Luke Rolfes: We are here today with poet Millicent Borges Accardi to talk about her excellent collection of poems entitled Quarantine Highway from FlowerSong Press. Many of these poems exist in the foreground of the pandemic, and they harness the fear, self-reflection, isolation, and anxiety many of us experienced while living through Covid-19. Thanks for taking some time with us, Millicent! Clearly, the pandemic was an inspiration for this book. You mention in the endnotes that many of these pieces were written during the early/middle stages of the pandemic, and that many of the poems came from a 30 by 30 writing challenge. Can you walk us through the genesis of this project and how this 30 by 30 challenge turned into a full-length book?
Millicent Borges Accardi: A 30 by 30 project is a challenge of writing a poem a day for thirty days. As you stated, the poetry in Quarantine Highway was written during early and mid-pandemic quarantine, as part of a CantoMundo fellows group writing challenge, organized by Juan Morales. CantoMundo is a poetry fellowship/workshop, similar to Cave Canem but for Latinx poets.
In regards to the 30 by 30, I kept writing after the initial month and added to the poems I had created. This was an isolated time for me personally (when poetry served as a prayer almost and a way to ground myself and gather in community thru Zoom and Google, to connect with writer friends, helping each other bolster our souls and take a re-assessment of what is necessary in life. And I welcomed the structure of the 30 by 30 and the comradery offered by the group.
The organizing point of the landscape for the book was to use lines from CantoMundo fellows as touchpoints, as prompts to ignite my work and my poetic purpose. The genesis for the book was giving a voice to the pandemic, my voice, and my poetry would serve as an artifact for that period of time. I was reading about the Plague and the 1918 Spanish Flu as points of reference, and finding many similarities, with the desperation the loss of freedom, the early fatalities, the fear, the homemade masks and the horrific disease that befell the entire world.
LR: How did you go about organizing this collection? Did you have a specific arc in mind?
MBA: I was struggling to find a way through the fear and the isolation. My husband is a long-time-waiting-for-a-heart-transplant patient, so we had different worries which were magnified by his situation. Our situation. This new layer.
I was writing everyday then as a way to connect with the outside world and with myself, also, as a grounding. How to face and exist within this new reality. Like in the poems, there was much fear and activities around protecting ourselves and crazy activities like bleaching the boxes of packages, wiping down railings, scrambling to buy hand wipes and face masks. Stockpiling toilet paper like it was the end of the world. We watched the news and talked over the fence to neighbors. It felt like The War of the Worlds (radio program from the 1940s when aliens invaded earth). No one, early on, had any answers as to what to do or what could be done. It was a desperate time. Personally, and for our communities.
When I set out to organize the poems in this collection, I had historically a bigger picture in mind: specifically, how the quarantine adversely affected immigrant populations and the working poor, the first poems like “Broken Pieces” reach out into the world, trying to make contact in fear. The quarantine and life after it seems, now, deviated a strong line between those in the service industry (restaurant and hotel workers), those on the front lines (medical staff, teachers), those who HAD to be out in the world because of their work in the cogwheel of cities, those running businesses, making deliveries, builders, care-givers. The line was drawn between those who had the luxury no matter how tenuous it seemed at the time between staying home and having to be outside. Those who could cocoon, did, bringing their families in close and at least for me, it was a time of discovering more of what matters in life. What activities and problems can be cast away. A lot of us had struggles and financial hardships and a lot of us reworked our former priorities.
The poems in the book are organized in a way that starts with outside and moves inward.
I printed out the whole manuscript and sorted it on the bed, physically moving around the order to create an arc, to disperse the “best” poems throughout and not have any clumped at the beginning or the end, and also making the decision which poems start and which poems end the book.
LR: Were there any tough cuts when making this book? Any poems that almost made it in but didn’t?
MBA: Ha ha. SO MANY rough cuts. I believe I cut some 10 or 15 poems from the first draft for two reasons:
Although written during quarantine, the poem was not or did not mention the pandemic even in a general way or casual way, so the poem did not fit into this grouping. Poems that were not about, even in an abstract way with the quarantine time were deleted in the first cut.
Poems that were not as strong. Poems that fell flat or that did not work even as foundational poems to forward the theme.
I was keeping in mind W. S. Merwin’s poem, “The Unwritten,” that begins like this:
Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught
In the sense that it is the responsibility of writer and artists take notes, to document important historical events, to tell out our own stories.
LR: We are a couple years removed from the worst stages of the pandemic. I recall “the unknown” being quite frightening, especially in navigating safety versus quality of life. Was there much time difference between drafting and revision of these poems? Did time and distance change the way you read these pieces and/or understand these events?
MBA: When I was IN IT? Everything was terrifying, overwhelming. I was stuck, and poetry I saw as a way out. Looking back the work is more of an artifact or a documentation as to what historically was happening in the world AND inside me, at that time.
LR: Many of your poems are “inspired by…” or “from a line by…” Can you tell us about your generative process? Do you often, for instance, read a few poems before writing a poem?
MBA: During the pandemic I was reading a lot of poetry, more than usual as a way to try and steady myself to stay sane. Much of what I was reading was written by CantoMundo fellows who were participating in the 30 by 30.
So, I was keeping a list of lines that resonated with me and sent my mind into over-drive as the start of a conversation. Prompts if you will. Prompts often get me started writing. They can, the original line, serves as a title or an impetus or even sometimes the original prompt disappears inside the poem which travels in a different direction. Often, for me a prompt or a line that inspires me is a starting point, an introduction to a conversation I want to have, poetically with an existing piece of writing.
LR: A number of your pieces employ the pronoun “we” rather than “I,” which follows the not-often-used first person plural perspective of storytelling. Can you talk a bit about that your usage of “we” in these poems? What drew you to using “we”?
MBA: We had not realized that we did that!
I’ll have to go back and see which poems you mean. I would say that I probably meant more as the “community” form of we versus the royal “we,” to include everyone on the journey of the poem, to make the poem act as a drawing together of a global disaster we all forcibly had to participate in. Live in and die in.
LR: Let’s dive into a couple individual poems. I was drawn to “Bread” early in the book. This particular moment struck me: “And, then life was forbidden and / everyone was an enemy. The air was poison and spit was / evaporating into a daily forecast.” This seems to get at the most unnatural part of the pandemic. Life was interrupted, and we were forced to acknowledge that we were a danger to each other. That idea seems to ripple through the entirety of the book. Can you talk about the concept of “everyone was an enemy”? What is its effect?
MBA: Potentially the Covid pandemic physically MADE everyone’s breath an enemy, everyone’s touch an enemy. It made sharing a room dangerous. It was like being at war with each other. Potentially, every exposure to the outside world was an opportunity to be exposed to a virus that could kill us or make us very ill.
Gatherings that used to bring people together, were seen as death ceremonies. Early on, the news there were tons of stories of families gathering for a wedding or a birthday party and guests coming down with Covid later. People were afraid to visit grandparents or parents, especially elderly people or those who were sick.
Initially, the virus was misunderstood and surfaces were to blame people, rational people were scrubbing door handles and stairways. They were wearing gas masks and latex gloves; they were out of their minds. We were out of our minds.
LR: Another poem that hit me was “The Past Recent Times.” In it, the speaker contemplates how different life has become. The final line of the poem is “How do I know what I used to be.” As the acute stage of the pandemic was coming to an end, people talked repeatedly about “bouncing back” and “getting back to normal.” Does this poem (and others in the book) imply that maybe there isn’t a getting back to normal? Do you think this collective experience integrally changed us?
MBA: Like a tree when it recovers from a break in the trunk, the tree continues to grow, but the roots run deep and the branch it inherited in its growth path is lost forever, so the scar will be seen for the rest of its life, torn with the break, disfigured by the change in its growth pattern. The tree lives with the scar.
I believe the pandemic did that to us as a society We will continue to see the consequences for our whole lives of that deep dent. That pandemic break will always be visible. Here we are two or three years outside the core of height of Covid, yet, still afraid. Habits have changed in people with the invention of Zoom; we are better adapted to work remotely. More so than we did before and Door Dash found its way to even the remotest of rural areas. Job descriptions were changed. Values were transformed. Brick and mortar stores continue to fold. Restaurants? People have not fully regained back to pre-pandemic business. People are less interested in pubs and bars, going out, than they used to be. We became complacent about staying home, being isolated. Most of us think twice when joining events in large crowds. People in general have grown mindful (careful) about opening the door. Or answering the phone. We are protective of our environments.
When I was binging black and white movies and there was a party where guests were crowded in or a concert with a mosh pit, my first thought during quarantine was "OH my, all of those opportunities for transmission."
LR: The pandemic is certainly a heavy backdrop in this book, but that is not the only subject. In the harrowing “Come Angels! Come Beasts!” a poem inspired by Ruben Quesada, you approach the traumatic issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. What can you tell us about this piece, and what led you to want to include this poem in this manuscript?
MBA: Ruben is a wonderful poet and a dear friend—
The pandemic was as oppressive as an authority figure like a priest. Like a child, we have a limited response to a limited defense to abuse and harm. To protect ourselves, we have to seek the protection of a greater power.
People grow cynical of authority, in a similar way that they were rejecting the vaccines. Many refused to wear masks in public and somehow had to find their own authority and dismiss the power of the pandemic. The situations seemed similar to me, how people lost their trust in priests in the church. Vaccine refusal is abuse. The pandemic was oppressive and everywhere. We were helpless.
Time itself cannot heal these wounds. Survival is an empty promise, sometimes. But given the choice, we continue.
LR: I was also drawn to “More Than us, but Less than Wind," a poem inspired by Carmen Giménez Smith. This poem, which appears near the end, is about the diaspora of peoples gathered across the country and the identities they take with them. Why did you choose to give us this topic near the end of the manuscript?
MBA: At the end of Genesis is when God tells Adam and Eve to go forth and reproduce, multiply. In the hope of surviving the pandemic and other casualties of living we should take what is good in our lives, things that means something and put distance between ourselves and these terrible memories and reproduce good memories. I wanted my book to have the same kind of message. That of hope. Of going out and being fruitful. As migrants do when they settle in new lands.
LR: Did you have a poem that came easier to you than the rest?
MBA: It sounds funny to say this, but nearly every poem I write has the same trajectory: an idea, a spark, some time to consider and percolate, a translation (putting the poem down on paper or typing on my laptop, then days weeks or years of adjustments, revision, and working it out so the poem in my head matches the poem on the page.
Once in a while, there is a poem that arrives nearly complete, as if it were created in air. Those are few and far between and always seem magical. The two Neruda-inspired poems in Quarantine Highway were both “easy” in that spiritual magic way. The one below, ending the book, arrived the easy way. Here is the last poem in the collection:
from a line by Pablo Neruda
Wet was the light as we saw it
through a threadbare lens
of what we call time or that period
of waiting between what will happen
next and what we regret having happened,
the hard-bad opposite of a world hunch or an omen,
the silent-low sense of doom to come,
a spirit arising in the country we
call home, the desire for isolation,
desperately to be different, the
unexplored nonsense of late.
This is the air in the pastel room when we
are enclosed and locked up by
an intense wondering and fear
of comfort fear of letting our guard
down and forgetting to protect ourselves
from nearly everything we can imagine,
even the scrape of skin upon
our hands, the whispered hello
of a neighbor or a child playing in the creek
below the yard where there are dirt
banks instead of lawn. We are who
we choose to become, are becoming
or perhaps we mean we are who we
are sentenced to be, a corona crown
of in the if and now and meant for always
that time is a path to follow, as we near the
day of the year when June rises
her longest glance of a day and tells us
it is all right to enter.
LR: What’s next for you and your work? Any new projects in the works?
Projects are aways finding me whether I am looking for them or not.
I become involved in different arenas; whether it is writing poetry or assembling work onto a mss or mentoring or teaching poetry on Zoom. Or spending time submitting for grants. Occasionally I am preparing for a panel discussion or grant board.
This summer I served as a poetry mentor for Adroit and AWP Writer 2 Writer writing programs. Earlier, I served as a theater panelist for a California grants board.
Poetry-wise, currently, I am finishing up a manuscript entitled, In Things Evil, poetry loosely based on the psalms.
I also have my eye on The Three Marias, a Portuguese text by three feminist authors Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa published in 1972, (officially called New Portuguese Letters (Novas Cartas Portuguesas)). The book challenges the Salazar dictatorship and revolts against traditional Portuguese society, discussing themes of women's rights, freedom, and oppression. Perhaps more necessary now than in years past. My idea is to write poems based on the original text.
Honestly? Though, more than a selection on a menu; my next project is always a Roulette wheel. Short-term? Wherever my interest happens to be on that day. Wherever the ball lands, I have something to work on that fits the category. Black Number 10, for example, is always revision. Red number 5 means head to Submittable to send out new work to publications. One through ten, odd numbers are red; even numbers are black. Double zero means get out books and read.
LR: Thanks so much for your time, Millicent! I enjoyed reading and thinking about this book. Check out Quarantine Highway from FlowerSong Press here.
More info on Millicent: https://www.millicentborgesaccardi.com/