Poem constructed from emails received during quarantine goes viral

Everyone has received at least one and now they’ve been elevated to poetry: a US teacher has highlighted corporate opportunism during the coronavirus outbreak, in a viral poem titled First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining.

Jessica Salfia, an English teacher and writer in West Virginia, posted the poem on Twitter on Saturday. “In these uncertain times / as we navigate the new normal, / Are you willing to share your ideas and solutions? / As you know, many people are struggling,” the poem begins.

Made up of instances of virus-inspired marketing (“Mother’s day looks a little different this year. / You’re invited to shop all jeans for 50% off!”) and corporate cliches (“How are you inspiring greatness today?”), each stanza ends with the refrain: “As you know, many people are struggling.”

In less than a day, Salfia’s poem had been liked more than 83,000 times and shared by 23,000 accounts, and inspired other poems including one by a student nurse made up of lines from emails from their college, and another constructed from the final sentences of emails, which used the refrain: “As we know, we will get through this.”

Poetry has been a prominent source of comfort and expression during the coronavirus outbreak. Poets who have gained prominence online include nine-year-old Sophie of south-east London whose poem thanking the NHS was widely shared, and Matthew Kelly in Salford, whose poem inspired by his partner’s work as a nurse was read on BBC radio by actor Christopher Eccleston.

At the end of March, Ben Taylor, a 29-year-old Royal Navy petty office and poet in Yorkshire shared a performance of a poem that has been viewed more than 241,000 times in two weeks. His dialect-inflected verse included: “They’re the same folk that hashtagged ‘be kind’ / and now they’re stockpiling bog roll and pasta / And when t’government told ’em stop home / queued up in their hundreds down Asda”.

A new anthology of verse written by NHS staff including doctors, cleaners and interpreters, was also released in March. These Are the Hands takes its name from a poem by author and poet Michael Rosen, who has been hospitalised with suspected Covid-19 since late March, and all proceeds are going to NHS Charities Together’s Covid-19 appeal.

And at the beginning of the UK’s national quarantine, poet laureate Simon Armitage released a poem titled Lockdown, which moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in Eyam in the 17th century to the epic Sanskrit poem Meghadūta.