A professor at UBC Okanagan has suggested a potential consolation for people nervous about the coronavirus crisis: poetry. 

Nancy Holmes, who is also a poet herself, said that verse has been a go-to support for people in difficult situations for thousands of years.

From funerals to battlefields, she explained, poetry has been there to help us through hard times.

 “It is hard to express our deepest anxieties and longings, so we turn to poetry especially in times of intense disruption,” she said. 

“Poetry’s job is to try to say what cannot be said.” 

Photo credit: UBCONancy Holmes

She added that, during this period of disruption and confusion, poetry could be what gets people through the next few weeks.

Holmes said: “These days, certain lines of poetry are coming unbidden into my head, like Irish poet WB Yeats’ ‘Things fall apart/ The centre cannot hold’ and the American poet Carmen Tafolla’s update on this phrase: ‘Things falls apart/ sometimes people too.’

“These two phrases show that poetry addresses the big picture as well as the most intimate personal experiences.”  

The art form can help people deal with shock and loss, she said. 

“For millennia, poetry has been an art that people turn to in order to cope with these traumatic experiences.”

She also recommended that people give verse a go themselves. 

“Writing a few poems is a nourishing way to spend a few hours,” she said. 

“I really encourage everyone to sit down and express feelings, terrors or love for people and the planet. It can be genuinely therapeutic.”