Viral Spring #11: Poetry in a Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips

One of my stay-at-home pleasures this Viral Spring has been perusing my friend Bill Christophersen's new book of poems, his fourth and I think his best. Like the ancient seafarer whose song closes this collection, he deliberately steers into the worst kind of storm -- the so-called post-truth moment that poisons the world's discourse today. And like the seafarer he comes out banged up, weatherbeaten, exhausted, but alive and articulate. I wrote something like a review, but since Bill and I are long-time friends and collaborators --  thick as thieves -- let's just call it an "appreciation."  

Rarely does a collection of poetry begin with a headline – but Bill Christophersen is a journalist as well as a poet, and he knows from a header and a lead.  The headline is the title – Where Truth Lies – in three syllables, the crisis of the world today.  The Pandemic is just the latest case in point: we can find where truth lies, only by finding where it doesn't.   

The difficulties of this quest, seen and unforeseen, are the plot of this Odyssey of epistemology, testing experience and language for the presence of truth.  Not much pans out.   

Objects gather dust, lose their emotional charge -- the ferris wheel he jumped at 18 creaks on in middle age ("The Wheel").  Memory bobs and weaves ("Tip of the Tongue"). Fiction sucks with “dark vapors” ("The Rise of the Novel").  Poetry itself prevaricates – “a license to deceive" ("Lies").  Speech loses its nerve and curdles in the throat ("The Right Thing").  

And yet there is a metal that can be truth-tested. He finds it in a newspaper story of murder with a blunt instrument – an aluminum baseball bat ("Being Here Now"). And in the title poem, truth bides its time, conceals itself and finds him -- in dreams and dust-balls, in misread blurbs that morph into indictments ("Where Truth Lies").  He sums up the quest with a spring-cleaning haiku: "Beneath the shag rug /the vanished salamander’s /sooty skeleton."

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people say things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.