Abide with Me: A Social Ecological Perspective in Selected Pandemic Poetry

• Main Authors: Abdelaziz Eldiasty, Amany Abdullah, Mansour, Eman Ebeida
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: COVID-19; ecopoetry; interdisciplinarity; social ecology; social proximity; stylistic shifts
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss45/3; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1031/viewcontent/Eldiasty_20et_20al..pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This article traces the core principles of the social ecological approach, namely, the interconnectedness of social communities and their integration into the natural world in selected poems written by contemporary poets during the coronavirus pandemic and collected in Poetry in Response to the Pandemic, published in 2020 by St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA. Applying a qualitative approach that integrates interpretive and analytical readings of the selected poems based on Daniel Stokols’s views on social ecology, it argues that although social networks facilitated community engagements during the pandemic (particularly during the lockdown), virtual reality failed to sustain the social ecological experience. Instead, social proximity, real-life interaction, and environmental integration (within the permissible limits) arise as possible socio-ecological remedies for the complications developed upon the outbreak of COVID-19. Together, these suggested remedies can ensure emotional, physiological, and environmental well-being. The paper also examines the stylistic effects of the pandemic on the poetic genre and argues that the selected poets have contextualized the pandemic with concrete evidence, and that, in the form and technique of their poems, they have projected the complexities, uncertainties, and most importantly, temporariness of such a critical time.