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‘Essential Voices of the Pandemic’ describes the health crisis in poetry of Connecticut people

Hartford Courant - 6/5/2020

Michelle McEwen of Bloomfield always has been an introvert. She doesn’t work, so she can take care of one of her two sons, who is autistic. She sticks close to home most of the time.

When the coronavirus pandemic started, her life didn’t change much, except now she homeschools both of her boys. She has written a poem about her daily routine. It’s called “Same Old.”

“Self-care stayed the same during quarantine -- kept up the skin-care & exercise routines.

Still over here worried bout the same old things: love, money, housing, & groceries.

Still over here daydreaming to slow jams.

Still making mountains.

Still counting my chickens.

Still biting off more.

Still a square peg.

Still lonely & high-strung -- except with mask on.”

McEwen is one of the participants in Essential Voices of the Pandemic, a new project by West Hartford-based poetry-writing initiative Poetry in the Streets.

Melanie Faranello, who founded Poetry in the Streets in 2017, used to sit on street corners in Hartford with a jar of words and a typewriter, encouraging passersby to grab a word and start writing a poem.

“It connected people, engaging them with strangers. Now with the pandemic, I can’t do that anymore,” Faranello said. “But it’s a potent time now. People want and need to express themselves. Arts and creative writing are healing in a way.”

Faranello set up a page on her website to post poems written in response to the pandemic, quarantine, mass unemployment, financial hardship and any other aspect of the coronavirus experience.

“The poems could be about anything. How are you? What happened to you? Can we hear from you?” Faranello said. “Everybody is going through something different right now.”

Faranello has collected the poems she has gathered on her website – poetryonthestreets.com/read-entries-here – and wants members of the public to contribute more. A call for entries is at poetryonthestreets.com. Most submissions will be posted, pending review, Faranello said.

Contributions of prose are also welcome, such as that contributed by bus driver James Dale:

“I do my part by helping steer people in our communities towards some sort of normalcy one turn at a time. But for others the fall guy! A scapegoat, a human pin cushion. Here only to serve the public, and for them to project their issues upon. … Making every stop at each station, platform, or sidewalk is like the pulse of each town; ensuring that the heart of the city beats on.”

McEwen, a freelance poet and short-story writer, met Faranello months ago. “When I met her on the street I was so happy. I loved her setup with the typewriter,” McEwen, 44, said.

Writing about life during COVID-19 came naturally to her. “Some people had routines that caused them to panic. They liked going out to nightclubs and to visit friends,” she said. “I was living the same life, but now I was living it during a pandemic. I’ve always been a melancholy person. I just stayed who I was.”

Another participant is the state’s former poet laureate, Rennie McQuilkin. He lives in Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield with his wife, Sarah. Seabury imposed strict rules about residents’ movements early on in the health crisis, but they do let residents wander the grounds.

“Seabury is a huge complex with lots of land. The buildings are separated from the meadow by a wooden fence with large posts. People have been putting stone tributes on the fenceposts to memorialize people lost. It’s a way of keeping in touch and celebrating them,” McQuilkin, 84, said.

The McQuilkins have created two of the stone tributes, to honor two friends who died of the virus. And McQuilkin wrote "Evensong in a Time of Plague”:

“On the thick, square-topped cedar posts

of a fence separating Pestilence from

a singing, trilling, wind-woven meadow,

walkers untouched by the plague have placed

umber, white, gray, red, black and ivory stones,

some shaped like birds, some set with eyes,

some with the profiles of humankind . . .

In the gloaming, as the chapel carillon chimes,

the stones, in memory of those who have fallen,

seem faces of a world-wide choir, their robes

the posts below. They lift voices with those

in the meadow, promising perfect health.”

McQuilkin said Seabury residents have other ways of blowing off steam and interacting. “We sing to each other across the courtyard like they do in Italy,” he said. “Some people do wolf-howling across the courtyard. And there’s a lot of poetry-writing going on, haiku writing. We’re quite rambunctious.”

Kelly de la Rocha and her daughter Emily also participated. Kelly, a freelance writer, and Emily, who just got a BFA in art therapy at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, are riding out the pandemic at the family home in Farmington. Kelly, who will continue her art-therapy education in the fall at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, created a self-portrait of an anguished person, her face in her hands.

“For my BFA, I was researching how people deal with traumatic experiences and how people cope. Then my life was turned upside down. I thought it was a good time to turn the investigation inward,” Emily said.

“When I was sent home from school, I was sad, frustrated, upset, torn away from my artistic community. I took some pictures of myself. I thought that picture captured how I was feeling in the first few weeks of the pandemic.”

Kelly wanted to cheer up her daughter, but it was difficult. “I couldn’t really say ‘everything will go back to the way it was before, everything’s going to be alright,’ because I don’t know that,” Kelly said. “I was longing for a simpler time when I could say ‘everything is going to be OK’.”

Kelly’s poem, “Face Covering,” taps into that longing, as she views the accessories of the pandemic – face masks – in light of Emily’s childhood.

“Blue paper face masks are a fixture

on the kitchen island now.

I hardly notice them anymore,

but can’t ignore

the plastic sandwich bag that protects them.

It’s just like the ones

I’d put in Emily’s lunch box

back when the world was

ham and cheese sandwiches.

Home from college,

senior year cut coronavirus short,

she wanders downstairs around 11

in paint-spattered sweats

to toast frozen waffles.

When the kitchen island

was all zinnias,

she would muse about whether

she had enough angst

in her life to be an artist.

Now she’s upstairs creating

a self portrait that’s haunted eyes

and one hand over her mouth like a mask.

Emily ventures into the world guarded

by a face-covering hand-

sewn from floral fabric

that reminds me of a bonnet

she once adored,

one like Laura Ingalls wore

when the world was running maskless

through sunny fields.

I long to shield my child’s eyes

from our COVID-bright world

but I know it needs her.

So I fill an old egg carton with soil,

teach her to grow zinnias.”

Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.

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