Barricaded Bards: Poems from the Pandemic

Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare all wrote during times of quarantine and epidemic. So, too, have poets at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of North Carolina Asheville. When Covid-19 precluded the many face-to-face gatherings that occurred prior to the shutdown, a group of seventeen OLLI poets with a passion to continue writing and sharing their work with fellow writers assembled online. They called themselves the Barricaded Bards.Each week one member selected a topic. On the basis of this prompt, poets wore a poem for that week on a wide variety of unusual, amusing, and challenging topics, now appearing in this collection.