PETERBOROUGH – The solitude of lockdown and COVID-19 has spawned a series of poems, “Day After Day In Quarantine,” a poetry anthology by the Peterborough Poetry Project.

Some contributors dipped into their creative psyche to unmask the fears and triumphs during the pandemic, while others delved deep to bring their feelings to the surface.

Author and educator Meg Peterson, director of the National Writing Project in New Hampshire, wrote a short essay about writing poetry, called “Poetry Day After Day,” which she said tangentially touched upon the theme of “Day After Day In Quarantine.”

“What I wrote about is a process that I use for writing poetry,” she said. “It’s called ‘poem a day,’ and it’s about how I find inspiration in everyday life to write about the things that are most important to me.”

Peterson said she was writing less during the pandemic quarantine and approached it with some trepidation.

“Often I write because I am inspired by people,” she said. “And I just sort of use the poem as a way of processing interactions with people. So I thought having so few interactions with people would make it more difficult, but it didn’t.”

The practice of writing a poem for the month of June, Peterson’s “poem a day,” helped her process things in a different way and make more sense of out what was happening around her.

Peterson said it was a cathartic experience.

“It was about finding meaning in the everyday,” she shared. “Because when you’re writing a poem every day, you’re not waiting for some fabulous bolt of inspiration. You have to find your inspiration in your daily life, in the things that sometimes you might not always pay attention to. That’s the magic of it.”

The author said it’s really about attending to things that you wouldn’t otherwise attend to and they become much more meaningful when processed through poetry.

“The fact that I could do it was kind of a ‘wow’,” she said.

Peterson keeps her writings and poems in a file and numbers them; that way if she goes back to revise them, she can keep them in order.

“It started out as a way to keep order,” she said. “But it finds its own chronological sense.”

Peterson has been writing for most of her life but doing the practice of a “poem a day” began in 2017.

William Doreski has been writing poetry for some 60 years and contributed to the anthology as well.

“I write poetry all the time,” he said. “And it’s always said that poets love disasters because, they stir things up. I think the problem is that nobody wants write poems that are just topical. But there’s a long history of poets and novelists and essayists writing about various plagues. Some of them are a hell of a lot worse than COVID-19. Like the Black Death.”

“Day After Day In Quarantine” is the fourth book of poems that Doreski has appeared in, with another forthcoming.

Doreski said a lot of people are writing about quarantine and COVID, because it is the new “what is.”

“Poets are always interested in issues of mortality and immortality and of course, immorality,” he said. “And it’s a natural fit. The pandemic creeps in because it’s part of everyday life. Most poets, since Wordsworth, have been writing about ordinary life most of the time.”

Poetry feeds our imaginative lives – sometimes in a negative way.

“It’s every present and kind of permeates everything,” Doreski said. “Naturally, people are going to write about it.”

Doreski’s poem is titled, “Arcadia in Plague.”

“It is much more directly about COVID-19,” he pointed out. “I find that other poems that I write are very much about something else – a line or two will come that will somehow refer to the current situation. It just can’t help itself.”

Doreski, a Poet Laureate, said that writing the poem was “the same as writing anything else.”

“People ask, ‘How do you write a poem?'” he said. “I say, ‘You put one word after another until you’re done.’ You don’t necessarily know where it’s going but when I was writing this particular poem, I was thinking about the fact that in the 17th century in general, masks meaning, the form of a kind of ceremonial play, were wildly popular.”

Players wore masks so that their natural expressions would not be part of the play.

“They were supposed to be representative figures,” Doreski said, “rather than actual people. And it occurred to me that many people here in Peterborough were being good citizens and wearing masks, obeying public health officials, that we were hiding our expressions from each other or so it seemed at first.”

Doreski said that as we see one another more wearing masks, we realize that a mask can’t completely hide our expression.

“The idea of the relationship between the mask as a play – the most playful kind of play because the 17th century mask is all singing and dancing – and then there’s the fact that we’re wearing masks in a plague. And the 17th century was quite familiar with plagues as well.”

Those subjects, and that of the mask as a play, was running through Doreski’s mind, not just when he wrote the poem, but in everyday life.

“This particular poem is probably the bluntest of that connection,” he said.

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