A Poet's Double Life

For poets working outside the literary world.

Category Archives: Work Products


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April Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 1


For the fourth year, I am participating in the Poem-A-Day Challenge in celebration of National Poetry Month. Along with other Living Poetry members, I use prompts from the Poetic Asides blog for the 30 days. As I promised myself, I am going to share my poetry more by posting the PAD challenge poems to the blog. I hope you enjoy!

Prompt: A new arrival

When Boredom Comes

She slips in under the doorjamb, dragged in

by the last crossed off item on your to-do list.

She loosens her clutches and plops down

silently on your clutter-free desk. She triesyawn2

to be helpful—rearranging the office supplies

to your liking: shifting the tape dispenser to the left

side then back to the right, placing the stapler

next to it—no, behind it—separating paper clips

from binder clips, sorting and counting each type

by size. You watch her straighten and re-straighten

pictures on the wall, line up chachkies, knick-knacks,

and doodads along the tops of bookcases, make

the books stand erect and alphabetized. She’s given up

dusting, but doesn’t mind a mop and broom or washing

a window or two. But before long, she’s done everything

she can and leaves you alone to finish what she started.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013


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14 Words, One Love


For the last week, I’ve been supporting my fellow double-life poet, Jodi Barnes, in her effort to collect 1,400 14-word love poems to distribute on Valentine’s Day. The first day, I wrote one poem, but since then I’ve written no less than three poems each day and as many as six! The 14-word challenge has been a great way to build up to a daily writing practice, strengthen the mind-paper connection, and focus on crafting concrete imagery.

I’ve written a series of poems, “to understand love / you must understand <blank>,” where I fill in the blank with an object or concept and then find seven other words that both describe the object and the idea of love. Here are some examples:

to understand lovegenes

you must understand genes—

their endless patterns

uniting, splicing, reforming, reborn

to understand lovedogs

you must understand dogs—

waiting by doors, tails wagging

in anticipation

to understand love

you must understand rings—

encircling delicate fingerssaturn_false

and all of Saturn

to understand love

you must understand tea—tea

slow sips of honey

warming your hands

I haven’t counted them yet, but I have three typed pages of the “to understand love” series, and about six 14-word free form poems. Every evening I come home eager to prepare the next day’s patch of poems, and every morning I wake up excited to post what I’ve written and watch the number count creep closer to the goal. Most importantly, I am having fun while supporting a worthwhile effort to spread love throughout the Triangle.

Try your hand at a 14-word love poem by leaving a comment.


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Black * Woman * Professional


Manuscript Section 1That’s the title of the poetry manuscript I submitted to a book contest one day before the January 31st deadline. On the one hand, assembling the manuscript was exactly like organizing the creative thesis for my MFA program—printing out every poem, creating piles of poems with a similar theme, ordering the poems in each themed pile, putting the themes in the order they should be read.  That part was easy.

The hard part was changing my mindset from a “hoop-to-jump-through-in-grad-school” to a “poetry-collection-someone-might-read-one-day.” Making that switch meant I had to treat the manuscript as if it were already a published book. These days, many poetry and prose books have sections break up the reading and the poems or chapters that follow. Some are as simple as Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars—One, Two, Three, Four. Others provide more information about the poems or chapters that follow. For example in Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling uses quotes from the Local Administration Manual to give a clue to what to expect in the next set of chapters. Having just finished that book on my Kindle Fire, I looked for something to help me tie the sections and the book together.

Then I remembered the book, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women Struggle for Professional Identity. I read this book about 10 Our separate waysyears ago, and then again in 2011, in my critical thesis semester. Flipping through it, I realized the chapter titles could organize the themes of my collection, and then, chose quotes from the book that connected to the poems:

  • Fitting In (“I feel like a guest in somebody’s house.”)
  • Work Isn’t Everything (“The thing that’s on every single black women’s mind is the whole issue of relationships.”)
  • Their Father’s Daughters (“My life is different from my mother’s and father’s; theirs was a different time.”)
  • The Racialized Self (“I experience myself as being exotic and mysterious to most white people.”)

No matter what happens with the contest, I’m satisfied with how my first poetry collection turned out.

Superheroes at Work

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I often say being a poet with a double life is a lot like being a superhero. Here’s a cool photo from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of some superheroes at their day jobs (maybe a few of them are poets, too!).

Window-washers from left, Mark Errico (Captain America), Jim Zaremba (Batman), Ed Hetrick (Super-Man) and Rick Boloinger (Spiderman) rappel down the side of Children’s Hospital on Monday morning, Oct. 22, 2012 as the crew of washers from Allegheny Window Cleaning Inc. rid the windows of the Lawrenceville hospital of grime. © James Knox

Special thanks to double-life poet and blogger, Jodi Barnes for sending this photo!