Writing the Life Poetic

The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman: How to Bring Poetry to Work

By Brittany Baldwin

In the morning I walk the dog through the orchard in the mist. This is my time alone before I head off to work. Between the trees I watch for poems.  

During the commute I listen to poetry, stories, news or music. I write down ideas that come from watching the farms pass. The man on his riding mower spreading chemical over his perfect lawn that is big enough to grow enough food to feed his neighbors and himself for a year. But he wants his country home to have a golf course lawn full of chemicals his kids can play in. Up the street another man has filled his land with old cars. They rest as memories, taxidermied pets from earlier in life he just can’t bury. All of them bring me poems.  

At work I study cadence and composition, listening to live recordings of Edna St Vincent between old Bruce Springsteen love songs. These poems transfix me as I press dough into pans, fill them with fruit, fold and whisper intention. Intention is the most important ingredient; it can be tasted, always.  

Sometimes I scrawl poetry in poor handwriting behind my grocery list for the day. Or late at night I’ll write character profiles from my evening of serving drunken doctors and real estate professionals. A snatch of conversation overheard while I reach to place the salad just so in front of their hungry eyes; each comparing the quality of the salad next to them and across from them to the one before them.  

Almost none of the poetry that accompanies me throughout my day gets to the page in a traditional sense but all of it solves me.  After work I send out menus for busy moms, special occasions and restricted diets for the ill. My poetic skills show themselves in cadence and adjective play. Food becomes a list of tasty words laid one on top of the other to make the reader salivate. With my weekly menus I observe how usually at least one dish a week is ordered by everyone. What words make that happen? What rhythm?

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Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in local poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.

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By Brittany Baldwin

In the morning I walk the dog through the orchard in the mist. This is my time alone before I head off to work. Between the trees I watch for poems.  

During the commute I listen to poetry, stories, news or music. I write down ideas that come from watching the farms pass. The man on his riding mower spreading chemical over his perfect lawn that is big enough to grow enough food to feed his neighbors and himself for a year. But he wants his country home to have a golf course lawn full of chemicals his kids can play in. Up the street another man has filled his land with old cars. They rest as memories, taxidermied pets from earlier in life he just can’t bury. All of them bring me poems.  

At work I study cadence and composition, listening to live recordings of Edna St Vincent between old Bruce Springsteen love songs. These poems transfix me as I press dough into pans, fill them with fruit, fold and whisper intention. Intention is the most important ingredient; it can be tasted, always.  

Sometimes I scrawl poetry in poor handwriting behind my grocery list for the day. Or late at night I’ll write character profiles from my evening of serving drunken doctors and real estate professionals. A snatch of conversation overheard while I reach to place the salad just so in front of their hungry eyes; each comparing the quality of the salad next to them and across from them to the one before them.  

Almost none of the poetry that accompanies me throughout my day gets to the page in a traditional sense but all of it solves me.  After work I send out menus for busy moms, special occasions and restricted diets for the ill. My poetic skills show themselves in cadence and adjective play. Food becomes a list of tasty words laid one on top of the other to make the reader salivate. With my weekly menus I observe how usually at least one dish a week is ordered by everyone. What words make that happen? What rhythm?

* * * * *

Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in local poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.

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View all "The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman" columns.

View the entire Writing the Life Poetic zine archive.

The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman: Kindred Arts

By Brittany Baldwin

I started writing as soon as they taught me how. I didn’t speak loud or well but with my pen there was no need for sound. In words I could say anything. I have boxes of stacked notebooks hidden in closets—fantasy stories from early elementary and journals from fifth grade on.

I was the girl with the stack of polished stones on her desk she used as telephones to her invisible friends. At a certain point everyone else was living in reality and I was able to slip off easier.

At 15 I got a job at the foot of our mountain washing dishes, bussing tables and making pizzas. Pizza is a good place to start in a kitchen. You have to prep all your toppings so you learn how to use a knife and how to work with dough. I was taught by a high school punk kid and an older creep who always said “I have a friend who really likes 15 year olds.”

I worked in restaurants for 10 years then started a catering company. The business woman was born. I had to learn how to talk to people, make big decisions about where to go and how to do it. Everyone in my immediate family is an entrepreneur. I was much shyer and awkward than they are and I messed up terribly so many times at first, stuttering and blushing. Thankfully, my food spoke for itself.

Two years ago I decided I wanted to grow vegetables for the company, get a few hens for farm eggs. When I was growing up, my mother ran a flower garden business; I had worked part time for her throughout my teenage years. I knew the basics of plants but now I was growing and selling quail eggs, squash blossoms and fine herbs. After a long day cooking over a stove in the middle of summer, now I put on a dress and play in the garden at sunset; eating as I go. Back stooped, talking to the tomatoes, I am a gardener.

I balance these four arts: writing, cooking, business and gardening, like old friends. They trade poems about food, and menus written like poems, and plants grown for the company and the company pays the bills. Today, writing still serves as a refuge for things I can’t say well. Along with the woods around my farmhouse, it always makes me clean again. With cats rubbing into my ankles and dogs panting in the corner, I am alone chopping onions listening to recordings of old poets.

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Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in local poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.

The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman: My Hands

By Brittany Baldwin

 Many poets write poetry for love and do other types of work for money. This column explores the interplay of multiple identities as one poet works and lives and writes a poetic life.

Right where my arm meets my body, between the bones in the front there is a pinch. Sometimes it grows in lumps of knots up my neck to my ear. Sometimes it tingles down into my elbow, a numb tingling in my pinky finger. Hours clutching a pen, a knife, a shovel, a calculator.

In the grocery store I stretch while they check my groceries. I stand square lifting the bags with my left hand. Inside homes I unwrap my knives and set out the vegetables. For hours my knife conducts the kitchen into steam, fire and dishes to be washed. All the while I am writing in my head, quietly listening to my headphones.

During the commute I keep a cassette recorder in the seat next to me, writing while I drive. When I get home after cooking all day I cook for myself, feed my pets, then the businesswoman gets the hands. She climbs up to the office and emails, returns calls, fills the calendar, writes menus and adds numbers against bills, projections and budgets.

In the summer there's an hour in the garden watering and pulling the next days' order. I weed the rows and spray down the aphids and ants. Then after the dog has been walked, the computer shut down and the grocery list written, the cook, the gardener and the businesswoman let the writer have the hands.

I tell myself balance. I pull out a blank calendar and draw up a schedule. This day I will have two hours to write and revise. This afternoon I will send out submissions. This night I will go to a reading. These are the hours to read, to study. Winter affords more time for the writer to take classes, go to readings and take the hands on vacation to the coast. Each dances their creative service in seasons, winter at the coast writing, summer in the garden weeding.

In the meantime the poet draws pictures inside, adding extra color to stuffed peppers, adding poems to chicken lined up in the meat case. For a moment just before I blink the chickens are rocking back and forth. It's like in the Fisher King when all the people are dancing in the train station. We all dance in the grocery store. There is a man juggling organic tangelos. But then I blink and the businesswoman orders five boneless skinless chicken thighs, a pound of salmon and a shoulder roast.

The poet listens for winter, for Saturday afternoons, for balance.

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Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in the poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.