Alice Quinn figured that poets would be writing poems about the pandemic. After all, she is the former poetry editor at The New Yorker as well as the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf for 10 years before that, As director of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) for 18 years, she had produced over 700 programs. Needless to say, she knows a passel of poets.

There couldn’t be anyone more qualified to compile and edit “Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic,” which has just been released as an ebook by Knopf. So when her agent called on March 24 and suggested she connect with her community of poets for this compilation, she got to work — and fast. Speaking from her home in Millerton, New York, she tells RI how the project came together.

“It became a poetic whirlwind,” Quinn says. “I reached out to poets on March 27. Each got an invitation to send work if they were writing poems, and was asked to inform me if they knew of others who were writing. The correspondence blossomed and swelled.”

In times of trauma, art can flourish. And it’s in times like these we turn to those who can better express what we’re feeling. As Quinn says, we’ve never been in a circumstance like this where we’ve experienced such fear, grief and uncertainty. The poets in this anthology bear witness to this time.

In 21 days, after corresponding with over 200 people, Quinn had culled the submissions down to 85 poems. On May 6, exactly 40 days — the traditional quarantine period in 17th-century Italy, and, of course, the biblical 40 days — Knopf had the first iteration for the ebook.

Despite being a walking Rolodex of poets in America, Quinn says she discovered a lot of poets doing this project, and the range is fantastic. There are lighter poems, lyric cries, apocalyptic messages, subjects from the medical front, poems that range in tone from the sorrowful to fiercely resilient, and there are love poems. The voices are as diverse as the poems, coming from poets varying in their geography, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age, but they’re all Americans.

“Some of the poems have a kind of warning about inequity and disaster that made me realize there was a prescience and alertness not just to the pandemic, but to this time of protest, tucked inside of them,” says Quinn.

The book’s title refers to “Keeping Quiet,” a poem by Pablo Neruda that uncannily mirrors this situation we find ourselves in (“where we will all keep still…an exotic moment without rush, without engines…we would all be together in a sudden strangeness”). “It characterizes this moment when we have to pull back from each other and yet feel this intense kinship,” Quinn says.

The anthology is not organized into themes or sections, although that had been a topic of discussion among Quinn and the publisher. When the poems were placed in alphabetical order according to the poets’ surnames, some unknown higher power made sure the poems were appropriately bookended. The opening poem, by Julia Alvarez, asks “How will this pandemic affect poetry?” The final, by Matthew Zapruder, concludes by referencing his love for his son, his wife, and “the ends of poems.”

“There’s a lot of serendipity when you have a project like this,” Quinn says. Indeed.

"Together in a Sudden Strangeness” was published by Knopf on June 9 as an ebook with simultaneous audio from Penguin Random House. A commemorative hardcover edition will follow on November 17.

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