Has anyone done
research on the differences between poets (or anyone else) who get up early and
those who stay up late?
A friend
of mine once gave me advice that’s worked for me: “Let not one day tread upon
the next.”
Yesterday
did not tread upon today. It’s 6:03 a.m. and I’ve been up an hour. I’m one of
those people who goes into a dizzy netherland about 8 p.m. I have trouble focusing. I can’t carry
on a conversation. If I’m at a club listening to music as the night goes on the sounds begin to
pool in a great basin of undifferentiated notes in my head.
On the
other hand, I can roll out of bed and be sitting at my desk writing at top
speed soon after waking. I have a local weekly column called Kudzu Telegraph
and it’s due at 8 a.m. on Monday morning. I never start writing before 5 a.m.
the day it’s due. It’s the way I work and I now have over 200 columns in the
bag. I think about it all week, but I can’t write a word until early Monday
morning. There’s no acceleration lane needed for my imagination if I’m up early
enough. Coffee helps (the ritual of it) but I could get started without it.
Poetry
seems suited to either late nights or early mornings. It’s not my way or the
highway in the poetry world. There are plenty of good poems written after
midnight. There’s plenty of inspiration to be had after most people are sound
asleep. It’s just that Cat Stevens’ “Morning has Broken” inspires me more than
Professor Longhair’s “wee wee hours between midnight and day.”
If every poem I’ve
ever written had a time stamp on it, I’d be willing to bet 95 percent were
conceived between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. I don’t think I’ve ever had a literary
thought after 9 in the evening. I don’t think I’m in the majority, but I know
I’m also not alone. We’ll call my predilection toward dawn “the William
Stafford School.”
Stafford got up early before the
house awoke and did his poetry work. Then he went on with his day of teaching
and simply being human—family, community, yard work. The next morning he did it
again. And the next again, for over 60 years. In one poem he once said, “The light
along the hills in the morning/ comes down slowly, naming the trees/ white,
then coasting the ground for stones to nominate./ Notice what this poem is not
doing.”
The poem
is not staying up late, or it would have missed that light.
Light is a
word that would be common in a concordance to my work as well. “Dark” isn’t
there much. “Midnight at the Oasis” I’ll leave to Maria Muldaur, and Wilson
Pickett can “Wait ‘til the Midnight Hour,” but I’m going to bed.
When I was
in high school I rose every morning at 5 a.m. for three years to throw a
hundred papers in our neighborhood. My mother got up when I did and helped me roll them. I threw them out
the open windows of my little Volkswagen Beetle. The paper route didn’t teach
me to be thrifty or save money. I was great at delivering newspapers, but
terrible at collecting for them. The route was good training for the William
Stafford School though.
I never
got over it. I must have altered my teenage genes. Getting up that early for
three years in a row must have been like a low-level dose of radiation or like
overdosing on a mind altering chemical. After that my friends started making
jokes about my bedtime.
This
morning I walked the dog at 5:15 and stood in the street for at least ten minutes
looking at the moon through the leafless oaks. The dog pulled at the end of his
leash and, wide awake, I looked at the moon. I wasn’t considering writing about
the moon. That’s almost impossible in a post-modern world. What I was doing was
taking the morning in before anybody else. I’m glad I didn’t miss this one, and
I’ll be at it again early tomorrow.