Anne Bradstreet: Mother, Poet; Power Of Words: America's first published bard built an oeuvre in her off-hours.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Byline: AMY ALEXANDER

"I'm too busy" were words that poet Anne Bradstreet didn't say.

Her chief time-management tactic was simple: She knew what was important to her, and let that steer her minutes. She focused mostly on being a good wife and mother. But, in her free time, instead of gossiping or mindlessly watching the coals on the fire sputter and spin, Bradstreet wrote poetry.

She didn't let tomorrow's menu, pipe dreams of publishing or concerns over critics' complaints cloud her focus. She just kept writing.

When she had headaches or fever or a cold, she wrote. When she was homesick for her native England, she wrote. After an army of children had been tugging and hugging her for hours, she wrote. Even on her deathbed, she documented her thoughts.

Bradstreet (1612-72) had five children between the ages of newborn and 9 when she put quill to paper to write "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America" (1650), the first volume of poetry ever published by a North American. Bradstreet had three more children after she inked "The Tenth Muse," yet she continued to fill notebooks with carefully crafted poems.

"Very often, her husband traveled," Bradstreet scholar Sheila Willard said in a recent interview. "She would be home alone with the eight children, running the household. . . . You made your own soap, you sheared the sheep, spun the yarn from their wool, then you loomed it, then you sewed your clothes. The work must have been nonstop."