How Diane Ackerman does it.

This morning with coffee I picked up one of the books* on my little desk-table in the Greek Room (a tiny room that used to be the maid's room in this 1920's-built apartment) and read an interview with Diane Ackerman** who got her graduate degrees in English and comparative literature:

"...I was always poaching in the sciences. "Physics for Poets," I remember, was one course that I took. I never could quite figure out if I wanted to be in the arts or in the sciences..."

Asked about the fact that there are identical sentences or phrases in both her prose and her poetry, and that her prose and poetry 'talk to each other,' Ackerman commented:

"...I end up writing several of my books at the same time. My muse is sufficiently miscellaneous that I might be, let's say, in the Antarctic writing an essay about that astonishing landscape and penguins for a book of essays. At the same time, I'll be noticing fascinating sensory spectacles, and that will go into the Senses book, and at the same time, there'll be some creative and emotional overspill that will go into a suite of poems set in the Antarctic. All of that seems to be happening simultaneously but in different places in my mind. I think of it as having a captain's desk with many drawers. When one drawer is open, it's completely open (the others are closed), and it has my full attention. And when that's closed, it's closed, and I open up the next one. But the drawers contain essay, personal essay, scholarly essay, poetry--whatever it's going to be--all at once."





*Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, an anthology of writings by and about women scientists
**poet and naturalist, author of A Natural History of the Senses and The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds