Night Owls and Early Risers [by John Lane]

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.

Comments

[Laura Orem]

I think it's just how an individual's biorhythms work. While I get up fairly early, I can do very little for the first hour in the morning except infuse coffee and mumble a little. I also can't stay up late. So I do most of my writing in the boring old 9-to-5 time. But whatever the time, solitude and quiet are necessary.

[Stacey]

After adhering by necessity for an eternity to the 8-6 schedule, I too am an early riser and find that with the jolt of coffee, my mind starts racing. I can put in about an hour and then I become filled with resentment about the reality of my desk job. When I was in grad school, I did my writing in the morning and reading in the evening. Then, I took a three month leave from my job to finish my thesis and I realized that I may be a nocturnal person after all. I slept late, didn't dress until late morning, and really got going after 11:00 pm. It was heaven and almost too painful to think about now. Still, mornings are magical, even in NYC. The saying goes that NYC is the city that never sleeps but in reality it is the city that sleeps in (I'm talking about weekends now). Well, another wonderful post John. Thanks for a fantastic week. I hope you will return at some point.

[johnlane]

Had a really great time!

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