The view from lockdown

Around 3:45 pm on November 1st, a “shelter in place” instruction pinged in through our campus phone and email alert system. I was in my office about to head to class, but I checked with another colleague, also on the third floor of my old building and conferencing with a student. They had both received the warning, too. So the credible threat was real?!

Failing to be appropriately scared, I looked out my two office windows, which offer a pretty good vantage. For a while people walked around, oblivious or not understanding what the warning meant or perhaps not having received it at all. One confused woman was banging on the locked library doors. Gradually they all disappeared and silence took charge. I sent a message to my students then settled in to read Shenandoah submissions and get some grading done. Thirsty, I drank leftover lukewarm water from the spout of my electric kettle–then I realized that my spouse had left seltzers in the minifridge, so I distributed some to the office down the hall, as well as a tin of cashews and leftover Halloween candy. We received another message that police would be checking each building; I heard them in the hall and watched them patrolling outside as the light turned golden and then blue. This all went on for 3 1/2 hours, so I was grateful to be well-supplied. Others, trapped in small spaces by doors that automatically locked, weren’t so lucky.

Rumor is–we haven’t been told anything officially, which is its own kind of problem–that some unstable-sounding person claiming to have guns and grenades sent an email threatening the entire campus. (There’s also a rumor about students setting off fireworks simultaneously–I’m really not sure what’s true.) My gut feeling that no assault was actually happening turned out to be right, thank goodness. Many people were shaken, but no one was hurt.

In retrospect, my calmness mystifies me. I mean, I work on the third floor of a building with no elevator, so I don’t get a lot of traffic unless someone is REALLY looking for me; fire and earthquake would be bad, but it’s not the worst place to be sitting during a potential shooter situation. Still, my god, it was a potential shooter situation! I had been contemplating, mourning, many kinds of violence: Gaza, Ukraine, and epidemic violence in the US, from school shootings to continued police violence against people of color to a president on trial for encouraging armed insurrection. The poetry submissions I was sifting through depicted domestic violence, sexual violence, and military violence–perhaps more than is typical in any given cycle.

Yes, many aspects of my identity and situation protect me more than others are protected. But I’m belatedly concerned that I felt safe during those strange hours. None of us is.

THAT’s what’s been up with me during the last few weeks of blog silence, as well as boatloads of committee work, student conferences, advising, grading, book-blurbing, and trying to steal an hour for my own writing once in a while (mostly I’ve been receiving encouraging rejections lately, which is appropriate enough, given that I’m also sending them). Oh, and a forest fire is burning nearby, so I’m inhaling smoke and wondering what calamity comes next. I’m also tending a dying cat, which wrecks me from time to time. Ursula has a tumor on her forehead that was removed once and came back; now she has another in her throat. She’s okay for the moment, still eating and drinking and cuddling, but we’re in that zone other pet-people will know of watching for signs that her discomfort is increasing. She’s only about eight, too, and had been such a spunky little creature. Cancer sucks.

Better things are also cooking. I just had the pleasure of rereading Jennifer Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal, really an amazing poetry collection; she Zoomed in and gave my advanced undergrad poetry workshop terrific advice. I took the same group to a campus gallery, showed them some visual art in conversation with poetry, and invited them to find works they wanted to talk back to, or ask questions of, poetically. Also super-fun. For my “Other Worlds” first year writing seminar, I’m prepping Jeannine Hall Gailey’s collection Flare, Corona: more apocalypse on the horizon! And I’m very much looking forward to break next week. We’re meeting up with the kids in Pittsburgh and cooking Thanksgiving dinner there for Chris’ parents.

Late November is often a time, for me, of slowing the whirlwind pace and taking stock. All that bright foliage vanishes and I can see further into the distance. Will I be able to settle and think this time, get myself oriented? I don’t know, but poems help, and art. Below are a few pieces from that campus gallery: a Grace Hartigan image responding to Barbara Guest’s poem “The Hero Leaves His Ship”; Elizabeth Catlett inspired by Margaret Walker’s “For My People”; and a David Drake jar, signed but without a poem (he often engraved short poems on his ceramics, even though it was illegal for enslaved people to read and write in South Carolina). The featured image above is “Color Study V: A Sense of Illumination” by Faber Birren, the piece I chose to draft a frustrated poem about on our gallery day. He was a color theorist who, according to the museum label, “believed color has a psychological impact that could be used to enhance productivity in business, industry,” and during shelter-in-place situations. Well, I made that last one up. Still, screw you, Faber Birren.