Finding Joy and Elegy

Amidst the despair, desperation, death, and economic deprivation of the pandemic, poetry—and creative outlets more broadly—have arisen to assist us in both making sense of the world at large, as well as addressing our own struggles during and from these challenges. This essay seeks to put these works into conversation as part of a process—along with quarantine—of seeding, an opportunity to grow new roots and networks. Drawing from a field of established literary journals and ones established during and explicitly to address the pandemic, the essay aims to begin a process of distilling the ways that even amongst fear and loss we must (and will) find ways to find joy. This requires us to seek out new forms of elegy that elaborate and understand the importance of relations and joys between peoples, and the new relational possibilities that our life holds for us as we move towards a post-pandemic world.