Quarantine

Brian Henry

An author's statement

Quarantine occurred after a period of silence lasting several months—the longest I’d ever gone without writing. I woke up the day after Thanksgiving in 2001 with an image of myself lying dead in a field. I decided to do something with that image and the accompanying feeling (of depression and stasis), wrote directly onto the computer (rather than by longhand, as per habit), and went to bed on Sunday night with a 40-part poem called “Quarantine” and plans to continue the poem the next day. However, I somehow realized in my sleep that the French word for 40, “quarante,” is related to “quarantine,” which made me decide (or realize?) that the poem had finished itself despite my plans to continue it.

Within a few days, I began to distrust the whole narrative—the narrator, the story he tells, the way he tells it, the way it ends—despite my attempt to introduce objectivity into the poem in the form of ten paragraphs that comment on the situation of the poem from a third-person perspective. I had intended for “Quarantine” to be set outside London in 1665, during the bubonic plague, and incorporated some details and iconography to that end. But the poem’s resonance with more contemporary events and the fact that plague victims often become delirious and/or comatose made me question the poem’s framework as well as its narrator. During the process of composition, the contradictions within the narrator had expanded into the work as a whole. The following week, I reversed the poem so the narrative literally turned on itself. In the process, I hyper-punctuated and then truncated “Quarantine,” creating with “Contagion” a vandalized mirror image of the original. The resulting text is somewhat schizophrenic: “Quarantine” was written from the nerve endings with almost no revision afterward, and “Contagion” is itself an act of revision. I hope the truth can be found somewhere between the two.

I have never written a book in this way, and never expect to do so again. This seems both welcome and disappointing—welcome because I have no desire to return to the the mental place that served as a catalyst for the poem, and disappointing because the emotional effect of the poem is (at least to me) significant, in no small part because of its impetus.

Written in November 2001, Quarantine won the 2003 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Excerpts have appeared in The Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Maisonneuve, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and Virginia Quarterly Review.