Oh, my word: these Ukrainians. I wake up to find Kyiv still standing strong, and now this, from a Facebook post by the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky:

Me, writing to a friend in Ukraine: how can I help, please let me know I really want to help

He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.

And, that is in the middle of war. Imagine.

Though I've had a hard time thinking about anything other than Ukraine, I did manage to clean the house yesterday, and to go for a walk with Tom, all the while picturing what-if in my neighborhood and my city. What if my neighbors and I were gathering together outside on the sidewalk making Molotov cocktails? What if my older son were stealing tanks with tractors? What if my younger son were singing folk songs in a bunker? What if my husband were moving a mine from under a bridge? It is all too easy to picture. I can see what we'd be wearing; I can hear the laughter and the fear. What has been amazing are the high spirits: the comedy of switching street signs so that they all read Fuck You; the cigarette in the lip; the obstinate hilarity of encounters, even just before oblivion.

We stand on the border

and hold out our arms

for our brothers for you

we tie a great rope of air

--from Zbigniew Herbert, "To the Hungarians," 1957

Greetings from Sunday-morning Portland, where I am yawning and lolling and drinking black coffee. It's been very, very nice to be sleeping late in a magnificent bed, and with its help I am starting to feel more like my usual energetic self.

Yesterday I worked on class planning and finished checking Accidental Hymn proofs (they're ready for the printer!) and went grocery shopping and lay around reading a John Le Carre novel. While it wasn't exactly a day off, it was a reduced day, so that was something. Today I'll do the housework, and maybe slip in some poem revisions around the edges . . . yet another not-quite-day off, but at least a change in activity. 

The sun is shining on the snow, and the news from Ukraine is hopeful.

Here's a poem. It's not spring yet, but my sap is starting run. The title is a play on Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn," and I also borrow some of his language.

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Another really deep sleep. Apparently I am exhausted. Thank goodness it's Saturday so I can wake up from nine hours of unconsciousness and then sit around groggily for as long as I like.

The new snow is glittering under the blue morning. I shoveled yesterday afternoon, but one of us will need to shovel again today. I don't know how much fell--6 inches? 7 inches?--but the temp has dropped from 15 to 4 degrees. No more pretending that spring has come.

I spent much of snowy yesterday choosing discussion poems for my upcoming class on Polish poetry. It was a painful task, which is no doubt why I'm so tired. I've been planning this class for more than a year, yet now, with the Ukraine situation, it feels horribly, horribly prescient. The poets of Eastern Europe have been truth-tellers for a very long time.

Maybe the class will help us hold each other up.

This weekend I'll keep working on class planning, and I need to recheck the page proofs of my collection, and I need to do housework and grocery-shop, and I'd like to work on revisions, etc., etc. But what I really ought to do is lounge around with a spy novel.

No one is shelling my street. My sons are not firing automatic weapons. The cold sunlight is beautiful. And the stillness. 

I never have the courage to speak of you

vast sky of my neighborhood

--from Zbigniew Herbert's "Never of You," 1957

Icy flecks razor my face as I set the compost bin outside the back door. Snow has fallen and is beginning to fall and will fall and will fall through the day and into the night to come and then it will fall and slowly fall and slowly slowly and then there will be stillness.

Yesterday was one phone call after another, meetings and not meetings, and trying to collect my scattered thoughts, and trying fulfill my appointed duties, and always worrying about Ukraine, and then in the evening going out to write, and then afterwards collapsing into the clean sheets and sleeping like I'd been poleaxed.

Today will be another such, I suppose, but at least this time I will have the snow to keep me company.

No, I think today will be quieter. Just me at my desk at the window, with my head down, following instructions.

There are days when it is hard to admit that it is hard. Choose your own antecedents for it. 

Anyway, here we are.

Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers
We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves

[from Adam Zagajewski, "Don't Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve," translated by Renata Gorczinzky]

66 degrees at noon yesterday. 16 degrees now. Winter storm warning for 6 to 10 inches of snow tomorrow. And here are some tulip tips smiling up at me in the Parlor Bed. Sigh.

Like you, I woke up to expected, terrible news about Ukraine. So now I am sitting here in my safe couch corner, filled with anger and sadness. You want to know a dumb thing that upsets me? Putin and I share a birthday. I hate that.

Anyway, the day will march on. I've got a bunch of meetings. I'm going out in the evening to write with my salon. After a three-day hiatus I'll return to my workout class, and that will certainly be a challenge. I've got to check corrections on my book's page proofs. I've got to start sussing out the Polish poets class. I've got to keep forging ahead with the editing project.

Here's one of the poems from the series titled "Accident Sonnets" which I wrote during and after the January 6 putsch attempt. It feels apt today.

Sonnet 2

Dawn Potter

the sign said it said

nothing it said nothing

could save us now now

nothing could save us

satan has us in his

clutches satan has us

the sign said in his

clutches the man

holding the sign stood

at the corner he stood

holding a sign that said

satan and the cars 

the cars they did not 

stop

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

The Alcott House is stuffed to the gills, and everyone but Mr. Ruckus and me is still in bed. When I opened the door to let him outside, I stepped into blanket of wet warm air. Spring today, snowstorm on Friday. That is the tale of February in the little northern city by the sea.

My sister's family arrived mid-afternoon, and since then I've been cooking and hostessing and playing cards and chattering, then finally climbing into the new bed and falling asleep with Tom to an episode of Peter Gunn. 

But when I woke up this morning I remembered that I have news for you: Tom has been awarded a residency at Monson Arts, meaning that he can return to the homeland for two weeks and finish a photo project begun when we were still living in Harmony: documenting mud season in Central Maine. This is huge news, as these residencies are nationally competitive. And now that he has a job with actual vacation time, he can afford to apply for such a thing . . . and win! So at the end of March, I will be a bachelorette for two weeks, and Tom will be up north with his camera, and I am so, so happy for him.

If it weren't for Ukraine, we'd be pretty cheerful around here.

 

Greetings from the North Atlantic--

This is a view from Pine Point Beach in Scarborough, where my neighbor and I walked for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon. Light wind, 50 degrees, happy dogs bustling up to greet us . . . it was a beautiful afternoon, and I came home with a sunburn.

The outing was a lovely break in the midst of the million other things I was trying to get done . . . though the universe really did not want me to be working yesterday. At various points in the morning, when I was supposed to be buckling down, all of my favorite young people managed to call ("opening night tomorrow!"), text ("want to see my new tattoos?"), or suddenly appear on the doorstep ("cup of tea?"). Who could complain about that? Not me: I am always ready to drop everything to sit for an hour with darling Lucy or text-chortle over James's silly new body art (two "live" mosquitoes and a squashed one) or listen to Paul excitedly tell me about the books he's reading.

Today will be another uproar. This morning I've got to focus on visitor-prep, and then run a zoom meeting, and then shoehorn in some editing until my sister's family arrives. Last night's poetry group gave me a bunch of good suggestions about revising the draft I'm working on, and I really want to spend some time with it today. But I doubt that's going to happen. The Alcott House will be packed to the gills, my nephew will be ensconced in my study, and the poems will have to take a vacation.

Here's another piece from the new collection. The character in this poem is not based on anyone I know; he just came to me, fully formed, to break my heart.

To a School Janitor, Fired for Drunkenness

 

Dawn Potter

I miss your grin your cigarettes your

bow-legged grunt up down up 

down the stairwells your bucket clank-clanking

 

against the charnel walls your mop

hoicked under a meaty arm

your nod your swallowed tears a smear

 

of wet linoleum snail-trailing behind you

oh lord why do we shrink

such mountains

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Monday morning, here you are again.

I've got many things to do today, and some of them are even fun. But they are predicated on the fact that the other people I'll be seeing are on holiday while I still need to work. As a result, I'll be cramming my early hours with editing so that I can have a cup of tea with Lucy and a walk on the beach with Valerie before rushing out to the grocery store to shop for my sister's visit and then rushing home for a zoom poetry workshop.

Everything will be fine, and much will be enjoyable, but I'm overbooked this week, and one of these plates I'm spinning will surely crash. It will be interesting to see which one.

Still, I slept beautifully last night in my beautiful bed, and now I am drinking black coffee under a red lamp in my tidy living room, and I have a poem draft I like, and I concocted an excellent meal last night (seared Arctic char with ancho and lime; diced and roasted potatoes and carrots; a salad of greens, sliced beets, and roasted red grapes), and the cat did not get sprayed by a skunk. Yesterday Tom and I drove down to the Eastern Prom, near where we used to live in that apartment where I cried all the time, and we walked by the bay and then huffed our way up the hill and snaked among the rich-person streets. We saw a tugboat pulling a tanker, we saw an eider diving in the harbor, we saw toddlers in snowsuits, we saw a cute little tourist train, we saw shiny new office buildings, and we saw this:

Yesterday was a very satisfactory day as finally I managed to get the house really clean: dusting, bathrooms, floors, laundry, stove ashes, furniture polishing, spiderwebs, houseplants, everything. Meanwhile, Tom was downstairs reaming out his shop. The combined project took hours, and we never ended up taking our walk, but we did change our filthy clothes late in the afternoon and go out for a drink, so that was a pleasant ending.

This morning we'll get in the walk that we missed yesterday, and then I'm going to turn my attention to reading page proofs for my book. I've got so many obligations this coming week: editing, meetings, class planning, plus my sister's family will be here on Tuesday and Wednesday, en route from college tours. If I can finish the proof checking today, I'll feel a smidgen less overwhelmed. 

On Friday, I did begin transcribing some pre-poem pieces out of my notebook, so during cleaning breaks yesterday I kept checking in with one of my infant drafts, five minutes of tweaking and tinkering here and there throughout the day. It's not a bad way to revise, in these tiny compressed sessions, and I always feel better with a poem simmering on the stove, especially when I'm on my knees scrubbing the linoleum behind the toilet.

I recommend this kind of quick-revision strategy, especially if you're a person who naturally conceives of revising as a massive cloud of killer bees ready to paralyze you with their sting so why leave the house. My solution to the killer-bee problem is to bring a draft up on my computer so that it's sitting there in my way whenever I open the lid. I always forget that it's there, but when I go to look something else up, the poem says HEY so I glance at it and quickly switch up all the stanza breaks from 3 lines to 4, and, huh, well, that changes what's going on, doesn't it, what if I get rid of this phrase, what if I add another few details here, what if I change all the verbs to present tense, what if this poem is really about how I feel about my dad, and five minutes later I go back to scrubbing. If I repeat this event five more times during the day, I end up with an actual deep-clean revision session, plus the housework gets finished.

Maybe, as a freelancer and an ex-stay-at-home mother and farmer, I have become more practiced than most at juggling many apparently unrelated tasks simultaneously, and also at making snap decisions about priorities, and also at dealing with distractions such as screaming and loud saws. Still, you might try the two-for-one approach to revision. An advantage is that it has trained me to think of revision as rest, not as chore. When I take a break to revise, I'm letting the chores slide, I'm reclaiming my private thoughts, and they delight and shock me. It's invigorating to switch back and forth between exterior demands and I'll-say-whatever-the-hell-I-want-to-say-but-I'll-say-it-as-best-I-can. 

I slept past 6:30 this morning . . . in my new bed. Yes, it's true! For the first time since leaving the woods, I am not sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Last night, when Tom got home from work, we weaseled the finished structure up the narrow cellar stairs, then up the narrow house stairs: he drilled in the slats and then, voila!--a gorgeous frame hand-made from ash milled from our Harmony trees, mattress still plush and new. True, it's not a very large bed. The room is too small even for a queen-size, so we are still sleeping on a full-size, as we always have. We're used to it. Plus, a queen-size frame would not have made it up the basement stairs. This is a 1940s workingman's house, and its small rooms were built for small workingman beds. Only the movie stars slept big.

This weekend I have to focus on deep-cleaning Alcott House: so much sawdust, so much general winter grit. I've also received page proofs for my poetry collection, and I need to spend time checking them for typos and design anomalies. Tom and I have promised ourselves to take a walk by the bay--though probably in town, as the beaches will be windy and raw. I have a hankering to go out for dinner, which we haven't done for weeks. But probably that's not in the cards. Last night we ate ziti with lamb, cherry tomatoes, and basil; a salad of greens and roasted red grapes; and then apple crisp with yogurt. Maybe we'll have chicken tonight, or maybe Arctic char. The freezer is comfortably full of options.

I've been reading the Aeneid (when not falling asleep over it); reading Beryl Bainbridge's novel According to Queeney, an imagining of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale; reading Flannery O'Connor stories and other people's poems. Yesterday I heard the wonderful news that my friend Ian Ramsey's first poetry collection has been accepted for publication. I've worked with Ian on this collection for more than two years, helping him transform it from a rough stack of unfinished pieces into a coherent whole. I feel all kinds of joy about the news that it's been taken. He's earned it for sure. And I am proud to have been useful.

Friday morning. A thin rain tapping at the windows. The muffled roar of an airplane taxiing into takeoff, a few miles away.

I woke up this morning convinced that I should tell you all about what the cat did when I got home last night. So I wrote that tale, just a minute ago, then realized that the paragraph was dumb and why would you care so I deleted it. First idea, bad idea, as Allen Ginsburg did not say.

Some things are best shared only with family members, and anthropomorphizing pet stories are probably one of them.

It's Friday, and I still haven't done the housework this week, a shocking lapse on my part, but these things happen. Maybe today, maybe over the weekend. I'll get there eventually. Last night, at the salon, I scrawled two sloppy pre-poems: my notebook is filling up with these undigested starts, and I'm longing to spend a day with them. Maybe that will be today. Or maybe my taskmaster mind will intervene and force me back into the editing chair.

In any case, it's Friday. Trash day. Sigh day.

The rain patters slowly in the darkness. I am thinking about time. So grand, so petty. Tragicomedy and melodrama. The cat taps his watch and longs for me to come home. 

Lately I've been spending an inordinate time with other people's poems. So of course I've been thinking in terms of why--why are they writing these poems? why are they writing in verse rather than prose? why do they want to compile their poems into a larger whole? why have they come to me? But as I work with their poems, I also stay aware of my own poems and the reasons behind them . . . I understand that all of these questions (bar the last) are ones that I also need to answer for.

I find it easy to be artist-statement glib: to come up with slick rationales for "why I write." I've done it before, for interviews and such, and likely I'll do it again. Mostly such statements are lyrical and passionate, descendants of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators" romance. But what if I try to answer the question more precisely, more dryly?

Why do I write poems?

Because I'm in the habit. Because novels have too many words and I'm not skilled at plot. Because somebody told I me could be good at it. Because I don't have a full-time job and I need to fill up my time. Because there can be a certain drug-addled sensation to writing that I suspect is chemical and that I enjoy experiencing. Because when that drug-addled sensation is not triggered, I am used to plodding through chores. Because I want people to believe I have purpose and worth.

Notably, "because I have something to say" is not on that list. I rarely feel as if I have something to say. What I write bursts out awkwardly and without plan. Then I stand back and look at the blurt and start messing around with what I've got.

But "because I want people to believe I have purpose and worth" is true. It's not easy to admit. But we are social animals: we care about how we intersect with others. I think it's normal, maybe good, to recognize that we care about how others see us. Of course, those "others" are very specific. I do not care how Melania Trump sees me. I do care about you, however. And I care about my clan . . . Shakespeare, Milton, the Brontes, George Eliot, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde. I want them to believe I have purpose and worth.

I'm happy to announce that I got stuff done yesterday. First, I finished reading the manuscript I'm consulting on (though I still have to write up my notes), and then I helped my high school poet move six of her poems into the "finished" pile . . . an accomplishment that thrilled us both. Today I'll write those notes and concentrate on editing, and I have to grocery-shop, and I didn't do any housework yesterday so there's still that to deal with. It was just as well I didn't do it yesterday, as Tom worked on the bed frame in the evening, and a new batch of sawdust got tracked upstairs. So now things are even dirtier.

It's cold again this morning, 8 degrees, but the temperature is suppose to rocket into the 40s. I'm feeling in need of the ocean. I'd like to walk out onto the sand and watch the waves, but I don't really have time for a jaunt. Maybe Tom and I can make a trek to the marshes this weekend, if the weather isn't too foul.

I've got pages of pre-poem scratches in my notebook that I have yet to transcribe. I've got the Aeneid to read and two Flannery O'Connor stories to finish. The poet life pays badly but it takes up lots and lots of time.

Here's another poem from the collection . . . one that was very hard to write. This is neither memoir nor  fiction. I was trying to inhabit a state of mind that was not mine; one that I knew well, but only from the outside; one that belonged not to a single person but to generations. It was painful to live in this imagined mind, painful to force myself not to look away.

John Doe’s Threnody

 

Dawn Potter

because I bought the blue plate I built the shed I fixed the faucet because our children became beautiful curious sad because we moved to this faraway land because I have no friends you’re my only friend because we use the same voice when we talk to the cat because your body is warm in the night because remember the house we rented long ago next to the train tracks because we have no money because I hate my job because I’m lonely you’re lonely because you never listen you always listen you tell me what you think you lie to me because I cannot bear your happiness your tears because once we saw a half-grown eagle fly below us into a chasm because our dog has grown old and feeble because I can’t stop drinking because I like to drink because you make me drink because you don’t care you care too much you invent fabricate prevaricate because you fall asleep at nine because you wake up at three because you could fix everything if you tried because I’m afraid because I never thought I’d miss the bus because you because you because

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

We had an affectionate, if comic Valentine's Day around here. My present to Tom was lobsters, but while I was out and about in the car I thought, Oh, cannoli!, so I stopped at the Italian market and bought a box. Then, when I got home, I had another thought: Ooh, I wonder if that was Tom's idea for a present for me. I texted to ask; he thanked me for picking up my own gift; yes, that's how things go between long-attached couples. We know what we like. Add in a slapstick lobster-eating explosion that required Tom to change his shirt in the middle of dinner, add in me across the table, laughing to split a gut, and you have a good idea about how old people celebrate the day.

It's 7 degrees this morning, but by Thursday the temp is supposed to spring up to 50. February is a strange month in Portland. Freeze, melt, freeze, melt. No wonder our sidewalks are so terrible. Still, yesterday, down by the wharf, on one of the most congested streets in the city, I watched a load of tourists clopping down the middle of the road in a horse-drawn wagon. Clearly, this was a large dose of no-fun for everyone--cars stuck behind the wagon, horse pulling the wagon, tourists and driver freezing inside the wagon. A metaphor for universal suffering, perhaps. The tourist trade as existential novel.

Anyway, I escaped from the horse-induced traffic jam and wended my way off the peninsula and back to my own neighborhood, which may not have horses but does have a large ratty skunk, ready to inject its own version of universal suffering at first opportunity. I watched it scuttling around the back garden yesterday morning. It looked as if it needed a good hair brushing.

As you can see, my writing has fallen down the giddy hole.

So, okay, back to business. Today I'll be finishing up work on a poetry-manuscript consultation, and editing a chapter of an academic manuscript, and working with my high school poet. I'll endure my exercise class, and I ought to vacuum and clean bathrooms, and I'll cook brook trout for dinner, though for some reason I was dreaming about making Italian celery soup. I should probably submit some finished poems to journals. I'd like to transcribe some scrawls out of my notebook and see if they've got potential for new drafts. Not all of this will get done today. But some of it will.

Monday morning, and I am tired from a weekend of work, with a week of work to come. Yesterday's class ended intensely, with participants writing stunning new drafts in response to the prompts I'd sweated over last week. It was very satisfying from a teacher's point of view, but I'm wrung out.

No rest for the weary, however. I've got lots of editing to do, and a manuscript to read, and so much housework to catch up on, and also I need to go down to the wharf and buy Tom's Valentine's Day lobsters.

Speaking of which, I have permission to share a Valentine's Day poem . . . the draft that my friend Donna wrote during Carlene's class on Saturday. I love its stanza-break pattern, its vivid and simple images. I'm not sure if this the first poem Donna's ever written, but its certainly the first she's written in a long time. I do hope it won't be the last. (The title is mine: she'll think of a better one.)

Poem after a Line by Wendy Cope

Donna Miller

Take-out dinner on the couch

A Netflix movie to watch

Ice cream in a plastic dish

Not the things I once would have dreamed of

But the things I live for today.

I love you. I'm glad I exist.

Look closely. Behind the detritus of winter, those are snowdrops--spring flowers!--opening in mid-February on my street in Portland, Maine. Every year on the first warm days, as the snow recedes from the south side of a neighbor's house, these beauties appear. Flowers in February! In Maine! Always a miracle.

Yesterday was a good day all around. I think the inaugural Poets' Table program was a success; in any case, we got lots of cheerful feedback about it . . .  though my internet misbehaved throughout, which was annoying. And afterward Tom and I went for a long brisk walk through the snow melt, feeling very happy to be together, both of us knowing it though not talking about it. I love those moments, when we are so transparently un-mushy in our affections. Love as puddle stomping. I'm a fan.

Now today I gird myself for part 2 of Busy Work Weekend: the last session of the advanced chapbook book, which I've been prepping hard for all week. After those balance-related rants on this blog earlier this week, I felt I needed to come up with some better way to explain myself to my students--prompts, actions--that might help them step away from stasis into some new relationship with their work. So that's where my brain has been diving . . . thinking hard about their individual manuscripts and habits, creating personalized prompts for each participant. There are only 6 people in the class, but the job was still giant. I hope they work.

Here's a poem from the new book. I was talking to some friends recently about poet crushes. Teresa has had a lifelong infatuation with John Keats; David is head over heels with Sylvia Plath. Me, I'm in love with Hayden Carruth, that crabby old poet of the north country. This poem borrows one of his titles.

Song: The Famous Vision of America

 

                        after Hayden Carruth

 

The birds come and go at the feeders,

but so few.

I long for flocks of finches but all I get

is a single sparrow flitting in from the maples,

a lone nuthatch, upside down, then gone.

 

I don’t know why it pains me,

            this lack.

Perhaps it’s a fear that I haven’t passed

some necessary bird test,

haven’t intuited their deepest desires.

 

Used to be, every calf I met

            would eat out of my hand.

How long has it been

since I’ve felt an eager wet nose

thrusting against my cupped palms?

 

There was an emptiness, in that greedy snuffling

            touch;

an emptiness, too, in the bright

flicker of a cardinal on my back fence.

Too easy an ending to say that it’s mine.

Saturday morning, 40 degrees. When I opened the door to let the cat out, the fragrance of wet earth and air rose to me, the scent of spring . . . which I know is a lie, but I am willing to go along with it for the next 24 hours, till winter clamps down again.

Yesterday my neighbor and I took a walk into the cemetery, a sea of snowmelt. I kept an ear out for hawks--this is raptor courting season--but no luck yet. Still, the south wind was in our faces and we had fun making up stories around what is currently my very favorite docket name: United States v. 26 Fat Oxen, an 1812 case involving cattle smuggling that was referenced in a book I'm editing. The smugglers were from my home territory, the Somerset County woods, and I was pleased to learn that its young men  have always been involved in hootenannies. Some things never change. During our walk Valerie and I had a good time picturing 26 oxen on the stand--blaming each other, complaining that the case should be dropped. Valerie, who is a lawyer, was especially good at this ("Your honor, I object to being called fat.").

This morning I'll make bread and do some writing and wrestle with that stupid NEA application, and in the afternoon I'll sit in on my friend Carlene's poetry class, and afterward Tom and I will go for a walk, and in the evening I'll stew lamb shanks and play cribbage and read books and fret a little about the class I'll be teaching tomorrow.

My publisher tells me that the page proofs of the new collection are almost ready for me to check, so I guess that will be another fret to add to the schedule. It's very hard to be my own copyeditor. Having copyedited for other people for so many years, I am extremely aware of the problem of author blindness when it comes to typos, extra words, missing words, and such. In a perfect world authors should never be their own copyeditors, but sadly that is not the world of small-press publishing. So, as always, I will do my best, and then three years later open the collection and discover a glaring error. Gah.

This week has flown by, probably because I've felt so behind on everything. But yesterday I made a sizable dent in the obligations, so maybe today will feel more sedate. I'll be involved in two Frost Place classes this weekend, which is partly why my life has been breathless. I can't shunt off chores, and I can't shunt off work: it all has to be done now now now.

But at least my frenzy has helped me stock a small pond I can sit by today. I still have to work and grocery-shop et al., but I think I'll also be able to spend some time with the new drafts I scrawled in last night's salon, and sit down for an hour with the Aeneid, and go for a walk with my neighbor. I drove with my friend Betsy to the salon, and we had a really helpful conversation in the car about some teaching/mentoring questions I've been trying to unsnarl. So I'm feeling more pulled together about that . . . or at least more confident in what I'm noticing about manuscripts and habits. Teaching is wonderful but can also be isolating.

Here's a poem from the new collection that's stylistically different from much of the rest of the book. An outlier, one might say. A disembodied voice. A compilation of images without narrative, in which the white space is the reader's cue to "make sense" of those images in whatever way they choose.

Ashes are a way to die in action

Dawn Potter

 

1

A woman shovels ashes

into a coal scuttle.

 

2

Shrieking, the wind

blows ashes into her tangled hair.

 

3

Future ashes sigh

and twitch their boughs.

 

4

Beneath a bed of ashes

the live coals wink.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Yesterday had many moments of "too much, too much." I was working on my editing assignment, but also trying to figure out the writing prompts for Sunday's advanced chapbook class, while also coping with the exciting but nerve-wracking chore of choosing poems to submit to the Pushcart. Under normal circumstances, journals and small presses nominate work they have published: the author just sits back and is happy. But some authors are also nominated at large, by one or more of the Pushcart's contributing editors. The latter is what happened to me: I got a letter in the mail announcing my good fortune and asking me to choose three of my own 2021 publications to submit for consideration--more freedom than the usual nomination, but also more work, and with a tight deadline. Then I fought with the NEA individual artist grant application, which has got to be the worst submission mechanism ever invented. Oy, government. Then I received and answered a flurry of emails asking me to teach or give a talk or otherwise do public stuff. And then, to keep life real, and also because someone has to, I cleaned the bathrooms.

Gracious.

Today is likely to be a bit calmer. Or maybe not, as I still haven't finished my class prep or unsnarled the NEA application. At least I feel as if I'm in end stages of both tasks. And tonight I'll go out to the writing salon, which is always soothing and revivifying. I haven't been able to focus at all on drafting my own poems this week: everything's been business, business, so I'm longing for a couple of communal hours in the zone.

I feel, as you might have noted, rather unbalanced at the moment. So many obligations, and the knowledge that more are looming: page proofs for the new collection, another Frost Place weekend to design, and now a talk about my diary-poem project at the University of New England, a high school day up at Monson Arts . . . 

Part of my staggering-around is linked to the fact that this all feels so strange to me: this being-in-demand stuff, this getting-treated-like-a-professional stuff. I mean, I am. I know that. But I spent so many years out of the loop, so many years holed up in my forest. I can't get used to this new treatment. Nor can I get used to these kinds of remarks on my poems:

I’ve long been familiar with Dawn Potter’s work, and I knew this collection would showcase her careful tending of the poetic craft, would express the singular view that is present in all of her books. What I was not expecting was this explosion of power—all of it contained, just enough, to keep the covers of the book in place. This is the poetry collection I have been waiting for. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Accidental Hymn is alive with power and surprise and thrums with the energy of complex life in the time of the pandemic.

 

—Maudelle Driskell, author of Talismans

Maybe you saw/got entangled in yesterday's comment thread about whether or not balance is a useful goal for poetry. Possibly I went off the deep end about it, but I think some of my discomfort with the word balance extends beyond the realm of art into the human tendency to grasp at catchwords or phrases that murkily symbolize what people aren't but think they ought to be.

Balance has always been anathema to me as a goal-symbol because it's a whitewasher. My conception of balance is that achieving it requires me to muffle my actual messy complicated thoughts and feelings about myself and my people and my place and settle into a sort of medicinal serenity. A balanced person doesn't get worked up about daily challenges. A balanced person doesn't ever go too far. A balanced person never falls down a badger hole, never wallows there in the funk and the dirt. Balance prefers that I bland myself.

My mentor, Baron Wormser, repeatedly told me, as I was learning to be a poet: "You've got to use your Stuff." He was right: my Stuff is my only material as an artist. And so, over the years, I've become fiercely protective of my awkward, hayseed erudition; my cadences and my anxieties; my dumb domestic rounds and my hare-brained plunges into one or another obsession. My life is highly unbalanced, though it lurches through many patterns and routines. 

I wrote in yesterday's comments that I can't think of a single great poet who seeks balance, and I stand by that statement. All of them are in pursuit; all of them are obsessed; all of them are metaphorically juggling 95 chainsaws while trying to peel potatoes and change a diaper.

Okay: this is not a calming, stress-free way to live. Sure. I give you that. But if I am trying to write the best poems I can write, I have to toss in that 96th chainsaw. And then the 97th.

I guess, in a way, this screed against the cult of balance is just me making excuses for why I'm such a loon. But as a teacher of poetry, I spend so much time with people who are longing to be poets, who work hard at it, who have skills and voice and talent and power . . . and who again and again and again make a hard u-turn away from their Stuff. As if the Stuff, in all of its sloppy, soggy, tear-ridden, frustrated, worried, tired, petty glory, isn't the shape of themselves.

This breaks my heart, as a fellow poet, and stymies me, as a teacher of poetry. There's something I'm doing wrong, something I haven't learned yet, about how to help them hone their commitment to their material . . . their awareness of their material. I need to do better. I keep trying.

It rained all night, and it will rain all day, and even in the predawn dark I glimpse the glum snowpack, fingers of frozen earth, my sloppy garden emerging from its winter tent. Mud season starts early here in the temperate "south." The sight is not inspiring.

Well, I have tons to do today to distract me from the weather. Editing, ms reading, a meeting, class planning, all of the housework I didn't get around to yesterday because I was on the phone with Teresa for two hours . . . we chattered about our new books, about doing readings together, about teaching adventures, about the Aeneid . . . we might as well have been a pair of teenagers curled up on our beds, devouring Cheez-Its, murmuring about boys, sproinging the stretched-out phone cord between our fingers.

Now, on this wet and glowering morning, I'm perched alone in my shadowed living room, staring up from my laptop into the smoldering glow of a vase of just-open daffodils. Tom is still asleep upstairs. The cat, for reasons best known to himself, has insisted on racing out into the rain. I woke up too early today, but am not unhappy about it. Four a.m.: the "nightwatch hour," Teresa calls it. A time and space particular unto itself.

One thing that Teresa and I were pondering yesterday was the question of whether or not a poetry collection should be "balanced." This was a word that came up in discussions during Sunday's class, and I was taken aback by it. Pattern, yes: poetry collections are filled with patterns. But is balance a goal? Have I been wrong all this time, in striving for imbalance . . . the dizzy, the vertiginous, the potholed? Do other people read poetry in search of balance?

And here we are again, with our old friend Monday morning.

I think yesterday's class went well. I focused on the work of three poets--Sylvia Plath, Ruth Stone, and Robert Hayden--and participants wrote and talked and pondered in response. Afterward Tom and I went for a small walk in the falling snow, and then I made lazy-day macaroni for dinner--just orecchiette and butter and cheese and a handful of spinach and a handful of garlic and a handful of cherry tomatoes and some chicken broth, alongside a bowl of sliced oranges. 15 minutes from start to finish.

Today I've got to go grocery-shopping first thing because of course I didn't do it yesterday and of course there's another sleet storm arriving in the afternoon. Then editing and ms reading, and then a phone call with Teresa about the Aeneid, and then some post-carpentry housework.

I've been spending so much time lately thinking about other people's books: how their poems accrue one by one into a larger entity, what that entity reveals, what it circles around but avoids . . . the dark whirlpool was a metaphor that rose to my lips during class yesterday.

Each of the participants has a whirlpool that haunts and terrifies them. We all do.

I wrote this poem because I was trying to describe how hard it is to say what needs to be said.

A Listener Sends Six Letters to God, in Autumn

 

Dawn Potter

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

I am requesting your kind attention

to a perplexity, which is this:

that I believe I may be hearing

what otherwise cannot be heard,

and I am finding it necessary to become

a vessel for pouring this sound into the atmosphere,

if only I may have your assistance in the matter.

Dear Sir,

I pray you, accept this request

with all seriousness and haste.

Yours most truly,

 

and, with great care, he signed 

 

A Friend.

 

*

 

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

Today I trudged down the muddy lanes

that snake alongside the sluggish canal

or suddenly veer away, to writhe

among the narrow houses and shops

elbowing one another against the dingy

waterfront.

 

He paused. On his pen, a bubble of ink trembled.

 

You see I am avoiding

what I need to say.

Despite undue haste, I remain

 

The bubble fell, and blotted.

 

Your Servant.

 

*

 

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

For three days now I have been writing letters

to you. I trust you know that they are always

the same letters, though my words are different.

I am practicing my scales, and my hands are dirty,

and the piano keys stick in the humid air.

Nonetheless, I am

 

Here a fingerprint appeared.

 

*

 

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

Last evening, I walked, again,

along the canal and I felt

the crackle of my letter to you

as it lay inside my hat, I felt

the snag of the letter’s fold against

my hair, which, I admit,

is neither clean nor combed.

It was necessary to mail the missive.

The question was:

where were you most likely to receive it?

I chose to drop the paper into a farrier’s mossy well,

and perhaps you now hold it

in your dry, your supple hand.

Reveal to me a sign.

My landlady is importunate.

Impatient,

I am your humble

 

Here a small hole appeared.

 

*

 

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

In truth I am becoming weary of this chore.

I distrust myself.

Last night, while I was at the piano,

my landlady pounded the butt end of a rusty musket

against my chamber door.

To all appearances, she hates my sonata.

Perhaps you, with your finer ear,

will despise it also. I cannot pinpoint,

in these waning days, what, if anything,

I trust.

Yours, in difficulty,

 

and now the handwriting became a broad scrawl

 

One Who Attempts Clarity.

 

*

 

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

 

Persistence is a reckless master.

This will not be my final missive, it will not.

Maintain your vigilance. Hunt for notes

tied to the highest twigs of trees.

I have torn the sonata into shreds

and floated them in the canal. They

are not the letter I meant to write.

I believe you understand.

A breeze blows across the piano strings

and the machine strums its private tunes.

They are not mine. Perhaps they are yours.

 

I do not hear my own in any gale.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

I slept till almost 6:30 this morning, and I am still feeling blinky and dozy, like a cat waking up in a sunny spot. It's cold here again, 5 degrees, and the Sunday-morning neighborhood is quiet under its blanket of snow-cement. 

I spent yesterday reading a Margaret Atwood novel, making pecan sugar cookies, scraping away at the packed ice on my car, talking to Donna about Flannery O'Connor . . . a peaceable day off. This afternoon I'll be back to work with session 2 of my advanced chapbook class, and I suppose ought to try to grocery-shop this morning, though Tom's ice-covered truck is blocking my exit and I could happily give up on the idea.

I dosed myself with a rest day yesterday, given my Sunday work schedule, but I felt guilty about it because Tom was in the cellar from morning till night making our new bed frame. The task is slow going because he's an artist and a perfectionist and also there isn't quite enough room for him to work comfortably. But yesterday he did get the ash frame finished, with the slats underway and the legs to come. Did I tell you that the ash was milled from one of our Harmony trees? Probably I did; I can't stop being excited about the prospect of sleeping in the memory of our forest.

Will I ever get over the loss of those woods? I don't think so. The ache is mostly dull now. I can live with my grief. I've learned to love many things about Portland . . . our rackety little 1940s cape, the crazy garden project, my neighbors, walking everywhere, writing friends, the comparative ease of getting to Chicago and New York to see my children . . . 

But nothing can replace the sky and the silence and the ring of trees. The air. The water. The spacious breath. Sometimes remembering it is unbearable.

What we got yesterday was several inches of packed sleet, impenetrable by shovel. It took me half an hour to beat the mountain of ice off the front stoop: that's as much "shoveling" as I could manage. The pack is so hard that trucks can drive on top of it without sinking in. I'd take 20 inches of snow over this stuff any day.

But this stuff is what we've got. I'm unclear if I'll be able to get my car out of the driveway, or if the little low-slung hatchback will be able to negotiate the shelf of ice that the city has plowed against the driveway. Maybe I'll be walking till spring.

Anyway, enough complaining. Other than the weather, yesterday was fine. I'd managed to attend every 8 a.m. exercise class this week, so by Friday my body was feeling pretty pleased with itself. I started working on a poetry-ms consultation, did a batch of editing, baked some bread, transcribed some of the scrawlings I did at Thursday's salon, finished my Aeneid homework, enjoyed phone calls from both sons, beat Tom at cribbage, concocted a seared cabbage-and-tofu-with-miso dinner, started rereading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, yakked with Maudelle about poems, yakked with Tom about Led Zeppelin, dozed through two episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and dreamed of Tiddly-Winks.

Today I'll do some prep for tomorrow's chapbook class, and maybe some grocery shopping, if I can get out of the driveway. I might fiddle with poem drafts. I might talk with Donna about Flannery O'Connor. I might make chicken cacciatore. I hope to have nothing to do with the layer of sleet-concrete outside, but that seems unlikely.

My brain is pinging around in an interesting way, like a happy pinball machine. I feel full of fizz.

Yesterday, as I watched the neighborhood kids standing in the middle of the road in the sleet storm, clutching snowboards and sticking out their tongues to catch the ice, I suddenly remembered exactly how those moments of childhood felt: a buzzy reckless confidence, being incredibly alive, racketing around inside my own snow globe. Sometimes being a poet is not so different.

Sleet is ticking against the panes . . . a gravel-whisper passing from roof to door to every window, a sort of Jimi Hendrix effect, as if our house has been piped for quadrophonic sound.

Being dumb, I did not lug the trash to the curb last night, so that blah chore awaits me. But I'll enjoy a cup of pre-sleet coffee before I force myself into the void. I slept well and am still pleasantly squinty and sluggish, with the good sensation of having filled a few notebook pages with messing-around thoughts at last night's poetry salon. I was glad to be back in the room, after a few Omicron-weeks in hiding. We played with kennings and opposites, and as you can see (gravel-whisper), my fingers are still in that land.

Today I'll be reading manuscripts in the morning, shifting to editing later in the day, baking bread in the interstices, making tofu and seared cabbage for dinner, and wishing that Tom didn't have to drive in this storm.

Here's a poem from the new collection . . . and a cover--

Petition

      Dawn Potter

 

Notice is directed to unknown father, whereabouts unknown.

 

Twitching in a patch of daylight, gulping

Cold grits and water, tramping through dust.

Dogs forget to bark.

 

Motion is submitted, for we have no way to identify unknown father.

 

Chipped front tooth, penny in pocket.

Two shoes.

A stare the color of Neptune.

 

We believe unknown father is living at: completely unknown.

 

House of horrors, house of blues, house of commons.

House of usher, house of cards.

House of the setting sun.

 

It is hereby ordered:

 

            In court, as in dreams.

 

Unknown father, appear.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Rain is coming in tonight, then sleet, then snow. It's hard to get excited about a storm like this one. The best I can say for it is that the melting snowpack might give the snowdrops I planted last fall their first chance to bloom. On the other hand, the 3rd of February is probably not when things should be blooming in Maine.

Anyway, Thursday. This week is crawling by. Two days ago I thought Friday must have arrived by now. Apparently not.

I spent yesterday with the new editing project, and doing a load of Frost Place stuff, and going for a walk, and making lamb stock for the freezer and lamb soup for the table and chocolate pudding for beside the fire. Today, more editing, and probably I'll start looking at the poetry manuscript I'm consulting on, and I've got a phone meeting with my publisher, and maybe tonight is the night when I'll finally venture back to the poetry salon.

It's funny: despite the trouble and trauma of this past year, I've somehow managed to step into fully living the life of a poet. I mean, of course I was writing and teaching and reading and publishing before that. But I still felt as if I were squeezing my vocation into "real" life. Now, suddenly, the vocation is "real" life. All week long, I think about words. Other people ask me to talk to them about words. Every day: words, words, words.

I write every day, I read perpetually, I teach and consult, I am slowly developing a social world around words . . . This astonishes me. I am what I have longed to become, what I have longed for ever since I was a little child. I am the storyteller.

I'm afraid this letter to you sounds boastful and self-satisfied. I apologize for that. But ambition isn't wrong, though we Puritans have been raised to hide our flames. I could care less about being featured on the cover of Poets & Writers or giving a keynote speech at an AWP conference or getting hired to teach at Princeton. What I want is to write the best poems I can write. What I want is to have other people know that I'm doing that work.

The bad weather has decided not to materialize (yet), so window entertainment has been quiet this week. Yesterday I made curried shrimp and dumplings for dinner, did a batch of housework, forced myself to stop procrastinating on some computer chores, and worked with my high school poet. Today I'll get back on the editing train, do yet more zoom stuff (it's been an endless zoom week), and, I hope, go for a walk.

One of the things I did yesterday morning was to spend a bit of time updating the Events page on this blog. Not everything has a link yet, but I will add them as they become available. I'm now beginning to schedule readings around the new book release, and I'll add them to the page as I figure them out.

Don't forget that spaces are still available in my two upcoming Frost Place Studio Sessions: "Learning from Nina Simone" and "The Nation as Muse." We've tried hard to keep these classes as inexpensive and accessible as possible, and I hope you'll consider joining me or send an interested friend my way.

Last night I happened to glance at the most recent New Yorker and read a poem by Terrance Hayes that just floored me. So strange and wonderful: so real and mythic. Also it's about a goat. Here's a link, if you'd like to read it too.

For the moment it's 1 degree above zero, but later today temps will rise and the freezing rain will begin and by the end of the week our lovely feet of snow will have become a sloppy mire and/or a Zamboni trail. The next few days look hard to love, weather-wise.

So I guess I'd best do the grocery shopping this morning. In the afternoon I'll be working with my high school poet, and in between times I'll fiddle with a poem revision and finish up the housework. I brought my long "Clytemnestra" draft to my poetry group last night, and Betsy suggested a few slight changes that I'm excited to try out. I ought not to put off those experiments because my writing time is already evaporating into teaching and prep and editing and manuscript consulting. A group of local poets wants to take part in a month-long grind--writing and sharing a poem a day--but I'm running far away from that. I've never liked the idea of writing as chore, but the real thing I can't take is an inbox crammed full of poem drafts. Maybe I'd feel differently if my day job didn't already require me to read and comment on other people's poems, but the image of that inbox is giving me hives. I can only do so much.

Yesterday I started sussing out a new class I'll be teaching for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in August. It will be a two-session generative workshop, in person and probably outdoors, unless Covid forces us onto Zoom. The title, tentatively, is "Sheltering in Place: Writing Poems from Where You Are." My idea is to address how the pandemic has damaged and disrupted our attempts—in some cases even our ability—to write and read productively. I hope to use these sessions to focus on helping people regain some purchase in their writing lives. With inspiration from several contemporary Maine-based poets, we’ll read and talk about poetry drafts as present-tense enactments, focusing on ways to write from where and how we are, not from how we expect ourselves to be. The sessions will be open to anyone, at any level of experience, and will include conversation, prompts, and generous writing time. I'm not sure when registration will open, but I'll let you know.