A sweet orange, peeled and sectioned,
lies on a plate atop a limestone
boulder covered with lichen
rosettes. A fossil of marine shell,

as if it were a stone heart, holds
and keeps deep inside the central
gravity of that rock...


Pattiann Rogers' at Poetry Foundation

Pattiann Rogers at Academy of American Poets

Interview with Pattiann Rogers by Richard McCann

McCann: One of the surprising qualities of your first book, The Expecta
tions of Light, was, as Peter Stitt noted in The Georgia Review, "its
sophisticated incorporation of modern scientific thinking into poetry."
Did you consciously set out to incorporate the findings and vocabulary of
contemporary science into your poetry?

Rogers: I didn't have a formulated way of looking at life that I wanted to
express in poetry. The poetry has created me at the same time that I was
creating the poetry, especially over the last five to seven years. There is one
thing I did consciously try to accomplish, however, and I worked on it for
a number of years, and that was to find some way of incorporating into my
poetry the massive scientific vocabulary that has built up. This vocabulary
has been mainly an untapped vocabulary, and many of the words are very
evocative, not sterile at all. But I didn't only want to be able to use this
vocabulary. I wanted to express the kind of wonder and exhilaration that I
felt was contained in much of what science has been discovering and also
to reflect in my poetry how some of these discoveries affect our ways of
seeing ourselves. 

Interview