“Gatherer’s Blog” is an invited feature that provides emergent as well as seasoned writers with opportunities to reflect upon aspects of their own writing processes.
What Do I Wear When I Write?
by Anne Kaier
For me, this is not a trivial question. I think about it. What kind of mood am I in? What piece of writing is in front of me—a new poem or revision of one? I am not alone in this preoccupation. The great Romantic British poet, John Keats, who composed some of the most memorable lyric odes ever produced in English, put on a clean shirt whenever he felt like he had to gather his thoughts to write. He owned up to this. On September 17, 1819, when he was 23 and composing remarkable poems, he wrote a letter to his younger brother George.
Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out – then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write.
Keats got himself dolled up, adonized as if he were primping to be as beautiful as the gorgeous Greek god Adonis. Of course he was being a bit snarky and self-effacing in this remark, but clearly what he wore had an influence on his mood and preparation to write.
I feel the same, though my slant is slightly different. When I have a poem brewing overnight and I wake up ready to tackle unformed ideas, emotions, and metaphors, I stay in my nightie (yes!) and bathrobe, grab a cup of very strong tea and a yellow pad, and sit at my table to do a free write with a pencil. I let it all out, whatever comes as directly as possible from my mind and spirit—and hope the poetry writing gods are with me. The looseness of my bathrobe, the very informality of it, helps me write loosely, with no concern for metrics or rhyme schemes or anything technical that I’d have to consider before the poem is finished. Perhaps the warmth of my body, my consciousness of its freedom, unconstrained by tight clothes, helps me open up to whatever is sensuous in my work, or whatever is risky, not fit for polite company like when I’m in a party dress.
When my draft is done, I get up, have another cup of tea and get dressed to go about my day—getting to work on time, doing a load of wash, checking on a friend who has drawn jury duty—whatever it takes. Generally, I don’t go back to the draft until at least the next day. Like so many of us writers, I let it lie fallow for a while.
When it comes to revision, I get dressed before I write. Maybe in loose jeans and a top, or a cardigan. Something I can button up. My revision clothes fit tighter to my body, control my ever-expanding waistline, feel more businesslike. When I’m properly dressed, just like Keats, who brushed his hair and put on his clean shirt, I sit down to rework my draft.
My first step is to type it into a Word document, where I can manipulate various versions and even keep the first draft as a separate file. Keats, of course, had to do all this by hand. When my draft is safely in the computer, my plump grey cat Sadie often walks across my keyboard so I have to correct her mistakes. Having deposited her on the floor, I begin to look for pools of metaphor that I may or may not decide to expand. For example, I’ve been wrestling with a sonnet about my fear of death and my corresponding zest for life. The controlling metaphors come from a love of pattern, shown as etchings on an axe and the kind of pattern used in collage:
Did the regal woman glance at the axe’s etchings
before she lifted her chin onto the block?
Did she caress her jaw to feel her throbbing pulse,
suck the sound of terror thrumming in her ears?
This scene has lingered since girlhood. Even then,
surely sinless, collaging shards of patterned paper,
I saw myself on the gallows, life shouldering death,
blood red against the sightless black cut paper.
Dressed in tight jeans and a zipped up jacket one morning recently, I lingered over these lines. Would the reader associate the “etchings” on the axe with the collage like patterning in the last stanza? Is the very idea of introducing collage into a poem about an execution inappropriate? Can you write about collaging with cut paper as a girl and sucking the last moments of sensual life?
Then, because I’m old enough to need paper, I printed out my new draft in triple space 14 point font so I could figure out the metrics. I was working on a sonnet. Did I want the meter to be mainly iambic pentameter like Shakespeare’s sonnets? If so, where should I rework the lines so that the occasional spondee, with its two strong beats, would raise its loud head?
Decisions made, at least for the moment, I sat back and re-read the poem. Did it work? Was the language too ornate? Keats, of course, was a master of sensuous poetry. Here’s the opening of his “To Autumn,” which he wrote two days after the letter to his brother about the clean shirt.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.
His poem is full of thick sounds like the “u” and ‘o” in “fruitful,” “sun,” “load” and “run.” These give a heavy, languorous mood to a stanza with a sexy undertone.
But he was also capable of very direct language, as in a fragment he wrote later when he was living near his fiancée but unable to marry because he had tuberculosis and very little income. He was 24.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
This is powerful stuff, an implied threat surely meant to induce guilt, however unfairly. And Keats’s language is unadorned, what the critic Dwight Garner called, in his review of the new book of poems by Iris Murdoch, “rhetoric emotionally charged and shorn…of clever words and shallow feelings.” Did I want my poem about the execution to have this kind of direct language, or should I keep the pools of metaphor? These are all questions for the buttoned-up Anne, the reviser who is using her critic’s brain and her delete button.
Still, even when I’m revising, some of the best images and words come from my bathrobe muse. When I was reworking this sonnet, staring intently at my screen, my eye caught this phrase: “I saw myself on the gallows, life right up against death.” Then a new word appeared, unsummoned: “I saw myself on the gallows, life shouldering death.” Shouldering was metaphoric, yes, but it was also physical, and an execution is, after all, fundamentally about the body. I left the new word in, grateful that images and feelings could still slip through the armor of revision.
Then I turned my computer off, let the unanswered questions about style swirl around in my head and went down to my kitchen to give the cat some treats.
Read a review of Anne’s book How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? and Anne’s review of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
Anne Kaier’s new book of poems, How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, winner of the Propel Poetry Prize, was published by Nine Mile Press in 2025. It’s available from Bookshop.org. Visit Anne’s website at: www.annekaier.com.