30 Habits of Highly Effective Poets: Jeannine Atkins on Multi-tasking

It's the last Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month and I am thrilled to be hosting my friend and fellow Poetry Friday blogger, Jeannine Atkins.

Jeannine and I met through Poetry Friday. She is the author of many books, including the historical verse biography, Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J.Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters . (My interview with Jeannine about Borrowed Names is here.)

Jeannine has several books for children about important women in science. With her interest in science and nature, her efforts to teach girls about pioneering female scientists, and her excellence in poetry, Jeannine is an expert multi-tasker. Today, she's going to tell us how juggling tasks helps with her writing.

Here's Jeannine.

I’m not a fan of blank paper, so rarely begin there. Much of my writing is inspired by reading or paying close attention. I’m intrigued by small things I see, and pose questions, puttering through books or following threads on the computer, though WEB information often isn’t dusty or buried enough to intrigue me. I write out from the image, describing it, then the setting, and people who come upon it. I look for other concrete things that the first image calls to mind and collect those that collide or snap into place.

I find it helpful to have several projects going at once. I can embrace procrastination by goofing off on one by fiddling with another, and find that after all a poem is sneakily coming together.

Or you can always write a poem about procrastination, as I did here:

Not Today,

Mama says, There’s too much housework.

Please. Do not get sidetracked

by shirts that need pressing.

There will always be fine grime

on the china on the mantel,

corn to husk, cherries to pit, apples to core.

Ignore them. The dream begun under a tree

is sweeter than stories you tell yourself

over dirty dishes.

Life tempts most away from paper and pen,

but gently bring yourself back.

Who can resist gingerbread

with chocolate frosting,

but do you need to bake it now?         

If you must get out pots and pans,

come back and invite your distractions --

cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg -- onto the page.



 from Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J.Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters (Henry Holt, 2010), © 2010 Jeannine Atkins. All rights reserved.

Some of my family's other favorite books by Jeannine are:

We especially enjoyed Becoming Little Women
after a visit to the Alcotts' Orchard House.

You'll find links to every post in my "30 Habits of Highly Effective Poets" here.

Today's Poetry Friday host is my dear friend Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference.

5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 2)

More of my interview with author Jeannine Atkins about her book Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters. Part 1 is here.

Jeannine and I have discussed the first two sections of the book, poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder, and Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia. The third portion explores the relationship between Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.

4. In the Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie section, there is a poem called “Between Gardens.” Irene is both fascinated by “the pale blue glow from bowls of crystals” and jealous of the attention her parents give their experiments.

How did you plan this series of poems to show Irene’s shift from resentment of her parents’ work, to becoming a Nobel Laureate for her own scientific work? I’m wondering about plotting with poetry.

The plotting with poetry was fun, as I began with that structure – here’s a daughter who won the same amazing award bestowed upon her mother – and wondered how she got there.

In Irène’s letters to her absent mother, her need for her reads like a scientific fact that she expresses clearly and directly. It’s a different tactic than the more typically feminine one her younger sister chooses, hoping to bring loved ones closer not by stating facts but through charm, clothing, music, and kindness bordering on self-sacrifice. As a child, Irène did resent her mother’s distance, but she never blamed her work. 

In “Without School Bells,” I wrote about how Irène needs “to comprehend the laws of radiance, reflection, refraction./Every question and answer binds her/ to the one world her mother loves.”

So she became closer to, or maybe sought to understand, her mother through the science. Irene is the only daughter in your book with a sister. It's interesting how Curie's daughters (pictured with Curie below) used different coping skills to handle their mother's focus on her work.

5. How has working on this book – and now, seeing how readers respond to it – enriched you as a poet and writer? What did you learn in the process?

It’s opened up a world to me, and I’m grateful for every reader who’s found something in my words. I still tend to think of myself as more of a story-teller than a poet, and of course these poems are held together with narrative arcs. 

The imagery and pace of poetry, the way I could choose over and over where to begin and end a section, and let that hold some power, seemed the best way to tell the stories of these women’s lives, leaving small clues about how they connected while taking their own particular courses. I like the process of building up, then taking away. Sorting through all the details of a life to find ones that seem to truly speak. Looking for, and making, patterns from the small things that might be found on a kitchen table or a porch.

Now I’m working hard – trimming, trimming, trimming, looking for the essential words that will show an era when writing began. I’m showing the surfaces of a different language, clothing, vehicles, religion, and politics, and drawing connections through the same sky and similar hearts.


It's quite an achievement. I also appreciate that you did not force comparisons between the three mother-daughter pairings. Instead, the reader creates his or her own threads of understanding among these three distinct stories.


Jeannine, thanks again for visiting. It's been great talking poetry with you!
 

Poetry Friday: 5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 1)

Have you adjusted to summer yet? My kids have been off school for just over a week. Our little annoyances with one another (like my 13-year-old constantly pestering for more XBox time) seem more annoying at the beginning of summer. Then we learn to cope with the shift in our relationships and settle into summer-normal.

I'm thinking about parent-child relationships today because author and Poetry Friday blogger Jeannine Atkins is visiting. Hi, Jeannine!

Jeannine's book, Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters is a trio of historical relationship studies -- all in verse. Look at the *display bling* Borrowed Names had at ALA last weekend.

That's a rainbow of stars!

Jeannine discovered that all three famous women she profiles were born in the same year -- and all three had daughters who influenced their own professional lives. So Jeannine began a journey of research, writing and finally a wonderful book (2010, Henry Holt). I can't wait until my daughter (now 10) is old enough to read and discuss Borrowed Names.

1. You wrote a blog post for the journal Hunger Mountain  about beginning this book project in prose, then shifting to poetry. How did poetic form open up these mother-daughter stories for you?

I love the way that line breaks in poetry can emphasize words in the cutting way we’ve practiced as half-grown daughters, letting phrases turn sharp as an angle of an eyebrow, the spin of a turning back. And as a mother of a teen, I grew practiced in editing, thinking: Is this a thought I need to say? Moving the stories to poetry added some of silence’s tension, the way it does in a conversation, especially one between people who love each other, but also often crave a space away.

Believe me, this is also true for mothers and half-grown sons. I like the point about the tensions poetry can create with the silence of line breaks and spaces between stanzas. It's a way of listening to the poem's voice.

2. When you went back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, what did you find there that felt poetic? How did her (and daughter Rose’s) writing style inform your poems about them?

I love the Little House books, but they feel more sturdy to me than spare as they move through the premise that people can and do go on… and on. Which has its own thrill, but it’s not so poetic. The connections and distance between the novels and the lives they were based on most inspired me, just as the difference between Louisa May Alcott’s real life and the somewhat idealized Little Women moved me to write a novel for middle readers called Becoming Little Women.

I was surprised to learn from your book how involved Rose was in the writing of her mother's books. There must be some interesting surprises for Alcott fans in Becoming Little Women.

3. One of my favorite poems in the book is “Pieces” – about Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia. The poem asks how A’Lelia can “bear to be the girl/ who demands so much giving up” from her mother. The adolescent daughter seems to be criticizing how she treats her mother, but is unable to stop herself. That feels very modern.

Can you talk about blending historical facts with moments like this – where we could be talking about a mother and daughter of 2010? How did writing poems help you weave together history and the rawness of these women’s relationships?

It’s always a question about how much of the present to bring to the past, but I tend to believe that while people may have dressed differently, read differently, and sat on different furniture, there’s more that remains the same than has changed.

Reading books written in the nineteenth century, we find more sentimentality about the mother- daughter relationship, as well, of course, about much else, such as the true labor of child-bearing or the difficulties of marriage. Good manners are more present in depictions of family life, and some habits must have gone deep. Daughters probably did feel a keener sense of dependency on mothers who might be their midwives or at least likelier to be neighbors.

But the daughters in this book came of age on the cusp of modern period. Virginia Woolf wrote, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Of course her tone is slightly arch, but the daughters in Borrowed Names lived through a time when the first world war brought enormous fear and tragedy, the suffrage movement and fights for civil rights were strengthened, definitions of what makes good art and music widened, and science was becoming increasingly rooted in worlds visible only to specialists. These daughters were going to live in quite different worlds than the ones their mothers had grown up in, and there were bound to be struggles as they found their places alone and together.

That's a good point about the daughters being aware they would inhabit different worlds than their mothers. A'Lelia Walker and Irene Joliot-Curie must have been particularly attuned to this, because they saw their mothers creating some of the changes you mention -- civil and women's rights, entrepreneurship, scientific progress.

More of my interview with Jeannine later today. While you're waiting for Part 2, check out more Poetry Friday offerings at Amy's blog, The Poem Farm. Or , go directly to Jeannine's awesome blog.