Why I’m Replacing Doomscrolling With Poetry

The American people are living through a moment of seismic uncertainty and social shocks. One day, our president and vice president scream at a world leader in front of television cameras. Another, the administration docks Columbia University of $400 million in federal funding. And all along, Canada has to take seriously the threat of becoming America’s 51st state. Many of us are also experiencing our own shocks that echo that news of the day: If we are federal workers, we may have lost our jobs; if we work for universities, we may be facing hiring freezes and limits on our speech. This constant barrage of discordant, unexpected, and often troubling news tends to distract us and erode our concentration.

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My attention has broken into strange shapes. While I usually "chain-read" novels and nonfiction—inhaling book after the book in a stream of information, storyline, and metaphor— these days, I can barely focus on a page without putting it down in favor of doomscrolling.

I have, though, found a reprieve from my anxious inattention: poetry. More specifically, the poetry of survival—verse written in the shadow of political extremity. I have noticed this is true for others I know. Friends tell me they are seeking out poetry in uncertainty, just as many of us have long done to celebrate marriages and to mourn our loved ones. Now we are doing so to parse and bear a startling moment in history.

I’ll admit that I’m not a neutral observer. I am the author of two books of poetry which include documentary poems about subjects that are not traditionally the stuff of verse, like economic insecurity and abortion. As the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I also commission poems from people who have experienced being unhoused, writing about their precarious lives. I have long turned to other poets to help me negotiate the trickiest moments—a few years ago I wrote about how it wasn’t coincidental that a staffer on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, Camonghne Felix, was a poet also.

These days, I find myself reading and rereading across the gamut of poetry written in states of extremis, from the poetry of the early Soviet era, like that of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, to the poems of Romanian-French poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, to the best verse of the AIDS crisis, like that of American poet and critic Tory Dent. All are poets who lived through times of chaos and cruelty, yet they continued to speak to (and for) us. As Mandelstam wrote, “Poetry is the plough that turns up time, so that the deepest layer, its black earth, is on top.”

Read More: How Insecurity Became the New Inequality

It’s not just a matter of seeking solace. These poems display a range of stances when encountering social extremes. They can ultimately offer us some moral direction. Sure, prescribing poetry in the face of societal turbulence can seem a meager or even an escapist response. But this sort of poetry is not just a cerebral pastime. It can give the reader a sense of recognition of their own experience and ballast in tough times.

That’s why I return, for instance, to “Stalin’s Epigram,” a 1933 poem by Mandelstam that was part of what landed him in the gulag (he died there in 1938). As journalist M. Gessen wrote of the poem in the New Yorker in 2020, the poem’s themes seemed to run in parallel to the first Trump era. One of the poem’s lines, “the Kremlin hillbilly is our preoccupation,” Gessen read as “the brute in charge is inescapable: he is our common obsession and our shared reality. Even as he continues to tear us apart, he brings us together in what conversation there is.” Or lines like this one from Emil Cioran, which the poet Ilya Kaminsky recently posted on social media, as if underlining my thinking of the role poetry can now play: “When we are a thousand miles away from poetry, we still participate in it by that sudden need to scream—the last stage of lyricism."

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, recently told me he’s also mostly reading poetry lately. “I have found solace in poetry’s ability to change the pace of my mind,” he says, as he has started to view poems as “little drugs.” Among the poets he has relied on recently are W.H. Auden and Walt Whitman, poets associated with World War II and the Civil War periods respectively, whose poetry nevertheless retained a notable hopefulness

Whitman’s “Chants Democratic,” written as the country is falling apart right before the Southern states seceded, exhorted Americans to believe in democracy: “America always!/Always me joined with you, whoever you are!/Always our own feuillage!/Always Florida's green peninsula!/ Always the price…” Whitman was patriotic in a profound sense of that word, loving and believing in his country even when it was clearly damaged. (To be sure, his work could also be read as in support of expansionism and Manifest Destiny). When I read these lines, I, too, get swept up in the promise of our democracy across centuries.

Rodrigo Toscano, the Program Director of the Labor Institute and a poet, tells me he has found meaning in today’s political “vacuum” by writing politicized sonnets. He is planning to complete 100 sonnets in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. “I’ve been writing through this period of paradigm shifts, while a new order has not been established yet,” Toscano says. He understands why many are receiving “nourishment,” from the poets of the Soviet era or the Shoah, but he prefers, he says, “the poetic attack,” or poetry that attempts to fight back more directly.

To me, perhaps the most effecting poetry of extremes is that of Tory Dent. These poems are accounts of near-misses and also recovery in New York City in the 1980s, where she was a person with HIV and then AIDS. As she writes in one poem, “…What I/know is that I'm both people,/one sick and one well…My impulse is to be alone with the x-ray/ like a loved one and the incarcerated.” Her poems capture the ambiguity that exists within survival, and the feeling you develop for your oppressor, in her case, the disease that eventually killed her in 2005. While this might seem deeply depressing, Dent's feverishly alive response to a personal and public health emergency is still galvanizing and instructive in its honesty, bravery, and anger. She names her bodily suffering in long lyrical lines that catalog her agonies, and in their beauty and elevated, allusive presentation seemingly interrupts her pain, ultimately helping the poems’ speaker compose herself anew.

I find unexpected parallels between Dent’s remarkable writing on the edge of her endurance, against a tide of bias and governmental apathy toward people with AIDS, and this moment, where immigrant kids are hiding in basement apartments and the word “gender” is being wiped from databases. This is part of how poetry can meet us where we’re at—by providing a language of political feeling and opposition, rather than relying on the hackneyed or overly familiar phrases of newscasters, or, even worse, the abased insults now expressed by politicians.

I know I will return to these poems as I need them. That, to me, is the greatest solace of all.