagion?

 

            You and I have shared

            More than time

            More than space

            We share the will to live

            In all its manifold stratagems 4

 

Are we the authors of our own unfortunate fate, responsible for all the things that hurt us, and our sweet engendering planet? Robinson’s superior intelligence and flexible zeal will see him through any scrape, but each instance leaves its mark. When humankind is long since gone, will there, against all odds, pop up an accidental conglomeration of protein molecules, rehearsing once more the birth of animate inspiration and inevitable extinction? Are there stays against this execution, delays before entropic endgame?

 

            Why is this happening now?

                        ***

            Had to happen sooner or later

                        ***

            Human agency run amok

                        ***

            How long can this go on?

            Chains of event

            Locked into cause and effect 5

 

Ultimately, the anxieties and cautions that erupt during a pandemic have their roots in our mortality, which has always been among the standard subject-matter and preoccupations of poetry. So, as uninhibited and open-ended as these poems feel, they are haunted by the very obsessions, the delights and predilections, that govern us during so-called good times.  

 

            

What did Whalen want?

            McClure made a monad of a mollusk

            Kyger questioned a quail

            Spicer listed to starboard

            Kaufman captured fractals just for fun

            Rexroth rode roughshod over America 6

            

In the literary descent of time, each writer imagines a world, where our descendants will judge what we have done, or left undone, a legacy in which our words will be found, placed, and preserved (or lost). Who will know us?   

 

            This could be the last time

            Takes on a whole new meaning

            Every day an exercise in weightlifting

The weight of the world

A world we no longer know 7

 

Robinson is such a reasonable, decent, fair-minded fellow that it’s hard not to be convinced by everything he says. And his poems reflect just such a resilient point of view. It’s that equanimity which allows him to sustain his even keel through adversity and threat. After a slow start in the 1970’s, he’s become a prolific writer with over twenty separately published collections. Though initially pegged as a card-carrying member of The Language School, he’s evolved beyond that into a space uniquely his own, with a relaxed and approachable style that accommodates all kinds of quotidian matter along with the most abstruse of post-Modern meditations—and yet it all looks so fluid, so unlabored! 

 

            There’s really nothing to it

            You get the power of speech

            By speaking

            A feedback loop that produces energy

            Even as it uses it up 8

 

These poems are reflexive interrogations—self & soul—of a writer who gets along with doubt and jeopardy, during a difficult time in the world. The progression of each poem suggests that he doesn’t know, from the first line, where he’ll end--in grudging certainty or ironic amusement. This is what allows him the freedom to live inside the poem, stretching and bending it to suit the movements of his mind and heart. These are made poems, but craft isn’t their justification. They are instead about exploration, and discovery. They perch on a fulcrum of wit/flippancy, curiosity/wisdom, surprise/conviction. It’s mature, confident work, worthy of timely attention.

 

            The main thing is to be patient

            Cognizant of the fact

            That anything can happen in a poem

            And probably will 9   

 

 

1.     From Quarantina p. 50 “Crowds Are History”.

2.     Ibid., pp. 52-3 “Distance Learning”.

3.     Ibid., p. 74 “This Poem”. 

4.     Ibid., p. 124 “Inoculate Conception”. 

5.     Ibid., p. 94 “Weather Report”. 

6.     Ibid., p. 90 “Early Times”.

7.     Ibid., p. 88 “The Last Time”.

8.     Ibid., p. 79 “Phantom Power”.   

9.   Ibid., p. 118 “In a Station”.