Phillip B. Williams December 18, 2020
I’m starting this piece with more questions than answers, with more eagerness to investigate than to disclose, and in that investigation I hope to reveal how inquiry, doubt, and uncertainty make for useful practices when writing a poem and thinking about ourselves within the literary tradition.
I’m not even sure if what I have come up with makes sense, but I would like to test out my ideas on you all in the hopes that we can discover something together.
I’ll begin with Missy Elliott’s 2001 album
Miss E . . . So Addictive. By this time, Missy Misdemeanor Elliott had already stationed herself as the number one innovator in hip-hop. Paired with her frequent collaborator, Timbaland, the two had a maddening year with this particular album because of how its production and lyrical dexterity pushed beyond their prior innovations.
Since its outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic’s interlinkages with illegal wildlife trade have caught a lot of attention and been touted as a primary cause. Dwelling on the carrier species of coronavirus that have been implicated and the channels of zoonotic spillover, the policies implemented to curb bushmeat consumption with incomplete ramifications to curb illegal wildlife markets are critiqued. The urgent need to address the problem is highlighted, requiring significant enforcement efforts at the local and national level along with transnational cooperation to make them successful. There is a need for alternative coordinated solutions for the COVID-19 vaccine which ironically finds its origin in a wildlife product.