Pattiann Rogers

There are several aspects that have influenced my poetry and also how poetry itself has influenced my interaction with the physical, nonhuman world.  After I had learned a fair amount of the craft of poetry, I discovered that asking myself a question and attempting to respond to it stimulated my imagination. The vocabulary of science is often set in questions, using words like "suppose" and "consider" and "imagine", "what if".  The scientist, mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski wrote, "That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer."  Using this searching voice of curiosity in my poetry set my imagination free. I wanted to write and say things that had never been said in poetry before.

I watched and listened to nonhuman life, and I listened to the conversations of children and their questions.  Once my young son asked me, "What would happen if a giant swallowed the earth?"  The poem I wrote in response to his question was published in Poetry and appears in my first book.  Sometimes the questions I asked myself became the titles of the poems, for instance: "The Importance of the Whale in a Field of Iris", "A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars", "The Year All the Clowns Were Executed".

When I began to write poetry seriously the contemporary field was somewhat full of the personal and confessional stance, much woe, much darkness.  One of my mentors told me, "Avoid self-pity like the plague."  I never forgot. I loved the natural world, the force and determination of its nonhuman life.  I wanted to understand all of it, beauty, pain, terror, scientifically and poetically, including the beauty of the dynamic celestial universe. I wanted to embrace all of it, and I wanted to learn to sing to it in the lyrical way it was singing to me and in the way the beauty of poetic language, with much work and failure, can accomplish these feats.