JOIN USTales from quarantined poets
Quarantine is making people experience a tsunami of emotions from freedom, self-love, happiness, to constraint, loneliness, sadness, anger. Sometimes all of them at once. Over the past few months, creativity seems to have peaked with more time on people’s hands. So we wonder: how are our poets doing and how has the ‘new normal’ affected their writing?
A means to cope
For some poets, poetry seems to be a means to cope with the stressful changes around them. Hiba Javad talks about how poetry brings stability to her routine.
“From the beginning of quarantine, it gave me something to do. It was my motivation to get up in the morning and start writing. I had participated in the NaPoWriMo Challenge in April where I wrote 30 original pieces in 30 days. Poetry has been my one stable thing, no matter what comes and goes. This will always keep me busy. The stress of a day may have numbed my head but when I come back to poetry and complete my piece, it automatically puts me in a good mood. It’s what keeps me going.”
Makes me feel good
Vidyuth Gargi believes poetry is only a temporary, but much needed, release, “There is the constant stress of contracting the virus, the constant stress of making ends meet and the pressure of deadlines at work, so when I’m writing poetry, it is for myself and for my enjoyment, so it comes to me easily. It gets my mind off everything else and I am focused on this ‘syllabic challenge’ that I have set for myself. Then the positive comments and approval I get for my poetry make me feel good. But it is a very temporary release, once I put my poetry out there, I slump back into the whole stressful routine.”
A change in style
Many poets have noticed a change in their poetry over the months of quarantine. Vidyuth, who often wrote performance poetry has now shifted to music, “My poetry is usually for live audiences, but for obvious reasons that hasn’t been happening for a while now. I figured that since I play the keyboard and guitar, I could adapt my poetry to music. So I started making songs out of it, kind of like storytelling through songs. I avoid writing about quarantine because that sort of beats the purpose of me writing poetry to escape the stress of quarantine.”
Akash Kumawat, who used to write his poems based on his experiences in the outside world, now draws inspiration from within. “Since there is not much human interaction and no travel, I have started to realise a lot of things— not everyone is going to be the same after the lockdown. My poems now are based more on how one feels, feelings of solitude and exploration of memories,” he says.
A deeper meaning
“I’m a lot more alone with my thoughts now, so I think my poems have become deeper than they used to be,” says Hiba Javad, “During quarantine, everyone is stuck at home and we start imagining things that we miss like going for a vacation or hanging out with our friends. I realized while we’re stuck here missing these things, the whole world is still passing by and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Vidyuth and Akash talk about how people’s approach has changed over the past few months. “I think a lot of people have started writing more for themselves than for other people,” says Vidyuth. Akash continues, “People, now with
time, seem to be writing longer poetry that is more deeper, they feel and believe what they have written. It is a nice change.”