Julia Knowlton
Coronavirus Ars Poetica
Spring season, honey melody suckling
at the seams. By the time all birdsong
blossoms, its own echoes drown it out.
Today the pestilence bred destruction
from coast to coast. My sister in LA texts to say
she cannot sleep, always crying. Nothing I can do.
(Writing might be something of the nothing I can do.)
What is a poem now, what is a word’s space?
It is how language distances itself, builds a nest,
shelters in place.
—Submitted on 03/26/2020
Julia Knowlton is the author of four books, including One Clean Feather (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co., 2018), which won a Georgia Author of the Year Award chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared Raw Art Review, Roanoke Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize, Knowlton is a professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She holds an MFA in poetry from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and a PhD in French literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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