Born and reared in San Francisco, California, in a Victorian mansion her father liked to call Mad Manor, Kate Adams has been writing since the age of twelve, when her first short story came to her, filling page after page of a very surprised notebook.
A year later, in the haven boarding school became for her, she wrote her first poem, “Brief Candle,” which she has described as “not bad for a first try.” That first try was written in blank verse, pointing to a proclivity for formal structures still dominant in her work.
Some two decades later, on January 25, 1979, Kate Adams awoke from a dream to scrawl “Defense At Thermopylae” on the back of the proverbial envelope (now framed and hung on her study wall), a poem included here on the PROCESS page. Calling it number one, she began cataloguing her work, giving each piece its date and number. She also learned to keep a clipboard by her bed, and to ask it, each night, for a morning poem.
Springing from a daily writing practice now maintained for forty-some years, that catalogue—tentatively titled, after Wallace Stevens, The Whole Of Mad Manor—has surpassed ten thousand poems, most in sonnet forms, with a selected version gathered into some three dozen collections. This website aims to give you a taste of that whole.