The patterns of my work habits were formed during the years when my sons
were young and living at home. Although they are grown now and on their
own, those early work habits remain with me. During those years, I
always wrote with some kind of noise and activity going on around me,
pre-schoolers to teenagers. If I wanted to write, I had to do it in the
midst of that activity and adjust to interruptions. I generally worked
on the kitchen table and never wrote in a room behind a closed door.
A typical day for me now, the spring of 1999, begins when I wake up,
usually out of dreams, around 6:00. If I’m particularly excited about
a poem I’m working on, I will have left it on the floor beside the bed
the night before. I pick it up the first thing then, read over it, eager
to see how it seems to me after a night’s sleep. I will revise it a
little before I’m out of bed.
Then I do whatever domestic chores are waiting, which was always my
habit in the past—cook and clean up after breakfast, usually soup and
a sandwich. I dress, make the beds, start the washing machine, feed the
cat, see what’s happening out of doors, weather and birds, a new poppy
in bloom, an unleashed dog running down the street. I go to my desk
around 8:00 to think again about the poems I’m working on. I turn on
the radio to the classical station. Either the radio or the stereo will
be on all day when I’m at home. I’m beginning a new poem today, so I
leave my desk with my clipboard and folder and sit in a chair by the
window or at the kitchen table where I can see outside. In my folder, I
have a list of words and phrases and brief thoughts I’ve jotted down,
simply because they attracted my attention and I liked them. These notes
are never in complete sentences. Complete sentences in these very early
jottings would kill any poetic potential the images or the words
possess, limiting them somehow. I look through this collection of notes
to see if anything there still interests me and also to see if any of
the separate items might work together in some way in a poem. Finding
something, I begin to write, in pencil on notebook paper, in a slightly
disorganized way, never orderly.
After working a while, I quit, leave the table to move clean clothes
from the washer into the dryer or to take clothes out of the dryer, fold
them and put them away, thinking all the while of what’s happening in
the new poem, listening to the music on the radio. When I go back to the
poem, I generally see something there I had missed before I left. The
early morning proceeds in this way. I write. I stare out the window. I
add a line or two, a metaphor, a word. I leave the writing to attend to
a small chore or two. Something Karl Hass says during his radio program,
"Adventures in Good Music," catches my attention. I make a note of
it. Whatever I’m doing, there’s still a part of me working on the
poem, thinking about what it’s saying, the direction it’s going.
When I see the writing beginning to take a form, generally in the
first couple of hours of work, I go to the computer and type in what
I’ve written, work with it a while at the computer. On my desk I have
a small stuffed doll, a jester wearing red, pointed shoes, a
three-belled hat, a silly grin on his face. He reminds me not to take
myself too seriously. I print out the poem, move back to the window and
begin to revise once more, adding, deleting, rearranging, clarifying. I
stop again, go outside, into that openness, and water the wild flower
garden. I go to the grocery store, then meet my husband John for lunch.
Afterward, we go to the hardware store to select a new kitchen sink and
faucet. We’re having the old sink and cracked faucet replaced. We’re
confused by the choices.
Home again. The mail has arrived. There are three or four letters, a
form to complete giving permission to reprint a poem, one letter from an
editor I respect who has accepted a poem I submitted to his journal. He
suggests a change in the last line of the poem, but insists that
publication does not depend on my agreeing to the change. I think he
gives good reasons for feeling the last line is a little weak, but I
don’t like his suggested solution. I begin to read the poem carefully
again and again, trying to feel what’s happening in that last line and
trying various ways of rearranging and rewording it. I work for an hour
at this. Now I’m not only dissatisfied with both the original ending and the
ending suggested by the editor, I'm dissatisfied with all the other new endings I’ve
tried as well. I’m beginning to feel anxious, afraid I’ll have to stick with
the original ending. It’s only four words but not quite the best four
words.
I put both the new poem and the poem with the flawed ending aside and
answer my e-mail—someone needs a bio for an upcoming reading; someone
else wants to know if I can come to a scheduled reading three days early
in order to participate in other events; another gathering I’ve agreed
to participate in is trying to arrange a conference call among the
faculty members; a friend has had her novel accepted for publication. I
e-mail my son in Austin and my son and daughter-in-law in New Jersey just to check in with
them and finalize our plans for visiting them next
week.
I turn to the new poem again and see the necessity for a little
research—the origin of a word, a synonym I need, the description of a
flower or a weed or a bird, double check whether I’m right about where
a reptile lives, an historical date. It’s a pleasure to look through
my resource books. I like the kind of vocabulary and perspective there.
I think about the questions the poem is raising, all that I don’t
know, how the poem might address my ignorance. The work is almost like
solving a puzzle, choosing the word that fits. There IS a right word, a
right image, a right turn for this space—right in music, right in
meaning. What are they? I want the words that will show me something I
wasn’t aware of previously. This is the same puzzle I face with the
flawed ending of the other poem. I work back and forth between these two
poems for a while, engaged in the puzzles they present. I make many
revisions in the new poem, entering my changes in the computer and
printing out the new versions, often revising at the computer itself.
Toward late afternoon, I take a walk. The Front Range of the Rockies
is always in view, so far away and full of colors, never looking the
same twice. I can see a great distance off. But I pay attention to what
is close at hand, too, how life is reacting to the conditions of the day,
what is being said out there in the world.
When I arrive home, I feed the cat again. I tell him everything I
would like a god to say to me. It’s time to start dinner. I peel and
pound and dice and stir and mix. And one time I wondered how the
movements of my hands engaged in these various cooking chores day after
day were informed by the movements of the words in the poem and vice
versa. I keep both poems close beside me, on the countertop as I cook,
on the table as we eat, just as I have always kept the poems I’m
currently working on with me. After dinner and clean-up, John and I
usually watch television for a while, sometimes a Poirot or a Sherlock
Holmes mystery, or an NBA game, a Live Performance from Lincoln Center,
a video we’ve rented, and we talk about what we’re viewing, critique
it, admire it or ridicule it and laugh about it. I look at the poems off
and on through it all. I change a word here and there.
We take a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood. The moon is one day
away from being full. It owns the sky. It dominates, influences the
earth.
I read before bed, South,
by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the last Antarctic expedition of Shackleton
and his ship, Endurance. How strange and frightening to be caught in a
sea of ice and carried along with its drift, the sounds of its great
cracklings and eruptions. I look at both poems again, reading through
them several times, trying to catch inconsistencies in the new poem,
trying to hear the music it’s making. I think I have a solution for
the flawed ending to the other poem, but I won’t be certain until I
sleep on it and read it again in the morning. I put both poems on the
floor beside the bed.
___
Pattiann Rogers - A Day in the Life
TCR October 1999 Feature
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