FRAMINGHAM, Mass. This suburb of Boston is known for its many shopping malls and franchise food outlets, but not for its poetry. “We ain’t exactly Greenwich Village,” says long-time Assistant Commissioner of Curb Cuts Mike Bottilini. “Who has time to wander lonely as a cloud when you got six lanes of traffic bearing down on you trying to make a left turn into Olive Garden?”
But in an unlikely turn of events the Massachusetts State Police barracks here is ground zero for a versification effort that is being hailed as the poetic equivalent of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government-funded race by scientists to develop the first atomic bomb. “COVID-19 has stretched our poetic resources to the breaking point,” says Marielle Twinton, the outgoing poet laureate of Massachusetts. “If you check Rhymezone.com, you’ll see there are only five words that rhyme with ‘mask,’ and we went through the last of those two months ago.”
So a team of 24 un-or-underemployed M.F.A.’s in poetry have been working round the clock in a windowless basement with exposed heating pipes overhead, cranking out verse that is posted on highway warning boards across the state, urging residents to wear masks to prevent the spread of the disease until vaccines are available. “These kids, I can’t say enough about ’em,” says Bottilini. “A lot of ’em came in over Thanksgiving ’cause they were tired of relatives asking about their job prospects.”
“I think that I am not too keen/about folks who spread COVID-19.”
Traffic safety and poetry experts say that in order to maintain the effectiveness of highway warning boards it is essential to keep content fresh, otherwise motorists won’t look up at flashing safety messages from their phones. “Our first poem–‘Don’t make me ask/Please wear a mask,’ was as effective as a haiku, or William Carlos Williams’ pithy poem about plums–‘This Is Just to Say,’” Twinton notes. “Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with ‘flask’ or ‘cask’ without encouraging drunk drivers, and nobody’s basking around here in December.”
“I think that I shall never see
a poem as lovely as Exit 33.”
Which left only ‘task,” which was used in October for “It’s fun, not a task/like Halloween, wear a mask,” and volunteers were forced to go back to crude tools such as thesauruses and blank verse to come up with new poems. “Thankfully we have our ‘angry young men,’ like this young fellow,” Twinton says, indicating Jeremy Overholt with a nod of her head. A look over the young man’s black turtleneck-clad shoulder reveals a rage-filled couplet that reflects the increasing frustration of many who face new lockdown restrictions:
I don’t know what it is with you jerks,
you gotta wear masks at home and at work!
Down a row of desks that wouldn’t look out of place at the local community college here, neo-Gothic poet Alison Furth tries her hand at a poem that reflects her love of Edgar Allan Poe:
You ought to read The Masque of the Red Death,
Wear one now, so I can’t smell your breath.
“I wish that you’d cover your mouth and nose–
I’m telling you in poetry–not in prose.”
Funding for the project is provided by The Poetry Foundation, which in 2002 received a $200 million grant from Ruth Lilly, heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, who had submitted several poems to its affiliated publication Poetry Magazine that were politely rejected. “In retrospect we’re kicking ourselves, since she probably would have given a lot more if we’d accepted one,” says assistant editor Valerie Vilsack. “We changed our policy and now publish every crappy poem that comes our way.”