The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Hampshire city’s weekly virus newsletters elevated by poet laureate
In addition to the endless Zoom meeting invitations, each week brings a new poem tucked into otherwise matter-of-fact messages about the coronavirus pandemic from the city manager of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Tammi Truax, the city’s poet laureate, has been contributing to the newsletters since early April.
“I think she’s absolutely brilliant,” said Valerie Rochon, who leads the Portsmouth chamber of commerce. “I look forward on Monday mornings to getting my week started with the wisdom and beauty that she shares.”
When she was named poet laureate last year, Truax planned multiple projects around the theme “Poetry as a Bridge,” including using poetry to cultivate the relationship between the residents of Portsmouth and its sister city of Nichinan, Japan.
But after a planned trip there with high school students was scrapped due to the pandemic, she instead wrote a poem honoring the nursing students whose graduation they were supposed to attend. And she has been highlighting Japanese forms of poetry, such as haiku — “Some nights are so dark/that the moon alone is sure/morning will come” — and tanka — “The bramble extends/a thorny cane offering/ perfect raspberries/while everywhere else I look/an imperfect world festers.”
“Sometimes things are percolating all week long, and sometimes on Saturday morning I have no idea,” she said of her writing. “But we are living through extraordinary times, and every week seems to provide ample material for me to respond to.”
The Portsmouth public library is including the poems in a “community diary” documenting the pandemic, and the poem about the Nichinan nurses will be read at their delayed graduation ceremony in October.
Rochon said she was particularly touched by Truax’s latest poem, “Transitions,” in which she grieves a fellow poet’s impending death but finds solace in baking bread from a zucchini for the young man who fixed her car.
“We all do that, don’t we? Whether we go into work, or go on a 20-mile bike ride, whatever it is, we all do that, just to be able to absorb that grief,” Rochon said. “It puts you in touch with something that’s real, and there’s a lot to be said for that.”
‘I think she’s absolutely brilliant. I look forward on Monday mornings to getting my week started with the wisdom and beauty that she shares.’ Valerie Rochon, Portsmouth chamber of commerce