Dawn Potter

2012-01-29T06:02:00.001-05:00

Awake too early: feeling heartsick, melancholy, pulled in a thousand different directions, and then I read this review of my Friday night reading. It was a comfort. Thank you, Anne.

2012-01-28T08:29:00.001-05:00

Two mourning doves swing on an empty feeder as my sentence wanders on and on. Somewhere a dog barks, but no one listens. Tires whistle through slush, coffee cools in the glass pot, and nightmares retreat into their damp caverns. From his snowy bough, a superannuated squirrel, bony and moth-eaten, eyes the doves on the feeder. Hunger glitters. Meanwhile, a middle-aged book splays on the table. Loneliness tots up its accounts.

2012-01-27T07:43:00.001-05:00

I seem to have been slammed with a head cold, just in time for tonight's reading. Ah well. Nothing could be as bad as helplessly coughing through an entire half-hour phone interview, can it? And at last night's band practice I did manage to sing, which is harder than reading, especially since my singing range tends to drop down an entire register when I'm sick. From being an alto with a usable soprano falsetto I become a contralto with a career-smoker rasp. So perhaps tonight I should only read poems about the seedy back rooms of speakeasies, or bleak Gatsby-esque roadscapes, or the desk chairs of washed-up private investigators. Unfortunately I haven't written any of those poems yet.

But, as a bright spot, we're having a sleetstorm, and school has been canceled for the first time this year. The boys are celebrating by being unconscious, and I am celebrating by not engaging in any of my early morning pitchfork-the-boys-out-of-the-house chores. Instead I am sitting at my desk in the snowy half-light, thinking vaguely about Shelley and Middle English lyrics and shoveling out barnyard gates.

All these thoughts seem to be culminating in my sudden need to copy out this fifteenth-century double-entendre chicken poem:

I Have a Gentil Cok
Anonymous

I have a gentil cok
Croweth me day;
He me risen erly
My matines for to say.

I have a gentil cok;
Comen he is of grete;
His comb is of red corel,
His tail is of get.

I have a gentil cok;
Comen he is of kinde;
His comb is of red corel,
His tail of inde.

His legges ben of asour,
So gentil and so smale;
His spores arn of silver white
Into the wortewale.

His eyen are of cristal,
Loken all in aumber;
And every night he percheth him
In mine ladyes chaumber.

[Translation key: get = jet; inde = indigo; spores = spurs; wortewale = skin of the claws. Not that you need to understand every word to love a poem. Sometimes sound in the mouth or shape on the page is as good as meaning in the head.]

2012-01-26T07:23:00.002-05:00

In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes:

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

"An inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature" . . . this is the phrase that will linger with me today. What is this inexplicable defect? And why do we all, every one of us, suffer from it? I think of the poetry of Keats and Shelley, but also of Joe Bolton, but also of Shakespeare--of Hamlet, Othello, even The Winter's Tale--the pain, that is also pleasure, in reading of these sorrows; the pain, that is also pleasure, of writing about tragedy or even simple sadness.

Last week I told someone that I think the best lines I've ever written, thus far, appear in one of the eclogues in How the Crimes Happened:

. . . It's not that being here
is misery; it's more like marriage is too much
and not enough at the same time: the trees crowd us
like children, our bodies betray a fatal longing.

Every time I say those lines aloud at a reading, I feel the weight of being alive. If I never write anything else again, I should remember to be grateful that, somehow, the patterns of pleasure and pain aligned themselves in those words that, one day, fell from my fingers.

2012-01-25T07:47:00.001-05:00

Stuff Going On

1. A few months ago, when I had a terrible cold, I unexpectedly got a call from a radio-show host in St. Louis, who wanted to interview me about Tracing Paradise. After coughing my way through the interview, I was sure I'd never hear from him again. But apparently the show ran on Monday night, and you can listen to it here, in the January 23 archives. The interviewer says he cut out the coughing, although, as usual, I probably won't bring myself to listen to it.

2. This Friday I'll be reading at the Common Street Gallery in Waterville, along with poets Patrick Donnelly and Rachel Contreni Flynn. We start at 7 p.m., and there will be free food and drink. (We hope there will be no snow.) I don't get very many chances to read so close to home; and if you care to venture out on a winter's night, I would love to see you.

3. Apparently someone has reviewed Tracing Paradise for the Milton Quarterly. This makes me nervous, so it may be just as well that the article is available online only to subscribers. But if you or your library has access, you could tell me if it's bad. Alternatively, you could not tell me.

4. James got his first college acceptance yesterday, which means we managed to get him to fill out the forms correctly. Hurray!

2012-01-24T08:12:00.001-05:00

Sometimes the submissions process is inscrutable. Today I withdrew an essay that a journal had commissioned two years ago but had never gotten around to publishing. Despite many sweet-tempered queries, I received no explanation of what was going on. Maybe the editors didn't like the piece as much as they used to? Maybe the journal was having a financial or an editorial crisis? I don't know the backstory, but this morning I finally got tired of being in limbo, and I reclaimed my essay.

A similar thing happened a few years ago, when a journal accepted both an essay and a poem and then published neither. In that case, I did become aware that the journal was foundering, although I never directly heard from the editor. And in yet another case, I submitted poems to a journal and never heard back about them, until the print journal arrived with my poems featured in it. I'd never signed a contract, let alone received an acceptance letter.

I understand that, for many editors, running a literary journal involves neither pay nor adequate staffing. Still, it seems to me that if you decide to be a journal editor, you also ought to commit yourself to corresponding with your contributors. It's not like we won't sympathize with your problems, but no one wants to feed her work into a black hole.

Okay, now I'm done complaining. In other news, the Harmony Huskies boys' basketball team still stinks; and according to his friend, who was spending the night, my older son sleep-asked, "Do you have any Monopoly tips?"

2012-01-23T09:24:00.002-05:00

Today, after I write a letter and edit someone else's poetry manuscript and shove bath towels into the dryer, but before I start peeling carrots and potatoes for minestrone, I will be reading Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, which may be my favorite document about poetry. Yes, it's overexcited and sometimes overblown; and, yes, it's too long; and, yes, he probably wrote it while his wife was hundreds of miles away dealing with their dying child. Nonetheless, it's a remarkable essay, and I love it all over again every time I read it. If you are feeling dragged out and disheartened by terrible student work or a trash heap of rejection letters or collegial grumpiness or the inanities of prize-winning versifiers or your own wretched revisions, try reading its final lines. I'm sure you'll feel better.

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

[P.S. If you want a cheap fried-fish dinner you can't do better than smelts, which cost $4.50 a pound at the grocery. Roll each little fish in seasoned flour, then in egg thinned with a teaspoon of cold water, then in cornmeal. Pour about a quarter cup of peanut oil into a skillet, and heat thoroughly. Fry the fish in batches, 2 or 3 minutes on each side, until they are crispy. Serve with lemon and lots of freshly ground pepper, a green salad, a scoop of cranberry-orange-apple relish, and a warm sliced baguette. You will be happy.]

2012-01-22T08:22:00.002-05:00

I left Connecticut at 3, and I drove and drove and drove, through snow and darkness, through slush and salt spray. On the roadsides, the rear ends of SUVs poked out out of ditches like hungry ducks upside down in a pond. Police cars prowled in the shadowy margins as teams of snowplows sparked and scraped in military formation. On and on I drove, praying incessantly to the muse of windshield-washer fluid. Finally, after crawling north for seven hours, I arrived at the Saigon Restaurant in Portland, Maine, where a comical wedding dinner was in progress, one that involved much posing with gift envelopes before an avid camera hobbyist while old grandmas tossed their heads contemptuously at the bread. For a moment I worried that I would be sent back into the salty cold. But thank goodness: there was a table for me; and when my bowl of pho arrived, and I tasted the first spoonful of that divine broth, tears came to my eyes.

Have you ever had moments when you meet the food that solves everything, the dish that arrives at exactly the right moment, the spoon laden with broth and meat and vegetables that pours a pristine Colorado River into your digestive system's existential ravine? I'm not talking about craving Oreos; I'm talking about sustenance. This bowl of pho was a bowl from the gods. And all it cost me was $7.45.

At the end of this one-dish feast, my fortune cookie remarked, "Go for it. You never know what happen next." Which was true. I had no idea that two hours later, when I finally arrived home, Tom and James would be watching an episode from Saturday Night Live's season 2, one that featured guest host Ralph Nader in a skit in which he was performing consumer-protection tests on inflatable sex dolls. And you thought Newt Gingrich was carrying some hard-to-explain baggage? Jeez.

2012-01-21T09:10:00.001-05:00

Stuck inside of Middlebury, Connecticut, with those Harmony blues again. However, things could be worse. After drinking plenty of coffee, I am sitting in a soft chair in a deserted library, where I have nothing to do but read Sir Walter Scott and watch the snow fall. Maybe I'll be able to leave by lunchtime.

A hundred people came to my reading. Can you believe it? The last time I read at a school, about 5 people showed up. But at Westover School they treat poets like queens.

Later I went to a faculty party and listened to gossip about Auden. And after that, just to reinsert myself into the real world, I got into bed and watched an episode of The A-Team on Netflix. (Note: "Real world" doesn't equal "reality." Otherwise, I'd have to explain why nobody is ever injured in any of those exploding cars. Rather, "real world" indicates "silly stuff I do with boys when we're sitting on the couch in the middle of nowhere on a snowy Friday night and the power hasn't cut out yet and we're drinking tea and fighting with the dog for possession of the couch blanket and we decide to invite Mr. T in for a glass of milk.")

2012-01-20T10:58:00.002-05:00

Temporarily I am living in a building run by those furnace dwarves who live in the basement and emerge periodically during the night to whack their shovels and picks against the steam pipes. I like it.

This school is chock-full of girls who always do their homework. In fact, they like doing their homework. Also, you can get good coffee here. For a school, this is very unusual.

Moreover, it appears that staff members and students really have read some of my poems, always an otherworldly sensation. So it was fortunate that I also accidentally got the chance to overhear the maintenance guys complain about having to move library furniture "for some poetry spiel." This was a homey touch, and I appreciated it.

2012-01-19T08:40:00.002-05:00

Snow in the forecast, so I am heading to Connecticut today while the sun still shines. Talk to you later, I hope.

And if you live in Connecticut, you could come to my reading. . . .

2012-01-18T08:02:00.001-05:00

Difficult as this may be to believe, given my 19th-century-novel-reading propensities, I've never consumed many of Sir Walter Scott's books--to this point maybe just Waverly and Ivanhoe, and neither of those very recently. But now I am reading Old Mortality, which, as I've discovered, is crammed to the gills with page-turner plot devices: handsome young men on the lam, the vicissitudes of a rocky landscape, noble gentlemanly principles, beautiful fainting ladies who live in towers, sword play, the comic dialect of yokels, etc., etc. Yet it's also a serious treatise on 17th-century Scottish politics, economy, culture, and especially religious extremism; and as I read I'm seeing why Scott's work mattered so much to the social-conscience novelists who came after him--for instance, Charlotte Bronte, whose Shirley deals with similar religious/economic/cultural/political themes but in a Yorkshire weavers-versus-millowners setting.

It would be tough, however, to convince you that Old Mortality is a brisk, action-packed read if you were to start the novel at the beginning. For some reason, so many early novels have the most hideously boring opening chapters; and even though I have learned to expect verbiage, windy prefaces, and the coy asides of faux-narrators, I still cannot manage to make my way through Sterne's Tristram Shandy, no matter how funny Dickens found it. Even by Trollope's era, when the genre was in full swing, a novel's first chapter was likely to be dull. But the opening of OM goes beyond dull into excruciating. It begins with an introduction written in the voice of a pedantic schoolmaster, who is telling us that his assistant schoolmaster has recently died and left a poorly written manuscript in his care, which we are about to read. This is followed by a second intro, from the not-dead-yet assistant schoolmaster, discussing his composition habits (walks along the babbling brook in the gloaming, visiting the mossy churchyard as the little birds sing their evening lullabies, blah blah blah). Then, finally, Scott disentangles himself from all this maundering and hurls himself full steam into drama, suspense, plot twists, denouements, and come-uppances. There was absolutely no need for 30 pages of blathering backdrop, yet there they stood, blocking my way, so I obediently plowed through them. But I was sorry afterward.

[P.S. As I was taking a shower, I thought, You know which of Scott's contemporaries never began a novel with a boring chapter? Jane Austen, that's who. Queen of the Snappy Opening we might call her.]

2012-01-17T07:41:00.002-05:00

As you might have expected, when I actually sat down to create a workshop plan for Friday's Westover School visit, the result had nothing at all to do with sonnets. After reading a few batches of student work, I decided to revisit two poems that I have often taught in other contexts but to focus on them somewhat differently:

* I'll start off by dictating Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s “Afraid So.” Afterward, we'll quickly discuss the punctuation-line relationship.

*Then line by line students will take turns reading Kim Addonizio’s“Garbage” (which I can't find online but appears in her collection Tell Me). At this point we'll expand our discussion of the relationship between punctuation-line and emotional-moral intensity in both poems.

* Now I'll ask the students to choose a question from the Beaumont poem and to draft apoem that spirals from it. They don't necessarily need to answer the question; rather, I want them to follow the question down whatever path it leads them.

* If technology is on our side, we'll share drafts on a projector so that students can discuss the punctuation-line strategies they found themselves taking. We'll talk about ways to ask ourselves and others some basic questions about revision: For instance, "point out two places in which those strategies worked well in the poem." "Point out one placethat makes you ask a 'what if [you made a specific line-punctuation adjustment]' question."

*With whatever time is left, I'll put myself on the hot seat and talk about some of the punctuation-line challenges I've been dealing with in my western Pennsylvania project. I'll share a few of those poems and some of the primary sources that inspired them, and talk a bit about how I moved from what was often prose diary text into dramatic monologues in verse, often written in specific (if invented) forms.

2012-01-16T09:18:00.000-05:00

Here's a clip from our show in snowy and blowy Monson.

And here's a clip from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. I'm not sure I've ever read a better description of what is happening when a poet is writing well:

[A poet's] power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed controul . . . [,] reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

2012-01-15T09:48:00.003-05:00

Minus 6 this morning. Brilliant sun, tree branches shifting and cracking in the cold, chickadees jostling with mourning doves at the feeder, a disgusted poodle, a greedy goat, and a giant old barn dog who refused to eat her breakfast. So I spent 20 minutes with my gloves off spoon-feeding the elderly Great Pyrenees, who eventually decided that maybe she could eat if I dipped a tiny amount of food out of the dish onto the ground so that she could slowly lick it up. This dog has always had unfathomable eating issues: "don't look at me while I'm eating," "I can't eat because you fed me ten and a half minutes earlier than you did yesterday," and so on. Today's old-lady snit was particularly irritating; but we persevered, breakfast was consumed, and I did not get frostbite.

And now I am sitting at my delightfully clean desk, ready to copy out the rest of chapter 14 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (in which he complains about Wordworth's Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"). Downstairs a pack of boys has emerged from James's room, no doubt preparing to reoccupy the living room while consuming five hundred or so pancakes. You wouldn't think this teeny-tiny house could hold so many boys, but we manage to pack them in somehow.

2012-01-14T07:28:00.004-05:00

I played a fiddle gig last night in Monson, Maine, reachable only by means of egregious, semi-plowed, hilly, slushy, slidey, dark roads negotiated at a top of speed of 25 miles per hour. For some reason a hundred other people also came to this show. Perhaps they walked.

I forget: did I mention that I'm in a band now? Our name is String Field Theory, which strikes me as hilarious since the band members include (1) a farmer, (2) a speech therapist, (3) a contractor, and (4) a poet. Nary a physicist to be seen, but we do like strings and fields.

Anyway, it feels good to be back in the music saddle. I like these guys, and I like ensemble work, and I like musicians who are happy to play together rather than concentrating on outdoing one another (a poisonous characteristic of young, ambitious classical musicians who are vying for orchestra seats). The downside is that I spent much of last night fingering fiddle licks in my sleep, which, while not exactly analogous to those nights I spend dream-proofing academic texts, is neither restful nor interesting, especially when the automaton reactions of muscle memory prove that my ganglia already know the fingering by heart (and isn't that a comical mixed metaphor?).

Here's a poem from my first book: an attempt to explain what it feels like to be a skilled sixteen-year-old violinist who is beginning to hate playing the violin but doesn't want to admit that to anyone, least of all herself. It is hard to be so young yet so responsible for the desires, ambitions, and pride of the adults who manage one's life. I found the pressure of that pride almost unbearable, and it has taken me all the rest of my life to find a comfortable resting place for this uncomfortable talent.

Violin Lesson

When you are eighteen,

Mr. Kowalski straddles the pianobench

you will marry my son

inthis shrouded house under rain.

and we will drink cognac together

Cars hiss by on the street.

and you will win the competitions,

I did not practice the Sevčik,Hrimaly, or Dont,

so you must forget this laziness.

but fingered silent thirds likenightmares.

Your work is terrible.

Theviolins on the piano tremble. The room

You shame yourself.

smellsof sad people, counting the minutes till freedom,

How can we continue

wastingour talent on sleep and tears.

if you do not love your work?

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]

2012-01-13T07:29:00.000-05:00

Five or six inches of snow on the ground and another morning of grumpy children clomping off to uncanceled school: coffee and sentence fragments and applesauce cake for breakfast: a poodle who takes the lyrics of Professor Longhair to heart ("she walks right in, she walks right out, she walks right in, she walks right out," etc., etc.): working (me, not the poodle) to figure out an expanded punctuational role for the colon: a pink flowered bathrobe and slippers that make my feet hot: the world's most beautiful rosemary plant glowing spikily before my eyes: a freshly dusted desk with a charming tiny edition of Thomas Carlyle's Essay on Burns open on my copy stand: a window view of fir trees loaded with new snow: all of my western Pennsylvania reference books arranged in a tidy row beside my grandfather's ancient cabinet radio: the thought of composing a thought:

2012-01-12T09:34:00.001-05:00

Yes, I am getting rid of books today. And yes, some of those books are about poetry. Some are even written by famous poets and critics. But you know what?--I need more space for the stuff that matters to me, such as the complete letters of Virginia Woolf, an eight-volume facsimile of the 1912 edition of the diaries of Lewis and Clark, and a giant Herodotus' Histories that I didn't know I owned but found stuffed behind Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Therefore, if you or your friends would like a perky explanation of how to fall in love with poetry, by all means let me know. I've decided to fall in love with poetry without aid from the manual. Similarly, I can offer you instructional tomes that explain everything you need to know about Shakespeare's sonnets as well as several other classic works of verse that are too complex for regular people to negotiate on their own.

Or perhaps you, too, have an antipathy to tour guides.

Just looking at these books makes me crabby. Why were they on my shelf for so many years? Because the authors were Experts, and if you want to know what I mean by Expert, go read Mark Twain's "Taming the Bicycle." You'll see how hard they are to ignore.

[I'm not as grumpy as I sound. I'm really not grumpy at all. My children, on the other hand, are very grumpy. They wanted a snow day and didn't get one, whereas I wanted a day to get rid of books and I did get one. Now, if that snowstorm would hurry up and arrive, I could also get out of driving to the dentist.]

2012-01-11T07:35:00.000-05:00

Today is the day that I will finally get a chance to plot my teaching strategy for next week's visit to Westover School. Unlike most of my recent teaching gigs, which have involved rural public schools and students without much poetry experience, this one will feature ambitious, well-read students who are accustomed to taking poetry seriously.

These advantages don't guarantee that the workshop will be a breeze. To begin with, all of the students will be girls, a challenge in itself, since the Fates have seen fit to make me a boy specialist. There's also the huge task of circumventing the analytical mind, always an issue with top-flight students. They know a lot, and they know how to talk about what they know, but they are so used to standing outside themselves and looking back in at the work that, when they find themselves forced to be creators rather than analyzers, they often struggle with voice, diction, and solidity of language in ways that so-called lower-level students do not.

In such cases, many of these young writers turn to form and facile word manipulation as substitutes for self. So I'm thinking of doing a sonnet workshop, one that focuses on line rather than end rhyme. I'm sure that every one of these girls can rhyme in her sleep, but a rhyme scheme does not a sonnet make.

Then again, maybe I'll do something else. I'll let you know.

2012-01-10T07:44:00.000-05:00

Again, the trees are gray with sleep. A handful of tiny brown birds flutters around a dark tube of seed, but the sky is heavy, weary. Clouds press on the tips of the firs. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the radio chatters over a hot griddle. Something is burning--toast or firewood or temper. I wish my feet were warm and the sun would shine and the radio would play Joe Strummer instead of Rick Santorum. Instead, I am looking at a catalog cover that features a dress I can't afford to buy. This is hardly better than Rick Santorum. Perhaps Samuel Pepys can help me today. A glance into volume 7 of the Diary brings me this news from April 1666:

To Sir George Carteret's and dined there, and many good stories at dinner, among others about discoveries of murder, and Sir J. Minnes did tell of the discovery of his own great-grandfather's murder, fifteen years after he was murdered. Mrs. Turner came to my office, and did walk an hour with me in the garden, telling me stories how Sir Edward Spragge hath lately made love to our neighbour, a widow, Mrs. Hollworthy, who is a woman of estate, and wit and spirit, and do contemn him the most, and sent him away with the greatest scorn in the world; also odd stories how the parish talks of Sir W. Pen's family, how poorly they clothe their daughter so soon after marriage, and do say that Mr. Lowther was married once before, and some such thing there hath been, whatever the bottom of it is. But to think of the clatter they make with his coach, and his owne fine cloathes, and yet how meanly they live within doors, and nastily, and borrowing everything of neighbours.

Well, it is difficult to argue that this gossip is better than idle catalog desire or bluster about Rick Santorum, but it is certainly funnier. And can Pepys's Sir W. Pen be our Sir William Penn? The Big Quaker as skinflint father-in-law? Yes, a random dollop of unreliable Diary is always a good idea.

2012-01-09T09:11:00.002-05:00

Today's post must perforce be brief as I have too much to do and too little time to do it. Oh, these distracting eighth-grade meetings, reprint-permissions requests, birthday dinners, basketball practices, and editorial cleanups. When will I ever get the chance to work (i.e., to wander aimlessly around the house drinking tea, staring out the window at crows, inserting one word and then deleting it, reading six lines of the The Prelude and half a page of Walter Scott, inserting five words, staring out the window at woodpeckers, etc., etc., etc.)? Well, it won't be today. The best I can do is to share the menu for Tom's birthday dinner tomorrow:

Cream of tomato and garlic soup
Sourdough baguettes
Carbonnade a la flamande (Belgian beef stew)
Spatzle
Spinach and pear salad
Homemade vanilla ice cream with home-canned purple grapes in syrup (which taste remarkably like canned sweet cherries)

2012-01-08T08:17:00.002-05:00

Following is a poem forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014) and that is also the subject of an essay, "For the Eye altering alters all," which I will be including in the anthology The Poets' Sourcebook (Autumn House Press, 2013). As the essay explains, I wrote this poem after reading Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, an unbelievably compelling narrative about how Custer ended up at Little Big Horn. It includes many, many extracts from contemporaneous journals, transcriptions of talk, and other primary sources; and this poem arose from my reading of an enlisted man's description of the aftermath of what was known as the Fetterman massacre. The Sioux retelling is the hero story.

Fear is so variant and situational. I think about this a lot. No matter who is right or wrong in the broad view--and no one could possibly defend the U.S. government's treatment of the plains tribes after the Civil War--the minutiae of evil infiltrate everyone involved in conflict. Blake says exactly this in America: a Prophecy, which is the other primary subject of my essay.

The Fate of Captain Fetterman’s Command

Dawn Potter

1866

At first light we saw our enemies
on the bluff
silver flashing in their hair

a glory of sun as they rode away laden
with tunics saddles boots arrows
still piercing the cracked boots

piercing our silent comrades
and just visible in the dawn
we saw wolves and coyotes

skulking along the verge
crows buzzards eagles circling
the sun-spattered meadow

but not one white body was disturbed
for we hear that salt permeates
the whole system of our race

which protects us from the wild
to some degree but it was strange
that nothing had eaten the horses either

except for flies which swarmed in thick
like the stench
all day we waited

till the doctor finished his report then
they told us to pack our friends
into the ammunition wagons

this was our job they said to retch
to stumble into the field to grasp
at wrists at ankles dissolving to pulp

under our grip to vomit to weep
to stare at masks pounded bloody with stones
bloated crawling with flies who were they

this was our job but we could not sort
cavalry from infantry all stripped
naked slashed skulls crushed

with war clubs ears noses legs
hacked off and some had
crosses cut on their breasts

faces to the sky
we walked on their hearts
but did not know it in the high grass

2012-01-07T12:19:00.004-05:00

I like to imagine that I was the only person wandering the streets of Portland, Maine, last night with a copy of Sir Walter Scott's novel Old Mortality in my bag.

The first things I saw this morning from my hotel window were a seagull sitting on the ridge of a steep roof and a golden retriever in a red jacket rolling around upside down on the snowy cobblestones.

When we returned to our home, we discovered that it had been taken over by teenage boys. "We're occupying the living room," said James. "Now that the 1 percent has returned," said Tom, "you have to move." Needless to say, the occupation persists.

I'm playing fiddle at the East Sangerville Grange tonight, in a new band that's opening for D. W. Gill, a wonderful blues harmonica player. You should come hear him.

In the meantime, I'd better do some laundry and see if the occupation wants any lunch.

2012-01-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

What's making me happy today

1. Thinking I was going to get paid $250 for a teaching job. Finding out that I'm going to get paid $800.
2. Anticipating tonight's celebration of Tom's birthday, here.
3. Holding paws with a large black ridiculous poodle.
4. Getting permission to reprint a really fine translation of Verlaine in my anthology.
5. Listening to Wordsworth complain about the way things have gone downhill in these modern times (i.e., 1800):

For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakspeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.—When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes [the first and second editions of Lyrical Ballads] to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished success.

2012-01-05T07:52:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to Tom's show, which opens tomorrow night at the Portland Public Library. I thought you might like to see the photo of my grandfather's chair, which Tom took on his only visit to the farm in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, right after we got engaged in 1990. My grandfather died the next year, and the farm was sold and the farmhouse razed.

This is the picture in my head as I write those western Pennsylvania poems.

2012-01-05T07:36:00.000-05:00

If you were to look at the reading list in the righthand column of this blog, you'd no doubt wonder why someone who calls herself a poet only seems to read novels. Well, in truth that list doesn't tell the whole story. To begin with, as I've been researching material for my forthcoming anthology (and by the way the publisher has okayed my table of contents; hurray!), I've been reading an enormous number of poems and writings about poetry. However, because the embryo book is under contract, it has seemed impolitic to list those works publicly without the publisher's sanction, so I haven't.

Setting aside the anthology situation, I do read many poems on my own volition, yet for some reason I rarely think of that interaction as actual reading. For instance, take that Raleigh poem I've been talking about for the last couple of days. Did I add "Raleigh" to the reading list? No. Why? I have no idea, except that what I did with that poem felt more like breathing than reading.

I don't know if my reaction is flightiness, or misplaced modesty, or something else altogether. I do imagine that it may have something to do with my scholarly anxieties: my worry that I don't know how to study a poem but only how to react to it. Still, you'd think I could manage to write the name on a list. But mostly I don't.

2012-01-04T10:04:00.001-05:00

A comment on yesterday's post asked me to explain glorious. First, my remark was hyperbole, though I don't apologize for it because that's what happens when a poem smacks me in the head: I immediately shift into a present-tense delirium, all my nerves and brainwaves exulting, "This is it! This is it!" Recollecting in tranquility, I'll attempt to explain why Elizabethan poetry so often has the ability to drive me temporarily mad with joy. I have never had any abiding interest in metaphysics or the armchair detection of secret identities. I don't care who Shakespeare's Dark Lady really was or which lovely Unas and Astraeas were invented to flatter an aging queen. What I love are the simple yet surprising, vigorous yet archaic, clever yet innocent manipulations of figurative language.

To whit: nearly every word of Raleigh's 30-line poem is devoted to comparing the idea of false love to something else. By the end of the third stanza, my mind is reeling, but is he done yet? Why, no--wait! There's more!

I think this is my favorite stanza. Whatever false love may be, if this is what it feels like, it's no wonder that it breaks our hearts.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

2012-01-03T09:13:00.005-05:00

I began reading a new book today, one that I found in a used bookstore over the Christmas holidays. It's called The Shadow of the Sun, and it's a 1991 reprint of A. S. Byatt's first novel, originally published in 1964. I have a slightly superstitious feeling about both of these dates because I was born in 1964 and married in 1991. I also have a perpetually fraying, queasy, affectionate, disappointed, overwhelmed, delighted, questing, and jealous relationship with Byatt's work; and since I had never even heard of this debut novel before I found it wedged in a stack of used paperbacks, I bought it instantly.

The reprint includes an introduction in which Byatt revisits her young self, "a very desperate faculty wife in Durham," 25 years old, with two small children, "surrounded by young men who debated in an all-male Union from which the women students were excluded, though there was nowhere else for them to meet." Nonetheless, "I had a cleaning-lady, and ran across the Palace Green to the University Library for the hour she was there to write, fiercely, with a new desperation. The children were human and beautiful and I loved them."

This is exactly the sort of description that makes me crazy: first, because of course I recognize that desperation, the suffocating embrace of very small children, the way in which they suck away a woman's private life, how in those years nothing, nothing, seems more precious that a single hour alone. Nonetheless, "I had a cleaning-lady," she tells me, without comment or explanation. "Oh, how nice for you," I imagine myself replying, my voice sodden with ironically understated cattiness. You can see that we don't always bring out the best in each other. On the other hand, she is constantly making my brain work, making me look again at the books I love or the poems I have forgotten . . . such as this one. How could I have forgotten it? Today it feels like the most glorious poem I have ever read.

A Farewell to False Love

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

Farewell, false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason.

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.

Sith then thy trains my younger years betrayed,
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed,
Whose course was ever contrary to kind:
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu!
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.

2012-01-02T07:32:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking a good deal about my friend Baron's comment "a poet has the right to her rage," a sentence that I can't seem to relinquish. What I think he's telling me is that, first, even though a poet has the right to her rage, her rage may not have a right to the poem. For instance, the murders of Amy, Coty, and Monica continue to fire my rage, which in turn both hounds me and taunts me. In other words, rage dares me to write and then forces me to see that what I've written is not a poem but a mouthful of nails.

A mouthful of nails is not a poem, although a poem can be a mouthful of nails, which leads me to a second thought about Baron's sentence: a poet has the right to her rage. Am I raging about these murders as a poet or as a friend? Can I do both simultaneously? Or am I not pressing the poet to take precedence? Here's where poetry becomes cruel: not because it undertakes horrendous subjects but because the poet must step into the role of manipulator . . . in this case, while excoriating the terrible manipulations of "the real story." I wrote about this dilemma in Tracing Paradise, in the chapter titled "Killing Ruthie," and I continue to ponder and worry over it.

But here's a third thought: a poet has the right to her rage, yet the frame of that rage can be reimagined. And this is why I'm on the cusp of introducing the story into the western Pennsylvania poems. Something very different will happen when I shift these present-tense angers into an entirely new time and environment. At the very least I will be a poet first rather than a griever first.

2012-01-01T09:36:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year to all of you. It is a glittering morning in Harmony. The driveway may be a rink, but the crunchy icy grass makes jumping rope fun. I counted up to 35 before I lost my rhythm and wrapped the rope around my boot.

The red squirrels are awake and busy for the New Year. One has already invented a brand-new curse, which she practiced while dropping a pinecone on the poodle, who became flustered and thus found herself helplessly careening around the crunchy yard like a wind-up maniac.

James made the January 1 deadline for his first round of college applications and is celebrating by sleeping. Likewise, Paul is sleeping, for no particular celebratory reason. Tom is sitting on the couch in his bathrobe reading Helter Skelter. I am considering our incipient New Year's breakfast/lunch: fresh pineapple, bacon, and waffles or pancakes, waffles or pancakes, waffles or pancakes. Someone needs to decide for me.

Last night, on the final evening of 2011, I was invited to submit "provocative prose" to a new literary magazine. Do I write provocative prose? Anyway, I was pleased to think that somebody believes I do. Mostly I'm used to people telling me that I write evocative prose, which sounds prettier but also drearier.

I have a few provokingly embryonic ideas for essays; also a few provoking essays in existence that are presently floating hither and yon in the journal aether. I have my western Pennsylvania collection in progress; my CavanKerry collection forthcoming in 2014; my ill-starred rereading ms (the one that editors keep losing, misplacing, forgetting, and occasionally rejecting, etc.); a sheaf of uncollected, mixed-subject prose pieces; and my anthology of writings about poetry, due for release in 2013. I am fortunate and puzzled and grateful.

Yesterday James asked me if I'd ever made any New Year's resolutions. I told him that, as far as I can recall, any resolutions always involved (1) boys [keep my head, quit crying about them, stop being tempted by their charms, and so on, and so on] and (2) writing [learn to do it better, learn not to give up, learn to do it better, learn not to give up, learn to do it better, learn not to give up]. The boy resolutions, thank goodness, were a complete failure. But the writing resolutions: ah, they go on and on. And they've even sort of begun to kind of in a way come true. Although, of course, I have infinite room for improvement. . . . and why would I want to commit myself to a vocation that didn't have these endless stairs and passageways and stony plains and foggy forest paths and confusing streets?

2011-12-30T08:08:00.000-05:00

Today I'll be proofreading Wordsworth's Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads" (1800), which I haven't read carefully since college--if I read it carefully then, which is doubtful. I was not an ideal college student: far too prone to wallow in unassigned Dickens instead of poring over assigned Ruskin, still struggling to decode syntax and contemporary plot devices. (Virginia Woolf was hard for me to manage, and Thomas Pynchon was almost unreadable.) I was such a rube then that I found it hard to understand why any college might have wanted me. Yet now that I'm helping J apply to schools, I have finally realized that all 17-year-olds are rubes, which, after all these years, still turns out to be a comfort . . . for both his sake and mine.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted about the Preface. I expect it will be far more interesting than I remember. However, after yesterday's immersion in wacky William Blake, I'll require some time to adjust to rational explanation and predictable punctuation.

Here's my new theory: Blake's punctuation and capitalization (or lack thereof) are directly related to the way in which his visionary and workaday lives intersected. For instance:

But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean unless he has seen them in the Spirit or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted) I have written lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. the Time it has taken in writing was thus rendered Non Existent. & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all produced without Labour or Study. I mention this to shew you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here

Now go ahead: write your doctoral thesis on this idea because I will never be able to.

2011-12-29T09:25:00.001-05:00

The wind is blowing cold and hard. Pine needles are sifting onto the carpet. When I walk across the kitchen, James's dusty garland decorations keep snatching at the top of my head. I'm trying to parcel out the pittance I have available for donations to worthy causes, to figure out which causes are more worthy than which other causes, to find stamps, to convince the wood stove to stay lit, to remember what time to fetch Paul back from his sleepover. And so on and so on.

I'm also fretting over my anthology's table of contents, imminently due to the publisher, and concomitantly fretting over the vagaries of interlibrary loan, which is a wonderful idea transformed into an aggravating reality. Really, it should not be all that difficult for a librarian to locate the selected essays of Gary Snyder somewhere in the state of Maine. And yet she cannot. Moreover, she tells me that Garcia Lorca's essays are entirely unavailable, which can't possibly be true since it took me about 2 seconds to order them online. The entire system, at least as practiced in central Maine, seems to depend on hand-scrawled instructions sprinkled here and there in a shabby spiral notebook crammed with loose pages. Probably your library functions differently.

2011-12-28T07:12:00.002-05:00

Sorry I've been away so long, but I'm home again now, with a thousand pounds of laundry, a stack of books, three different kinds of tea, bright red gloves, and a desk calendar composed of pictures taken by my 17-year-old son, which has got to be one of the nicest gifts I have ever received.

In the interstices of holiday cheer, I have been rereading Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby, which you may or may not have read yourself. It is early-ish Dickens, with a floppy picaresque plot and a particularly saccharine ending. But it also includes this delightful letter, written by Fanny Squeers to Nicholas's evil Uncle Ralph. Fanny is the twenty-three-year-old daughter of the horrible Yorkshire schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers, whom Nicholas has just nobly trounced. Am I wrong, or is this one of the funniest letters ever written?

Sir,

My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen.

We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms [school desks] are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.

When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifikit that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.

Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.

2011-12-23T08:14:00.005-05:00

Once the snow stops snowing and the mail finishes mailing, we'll be heading south into the land of commerce, colleges, liberal politics, and large grey squirrels, with a quick detour along the way for Vietnamese noodles and whatever emergency poodle pit-stops become necessary. As I drop all literary activities to assume my holiday sous-chef duties, my notes to you will no doubt become sporadic incomplete sentences packed with nouns and ambiguous import. But you will be too busy to miss them, which is just the way things should be. Have a lovely holiday.

Eggnog

2011-12-22T07:15:00.003-05:00

Every Christmas I make eggnog, and every year it has turned out slightly less delightful than I'd hoped it would. This once-a-season schedule slows my tinkering abilities, so improvement is perforce incremental. But finally, this year, I have succeeded in making what, to me, tastes like the best eggnog on earth. And I say this as a person recovering from stomach flu, so you know I must mean it.

1 quart whole milk
1/2 c. natural cane sugar (turbinado works well)
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
1/2 t. ground mace or nutmeg
3 fresh eggs
1 T. flavoring (see below)

In the top of a double boiler, whisk together milk, sugar, and spices over simmering water. Stirring frequently, heat this mixture to the boiling point.

In a separate heat-proof bowl, beat the eggs. Continuing to beat constantly, slowly drizzle in a cup of hot milk. Then stir this egg-milk mixture into the remaining hot milk. Cook, stirring constantly, for 3 or 4 minutes or until the mixture becomes smooth, shiny, and slightly thickened.

Remove from heat and gently stir in your flavoring of choice. Vanilla works, as do rum and brandy. I used bourbon. You can increase the amount of liquor now or at serving time, but remember that it will thin out the final product. And as far as I'm concerned, a velvety texture trumps the extra booze.

Let the mixture cool on the counter for about 15 minutes. Then pour it through a strainer into a pitcher. Chill until ready to serve.

P.S. Feel free to substitute some other kind of sugar, but don't try to use lowfat milk. You'll be sorry.

2011-12-21T07:40:00.003-05:00

Robert Frost's earliest known correspondence: notes passed during school. This one was written in 1886, when he would have been 11 or 12.

Ah, middle school. Some things never change.

To Sabra Peabody

Dear Sabe,

I will answer your letter to let you know that I am well and hope you are the same. About me liking Lida [Storer] better than you you are all wrong because I like you twice as much as I do her and always have thought more of you than any other girl I know of. I thought you were going to the entertainment the other night but I didn't see you there. I saw Eva Hattie and your mother there. There is no fun in getting mad every so [often so] lets see if we cant keep friends Im sure I am willing. I know I have not treated you as I ought to sometimes and sometimes I don't know wheather you are mad or not and we have gotten mad and then we would get friends again ever since Westons party when I first came here. There are not many girls that I like but when I like them I fall dead in love with them and there are not many I like just because I can have some fun with them like I can Lida but I like you because I cant help myself and when I get mad at you I feel mad at myself to.

From your loveing Rob

2011-12-20T07:35:00.001-05:00

Things that make me happy this morning

1. Running up and down the cellar stairs with a basket of laundry instead of lying on the couch wondering if I'll always feel pointless.

2. Receiving an unexpected present in the mail: the novel Split-Levels, written by my friend Thomas Rayfiel and inscribed "To the country mouse from the city mouse."

3. Having two 20-year-old girls in bright lipstick whirl into my kitchen and enfold me in hugs.

4. Watching the Drama King lose his fourth straight basketball game and still smile at his teammates.

5. While selling slices of pizza at the same basketball game, figuring out how to make change for a 20-dollar bill without humiliating myself.

6. Almost finishing my anthology's table of contents.

7. Enjoying the slim sensation of post-flu belt tightening.

8. Eating cranberry relish for dinner; really, eating anything for dinner.

9. Getting hired for two paying gigs in two days, neither of which I applied for.

10. Starting Nicholas Nickelby again, for the 100th time.

11. Reading the Facebook status of a friend who teaches 5th grade: "Just when she wonders if anything has been accomplished . . . she overhears 2 boys discussing where the line breaks go in a poem one of them is writing. 'Well, I hear you stop here, so maybe that's where you should put the line break.'"

12. Looking at Baby under my Christmas twig, which I never thought would make me happy . . . and doesn't really make me happy but does make me undergo a sort of formal acknowledgment of mourning and redemption.

13. Getting an email from my friend Baron that says, "A poet has the right to her rage." Because she does.

2011-12-19T12:04:00.001-05:00

I still feel relatively awful, as if taking a shower equals doing a full day's work. But I am somewhat better than I was yesterday, when I passed many dull convalescent hours on the couch reading a Barbara Pym novel and at one point even watching football, which was a new low for me. Yet even in the midst of flu, reading synchronicity can strike. Here are a few lines from Pym's A Few Green Leaves:

The silence induced by the thought of libraries was broken into by Miss Lee and Magdalen Raven, obviously in a state of agitation.

"It's Miss Grundy--something rather upsetting--she's had a kind of turn. . . . "

"It must be the heat," said Tom. "I was rather afraid something like this might happen. I blame myself," he added. It was so much easier to take the blame, almost expected of him.

"Oh, it's not that," said Miss Lee impatiently, "not that kind of turn--more like an experience--she says she's seen something, some person from the past."

"A ghost?" Emma suggested. "Or something like Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain at Versailles?"

Yes, this Miss Jourdain is the elder sister of Milly Jourdain the poet, decorative arts historian Margaret Jourdain (and companion of Ivy Compton-Burnett), and mathematician Philip Jourdain. And here's a retelling of the "incident at Versailles."

2011-12-18T12:41:00.002-05:00

Sick all night and recuperating today. Will write more when I don't feel like I've been flattened by a paver.

2011-12-17T09:48:00.003-05:00

Finished a poem yesterday . . . one of those delirious two-day writes, as if a ghoul had risen from hell and infested my tongue, fingers, heart, eyes. In this case the ghoul was that horrible psychological autopsy of the Lake murders, and the poem is constructed around the myriad voices of people who saw what could happen while also seeing nothing. It is one of those poems that drives the poet into sickness and brutality and could be an advertisement for why being a writer doesn't make anyone feel better about anything. Nonetheless, I think it's a real poem, though it will give no one any pleasure to read.

And now I will turn my attention to cole slaw and a Christmas party. Thanks for being my friends.

2011-12-16T07:05:00.001-05:00

Sonnet 7

from Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods

Charles Sangster

Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
The full light rarely finds us. One by one,
Deep rooted in our souls, there springeth up
Dark groves of human passion, rich in gloom,
At first no bigger than an acorn-cup.
Hope threads the tangled labyrinth, but grives
Till all our sins have rotted in their tomb,
And made the rich loam of each yearning heart
To bring forth fruits and flowers to new life.
We feel the dew from heaven, and there start
From some deep fountain little rills whose strife
Is drowned in music. Thus in light and shade
We live, and move, and die, through all this earthly glade.

I read this intensely beautiful poem for the first time yesterday. The poet, Charles Sangster (1822-93), was born in Kingston, Ontario, and began his working life making ordnance for the navy. Although he later became a newspaper editor and a postal employee, he was generally unhappy and overworked. He married three times, and two of his wives died young. He had a passel of kids and a nervous breakdown; and although when younger he had published his work to acclaim, his output eventually dwindled to almost nothing. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "When I went down to Ottawa [to the post office job] . . . I took a pile of M.S. of a third volume with me, as I thought 'ready for the press,' but in all the 18 years I remained there I did little more than correct. . . . When they get a man into the Civil Service, their first duty is to crush him flat, and if he is a fool of a Poet, or dares to think of any nonsense of that kind, draw him through a Knot or a gimlet hole a few times, pile [him] with agony of toil, toil, toil until his nerves are flattened out, all the rebound knocked out of him, and then–superannuate him . . . and tell him he should be thankful."

2011-12-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

Yesterday evening I spent some time reading a document that I have been avoiding: the so-called "psychological autopsy" of the Lake family's murders and suicide--a long, detailed report on the case and various hindsight indicators of imminent violence. The thing is both dull and horrendous, and it's available online if, for some reason, you want to look at it. The authors are a group of ex-cops who asked the families if they could conduct this autopsy as a way to help families, law enforcement, and the judicial system improve their response to domestic violence. As you can imagine, it took a great deal of bravery for the families to participate in this process; and Linda has still not brought herself to read the final report.

I don't know why, but certain bits of the text struck me as particularly strange and disturbing. The following statement, for instance, gave me sudden pause: "Intimate relationships are increasingly complex and potentially dangerous in direct proportion to thedegree that spouses or partners are not 'soul mates.' Soul mates are relationally fulfilled by anindividual intimate partner and tend to have very few or in some cases no disagreements . . . what we referto as 'a low coefficient of friction.'"

This has got to be the most depressing definition of soul mate that I have ever heard; as Tom said, apparently, for a cop, all one has to do to be a soul mate is to not fight with your partner. None of this "twin minds/twin hearts/intellectual and erotic equals" stuff so beloved of the poets. It makes me very sad to think that safe boredom might be equated with happiness. And yet, of course, in Amy's case it would have been.

For here's the other passage that struck me cold: "According to our sources, Steven owned either 20 or 21 firearms and had purchased 7 or 8 pellet guns for Coty as a child. It was stated that Steven would use plastic pellets in those guns to occasionally shoot Christmas tree ornaments hanging from the tree in the family living room in Wellington, including heirloom ornaments. Steven was described to us, however, by many of our sources as 'mouthy, but I did not think dangerous.'"

2011-12-14T11:35:00.002-05:00

Baby

2011-12-14T07:22:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I watched the Harmony boys' basketball team play possibly the worst game I've ever seen, with a score along the lines of 60 to 7. Meanwhile, I got to spend an hour in the stands wincing at my own personal 8th-grade Drama King's flounces and groans. Sometimes it's just better not to watch one's children play sports.

On the bright side, James went to school with a fake mustache in his pocket, which he plans to don "at the perfect moment." He also spent some poker-faced time this morning earnestly explaining to me that I would be a better mother if I cooked more bacon. In addition, we had a long conversation about what we would say if we were talking stuffed monkeys with pull strings. Clearly he's in a good mood about something.

2011-12-13T07:01:00.003-05:00

Unbeknownst to one another, my friend Baron and I have both been writing about the Dove-Vendler debacle. Here's a link to what he has to say about it. As one might expect, he's brilliant.

What I ended up doing yesterday was writing a teaching statement for the Frost Place. Here it is, in case you're interested. And thank you to the teachers who gave me the opportunity to see these particular students in action:

In November 2011, I visited a high school in rural Maine. Many of the students I worked with that morning were general-level ninth graders, most of them boys, all of them either resigned to boredom or openly scornful of academics. As one of their teachers told me, the school is so focused on making sure that these kids are barraged with "the basics" that there is almost no available class time for anything personal or creative. And yet, she said, so many of them long for the freedom and focus to express themselves.

This longing was evident to me and to all the staff members present that morning, even though our interactions were limited to the space of an hour-long workshop. These students, most of whom had few academic expectations, not only could write well but wanted to write well. They wanted to figure out what was going on in the work of poets such as Robert Francis and Richard Wilbur. They wanted to focus hard on subjects that mattered to them and that they knew a great deal about. They wanted to use exactly the right word for the situation they were imagining in their heads. They wanted to read each others' drafts and comment on them. They wanted to keep writing, even after our hour was up.

More than a decade ago, Baron Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching because of such students and their devoted, questioning, yet struggling teachers. Today the conference continues to build connections and confidence among educators who understand the value--the necessity--of creative independence and who believe that poetry is a way both to teach academic focus and to open locked windows. Poetry matters enormously--and not just to high-achieving or arts-oriented students. All children need the opportunity to wield the tools of language, to discover the power of speaking for oneself. It's entirely possible that those students I saw in November may never again get the chance to read a Frank O'Connor poem and to figure out for themselves how sentence structure can influence narrative and emotion because they, like O'Connor, got the chance to use sentence structure to influence narrative and emotion. Perhaps this will be the last poem these fourteen-year-olds ever write. Meanwhile, they have a life to endure, with all of its joys and tragedies. Surely, one duty of our schools is to give our children at least a handful of ways to articulate that endurance.

2011-12-12T08:14:00.003-05:00

I have turned in my editing project. The library is closed on Mondays, so I can't go pick up my interlibrary loan order of anthology possibilities. The house will be quiet and empty until 2:30. Therefore, I just might write something today. I have been mulling over an essay, tentatively titled "Why I Don't Write about Cooking." Or I could go back to the western Pennsylvania poems. Or I could impose a few revisions on the forthcoming CavanKerry collection. I don't know. It's 8:15 a.m. and no one in the world expects me to do anything in particular for at least 6 hours. I may end up staring out the window at the apple tree that's collapsed into my garden, which would probably be fine too.

2011-12-11T07:46:00.002-05:00

Finally, a quiet morning. No incipient 8th-grade craft fair or turkey dinner; no monitoring of arguments over who used up all the hot water in the shower. Merely a cold kitchen and strong coffee--a great improvement.

Yesterday, while Paul and I were craft-fair hosting, Tom and James went out into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree. It may be the ugliest tree we've ever featured in our home, although the competition has always been stiff. Living as we do on a 40-acre woodlot packed with conifers, we find it difficult to justify the idea of purchasing a pine tree, no matter how plump and shapely it might be. This particular tree is, in James's words, "skimpy." I'd say that's a kindly description of what is more or less an oversized twig. However, festooned with an inordinate number of lights, anything can look charming, and the twig looks quite cheerful in its tight corner.

I'm trying to concentrate on this cheerfulness; for while I was sitting beside the craft-fair's soup table, shell-shocked from playing Christmas carols for 6 hours, my friend Linda came over and put her arms around me and said, "Guess what? I found Baby."

Maybe you remember last summer's murders? Maybe you remember my telling you about Linda, whose daughter and grandchildren were killed by her son-in-law? Maybe you remember that I mentioned her dead grandson's rag doll, who used to be mine? That's Baby. On Tuesday morning I am going over to Linda's house and she will present me with Baby. And then we'll both cry. And then Baby will live somewhere in my house for the rest of my life. I feel terrible.

2011-12-09T08:38:00.004-05:00

1. Today is December 9. I live in central Maine. The 45th parallel runs through my living room. Johnny-jump-ups are blooming in my garden. Something is wrong here.

2. College essay update: In what I hope will be the penultimate pass through J's essay, I finally laid a finger on the piece, which is to say I marked it up with queries without actually correcting anything myself. The queries ranged from typo notation, to grammatical inquiries, to questions about specific details. As with the other revisions, I emailed it to him, but this time he asked me to sit down with him and discuss each point of contention. In one or two places he was adamant and/or crabbily defensive about his original wording. His father, who was washing dishes and also hates having his writing marked up, chimed in on my side of the debate, which was a surprise. This made J slightly less defensive but still fairly crabby. Having reached this impasse, we closed up our computers, and he immediately fell into 12 hours of coma-like slumber. Last night he claimed to have revised the essay and emailed it to me; but as of this moment, no email has actually appeared. Thus, I cannot reveal his final decision. Whatever the case, the time has come for us all to let this piece go and make the best of imperfection. Here's hoping the admissions officers do as well. There are numerous interesting tidbits in the essay, he's seventeen years old, and how much delight can they honestly expect?

3. A soupcon of Milly Jourdain: Because I have to play Christmas carols for hours and hours tomorrow, I may have no available fingers for typing a blog post. So I'll give you the next two Milly poems. As the only living experts on her oeuvre, what do you think?

Beacon Hill

Milly Jourdain

I hear the deep sea sounding through the pines,
I breathe the wash of air, all cold and clear
And know the peace that lives among the stones
With nothing near.

And then I try to see my little life,
The huge and quiet earth around me spread,
And blue hills far away, that make me feel
Without a dread.

The freshness of this scene is with me still
--In Memory's freshness that can never wane--
And all the music of the many pines
I hear again.

A Phantom Sea

Milly Jourdain

We saw from dull suburban streets
A sudden space of light--
A level line of misty hills
And shiny spots of white.

O how it made me long to feel
The sea was really there
The sharp wind blowing on my face
And sea-sounds in the air!

The hills are like my shadowed life
Where only I can sea
The waves and white sailed ships that float
On its immensity.

2011-12-08T07:10:00.002-05:00

Here's "Hated by Literature," another essay from my well published yet unpublishable manuscript, The Vagabond's Bookshelf. I'm grateful to the editors of Solstice because this was the one chapter from the manuscript that was difficult to place. I might draw the conclusion that most journals don't care to publish ambivalencies about Malcolm X, especially when a white woman writes them.

2011-12-07T09:29:00.003-05:00

In the course of my anthology research, I've been learning about a Australian poet named Oodgeroo Noonaccul (formerly known as Kath Walker), who was a prominent Aboriginal activist as well as a poet and a painter. In 1974, as she was returning from a conference in Nigeria, her plane was hijacked on the tarmac at Dubai's airport. The tale is amazing and awful, and the University of Queensland's Fryer Library site tells it better than I can. Suffice it to say that Noonaccul is the author of "Australia's only literary work created on a sickbag at the point of a gun."

I had a wonderful morning teaching 9th and 10th graders yesterday, with the only downside being a room clock set to the wrong time. And I thought I'd been pacing myself so well.

In other news, on Saturday I will be providing live entertainment at the Harmony craft fair. Yes, you can drop by and listen to me sing and play carols with my friend Dave as my son Paul hawks brownies and whoopie pies to the crowd. Also, you can criticize my cooking: I will be responsible for a vat of corn chowder and several dozen rolls. According to my 3 a.m. subconscious, something will go wrong with them, though my 9 a.m. conscious can't remember what.

2011-12-06T07:59:00.002-05:00

Dickens the Novelist: A Love Letter

Dawn Potter

[first published in the Sewanee Review (summer 2011)]

This Christmas, I did what I have not done since childhood, in those years when I annually swiped my sister’s highly desirable Arthur Rackham-decorated hardback and holed myself up in a corner with Scrooge and a box of Cheez-its: I prepared for the holiday by rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol is a snug, well-organized, moralizing fairy tale; and I enjoyed it this season, as I always enjoy it; but I had to conclude, regretfully, that I didn’t adore it. Though I have a high tolerance for Victorian sentiment, even I became tired of festive holly branches and oversized Christmas geese and kindly dancing warehouse owners and jolly kissing games and pathetic but cheery invalids and that endless parade of pedagogical phantoms. Unlike Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit and so many of Dickens’s other novels, A Christmas Carol is an aphorism, a holiday card, a cheerful handshake. It celebrates and instructs; but it refuses to branch and spin and leap, to overflow history and reinvent memory, to skewer and mourn and laugh and hopelessly, restlessly yearn. I’ve spent most of a lifetime alongside Dickens’s novels; and to me, the imaginative risk and intelligence of these brilliant structural and physical adventures are the essence of this writer’s greatness. They are what make him, as F. R. and Q. D. Leavis declare in a joint preface to their series of critical essays collected as Dickens the Novelist, such a “profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practising novelist, a master of [his art].”

Nonetheless, Dickens, even in his lesser moments, always manages to stun me; and on this year’s reading of A Christmas Carol, he did it again by page 13:

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot-air; and though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be, in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

Copying out this passage, I begin to realize how closely my own rhetorical style resembles Dickens’s. Having read his novels so intensely for so many years, I’m not altogether surprised at my mimicry, though I hadn’t really recognized the extent of my grammatical imitations. Like him, I have a tendency to build my clauses on principles of repetition and opposition: “It was not . . . but. . . . It was not . . . but. . . . ” Those rhetorical repetitions also infiltrate our descriptive imagery (“with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly forehead’) and the words we choose to shift readers from one independent clause to another (“That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be, in spite of the face and beyond its control”). I, too, have an old-fashioned reliance on the subtle rhythmic and emotive powers of a judiciously placed adverb, as in Dickens’s “curiously stirred.” (Do not get me started on the ignorant adverb-hating tendencies proselytized by contemporary self-help writing manuals.) I also pay close attention to punctuation as sentence drama, in particular the vast theatrical differences between a comma and a semicolon (another much-maligned grammatical tool). But all of this, while technically intriguing, really only spotlights what Dickens and nobody else can do: to conjure up, in a handful of words, a situation or a character who feels incredibly, three-dimensionally, clumsy and dirty and smelly and real while being as impossible and as far-fetched as Aladdin or Ali Baba. (Well, maybe Shakespeare can do it too, in his own way.)

Consider, for instance, the two sentences that open the quoted paragraph: “Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Now, I myself have never seen a bad lobster in a dark cellar. Nor I can I think of anyone else who might have. Possibly I could find a bad lobster in a supermarket dumpster, but would the parking lot’s high-powered security lights negate the corpse’s dismal glow? Time and dumpsters being what they are, I have scant hope of verifying the accuracy of Dickens’s unsavory simile. Yet I don’t care. Without a scrap of forensic evidence or zoological insight, I can see the putrid, phosphorescent gleam of Marley’s dreadful face on the blackened door. At the same time, in true Dickens style, the simile may be horrible, but it’s also ridiculous, a product of the writer’s inimitable blend of gothic melodrama and comic-strip farce. One almost expects the bad lobster to undertake a speaking role.

What Dickens does so blithely and with such off-handed charm in A Christmas Carol—to ignite a distinct physical reality by means of an outlandish, even silly, comparison—becomes, in his major novels, a sleight-of-hand so deft and miraculous and sensitive that words fail me. Even in a relatively minor, transitory scene, such as this one from Great Expectations, his descriptions caper and glitter and dive like a gorgeous, gaudy, high-wire circus act:

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs, hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh-mist was so thick that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on—who even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!”

I could blunder my way back through those two paragraphs, with the goal of mumbling something to you about figurative comparisons and grammatical inversions and personification. But who cares? I might as well be a cross-eyed medical student attempting to dissect an eyeball with a dull axe. This, I think, is why I have such trouble writing about Dickens. I become so painfully aware of the limits of my imagination, so humbled by his shining mind, that I can barely speak. At the same time, however, he is unquestionably the root of my rereading obsession: I return to his novels more often than to any others, and I go to them for the same reason that I make mashed potatoes when I’m sad—because they are a familiar comfort, a stay during times of chaos, a predictable and nourishing satisfaction. They take care of me.

I love Great Expectations and Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby and Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend. But above all the wondrous others, I love David Copperfield. Though I’m loath to commit myself on paper, this may in fact be my favorite book in the world. And just yesterday, I joyfully learned that it was also one of Tolstoy’s favorite books. What could be more cheering? According to Mrs. Leavis, “we know from numerous independent sources of Tolstoy’s conversation throughout his long life, as well as from his own written tributes, that David Copperfield was a serious and indeed fundamental influence on his work as a novelist.” In Tolstoy’s words, “Dickens was a genius such as is met with but once in a century.” And apparently, among all of Dickens’s novels, David Copperfield headed the list; for the Russian reread it many times over the course of his long life, even struggling, at least once, with the original English. “If you sift the world’s prose literature,” he said to his family, “Dickens will remain; sift Dickens, David Copperfield will remain.”

Mrs. Leavis records that “in 1905 he told [his friend and physician Dushan Petrovich] Makovitsky: ‘How good Dickens is! I should have liked to write about him!’” She quickly points out, however, that “he never seems to have done so directly.” I wonder why not. Surely Tolstoy, of all novelists, couldn’t have suffered from anything comparable to my own tongue-tied lumpishness. Mrs. Leavis, for her part, gives no credence to any such reaction, announcing in her standard imperious manner that “Tolstoy’s consistently high valuation of David Copperfield must mean that Dickens’s intentions and achievements there, in some fundamental way . . . , were perceived by Tolstoy to have an immediate relevance to his own creative problems, in helping him to formulate what he, through Dickens’s eyes, saw as the essential difficulties of living that pressed on him.”

Oh, those essential difficulties of living that press upon us. At this point I immediately become distracted and close the volume. All I want to do now is to climb into bed and read David Copperfield cover to cover and then War and Peace cover to cover, and to hell with Mrs. L’s bossy arguments and explanations in their favor. I know this is unbecoming and anti-intellectual and that it only reinforces my provincial self-absorption. And believe me, I give Mrs. Leavis grateful credit for writing such an evocative line about the difficulties of living, even though it did make me lose interest in her critique. But I suppose my problem is one of priorities—and maybe this was Tolstoy’s problem as well: why should we bother to read or write about David Copperfield when we could just reread David Copperfield?

I’m painting myself into a sticky corner here, I know. Of course, I have learned a great deal from other people’s musings about literature. Of course, I am gratified when other people choose to read my own musings. Of course, I am engaged in just such musings at this very moment. Yet the book itself stands at the center: erect and irreplaceable; in glory, in shadow; invulnerable and always alone—though a reader can have a hard time believing that a work she loves does not require her protection. I know I have taken this tack myself when I’ve written in defense of particular characters or ways of seeing, and the Leavises have a similar protective mission in Dickens the Novelist: “to register specific protests against the trend of American criticism . . . as being in general wrong-headed, ill-informed . . . , and essentially ignorant and misdirecting.”

No doubt, there are excellent reasons to crush what the pair balefully refers to as “self-indulgent vapourings [that] give no satisfaction to anyone but their perpetrators.” But in truth, David Copperfield remains indifferent. So why am I driven to write about the novel? Better, perhaps, to ask why I am driven to write at all; better to call these jottings a love letter, not an essay: for dear David Copperfield, I am writing to say that you—word by word, sentence after sentence, reading upon reading upon reading—you, David Copperfield, have invented my vision of the world.

I might begin, perhaps, with this image—“the touch of Peggotty’s forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.” I have always believed so wholeheartedly in that grater-like finger, though, until I was in my twenties, I knew nutmeg only as a sandy, scentless powder stored in an aged A&P tin. And then, as a Christmas gift, the dairy farmer I was working for gave me, of all things, a pocket nutmeg grater, which was so exactly like my existing image of the maidservant Peggotty’s forefinger that I nearly cried. I can’t tell you why it mattered so much, why I was so happy to have her finger in my hands. But still, twenty years later, whenever I take that grater out of the spice cupboard, always Peggotty is my first thought, not custard pie or spinach soufflé.

And then there’s David, neither an ass like Pip of Great Expectations nor a good little cipher like Oliver Twist but the child that I have always wished myself to be: curious and watchful, especially of the flawed and various adults who surround him; innocent, trusting, well intentioned but also clumsy and imperfect; comical, wistful, gentle, and babyishly in love with love:

When we had exhausted the subject of the stars, . . . little Em’ly and I made a cloak of an old wrapper, and sat under it for rest of the journey. Ah, how I loved her! What happiness (I thought) if we were married, and were going away anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields, never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night, in a sweet sleep of purity and peace, and buried by the birds when we were dead! Some such picture, with no real world in it, bright with the light of our innocence, and vague as the stars afar off, was in my mind all the way.

In many tales, maybe even in most, such a passage would be embarrassing; but in David Copperfield the sentiments are not only funny and sweet but somehow profoundly real, as if the novel’s imaginative heart were fueling a larger, common body of hope and yearning and dear affection.

I suppose that Tolstoy must have had some parallel reaction to David’s character, who seems to reappear, at times and in altered and more sophisticated form, in Anna Karenina’s Levin and War and Peace’s Natasha and Pierre. Without question, both Dickens and Tolstoy were acutely conscious of the oxymoronic ambiguities of joy and pain, how one entwines with and supports the other; but in their rendering of these four great characters, neither writer allowed himself to veer toward the masochistic ironies of, say, Lucy Snow, heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Rather, each of the four, and David most especially, is able to release himself to himself, to exist earnestly and seriously, even at moments of great fear or deep unhappiness, even in recollection of such moments:

As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me in review again. . . ! When my thoughts go back now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things.

Several years ago I wrote a poem titled “Why I Didn’t Finish Reading David Copperfield,” a first-person fictional narrative in the voice of a high school girl who wants desperately to be in love. When I wrote the poem, I was operating under the influence of the David voice—its sweetness, its sad longing—and I tried to create a character who shared both his comic wistfulness and his earnest yearning to become love. But the influence of his voice on my writing had an unfortunate and self-perpetuating side-effect: readers and listeners consistently believed that the poem was autobiographical, that I had once been the girl riding the school bus who could not finish reading a Dickens novel. Even the journal editor who first published the poem went so far as to assure me that she, too, has always disliked Dickens.

As you might imagine, I’m unhappy about such mistakes. With so many allusions to David Copperfield woven into the fabric of the poem, shouldn’t it be self-evident that, in order to write the piece, I must have known the novel intimately? Apparently not, though the reasons, I suppose, may vary. By and large, people don’t read David Copperfield for pleasure anymore, so how could I possibly have expected them to identify my plot references, let alone the influence of David’s voice? But on the other hand, that voice is so appealing, so convincing, that it does indeed seem real. Among readers and critics who remain familiar with the novel, many continue to confound David with David’s inventor—“insinuating, through critical stupidity,” as the Leavises bitterly aver, “false assumptions about the subject’s art, character, personality, and history.”

The Leavises are cranky, but they are evidently right. In his own preface to a reprint edition of David Copperfield, Dickens showed that he did indeed draw a distinct line between himself and his creation: “Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”

In other words, Dickens’s well-loved child was not David Copperfield but David Copperfield. Notwithstanding any borrowings from the author’s own history or personality, David the character was merely a single imaginative element within a larger creation. The novel itself was the favorite child of the writer’s fancy, this tale that he coaxed from a disconnected mass of words, molding Peggotty’s rough forefinger and David’s tender commentary and his stepfather Mr. Murdstone’s “old, double look, . . . his eye darkened with a frown,” and ramshackle Mrs. Micawber’s perpetual suckling infant and Dora’s baby-doll flirtations and Uriah Heep’s clammy machinations and the swift similes and rhetorical pauses and flourishes that rush me from one drama into the next.

I love David Copperfield so much that I can hardly bear the idea of taking it apart to critically examine its insides. I really don’t care how or why it works. All I want is to keep rereading it forever. As David says about his friend the Micawbers, “I had grown so accustomed to [them], and had been so intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly friendless without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon some new shift for a lodging, and going once more among unknown people, was like being that moment turned adrift into my present life.”

2011-12-05T11:34:00.005-05:00

Busy today trying to be an exemplary employee of myself. Among my other tasks is inventing a teaching syllabus for a high school workshop tomorrow. Here it is, in case you care to disguise yourself as a 9th grader and try it out.

Quick write: A 6-line draft in 3 minutes. I prompt each line with a word: "The," "Of," "We," "Was," "Asking," "Who" (a fast and fun method of prompting that I learned from the inimitable Charlotte Gordon, one of our visiting poets at the Frost Place teaching conference).
Share drafts
Read: I read aloud Richard Wilbur's “The Barred Owl.” The students eventually figure out that the first words of RW's first stanza are the first words of their own drafts. This is an interesting way to look at a poem in form--via the first words of the lines. It tends to help readers see that formal poetry isn't all about plugging in the end rhymes.

**

Dictate: Line by line, I dictate Robert Francis’s “The Base Stealer,” and the students copy it down.

Longer write: 10 minutes.

1. Choose a physical activity: football, white-water rafting, splitting firewood, dancing, fighting—something you’ve done yourself or watched someone else do.

Now imagine a moment of the action, and freeze that moment in your head, like a stopped instant replay. Hold onto that picture.

Prompt, lines 1 and 2: What are the arms doing? Focus on action, movement, shape, where they are in space. Are the arms working together? Does each arm have a separate action?

Prompt, lines 3 and 4: What are the fingers doing? What are they touching? How are they moving? Does their movement remind you of anything else? What could you compare it to?

Prompt, lines 5 and 6: What are the feet doing? Where are they in space? Do they shift from one space to another? What exactly are they doing at this very moment?

Prompt, line 7: Now unfreeze that picture you've been holding in your head. What does the person’s body do as soon as the video starts rolling?

Share drafts

**

On iPads: Students will have copies of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem” [Lana Turner]. Taking turns, they'll read it line by line. Probably we'll hear it at least twice so that all students will get a chance to read aloud.

Free-ish write: 5 minutes

Write a poem. It has to be at least 5 lines long. Here's the rule: it has to be all in one sentence . . . no punctuation, no stopping, hurry hurry hurry

Here’s your first line, gleaned from the current edition of the Weekly World News: "FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th, 2012!"

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2011-12-04T07:24:00.004-05:00

I need to spend some time today figuring out how to get from Nowhere, Maine, to Somewhere, Connecticut, via our half-assed public transportation system. Toward the end of January I'll be doing a workshop and a reading at Westover School, which will be lovely, not only for itself but also because I'll get to go to New York City, and I could use an urban interlude. All this wood splitting and water hauling is healthful and intense, but sometimes I forget that such a thing as a sidewalk exists.

A bus trip from Waterville, Maine, to NYC takes roughly 10 hours and then somehow I'll need to snake my way back into Connecticut via Amtrak or commuter train. I'll also need to acquire a suitcase with a functional handle. Still there is nothing like leaving cold grey Maine before dawn and emerging, after dark, from the bowels of Port Authority onto gaudy 42nd Street. It's like kind of like getting trapped in a delayed Star Trek transport between the barren rocky planet overrun by giant wigged cavemen brandishing styrofoam clubs onto that vacation planet where Harry Mudd is shacked up with a plethora of cloned babes in hot pants and go-go boots. I always lose some molecules along the way.

2011-12-03T07:33:00.006-05:00

My copy of the latest New York Review of Books arrived yesterday, so I finally got a chance to read the Dove-Vendler letters to the editor. As a result, I am so melancholy I can barely speak.

Poetry is the only thing in my life that has made me feel close to being born again. This isn't to say that I conflate art with religious faith, which I do not. But it is my vocation; I believe in it seriously and without irony, with fervor and conviction, with struggle and also with all the innocence and honesty I can muster. I think this is why I am so sad about the haughtiness, the shrillness, the cruel rejoinders, the one-upsmanship, the put-downs. I do understand that one can speak critically--that is, one can examine and consider and weigh points of view. I have done so myself on this blog. I have opinions. I don't love most of the poems I read, nor do I love most of what's written about poetry. But the meanness: I hate that so much. And I do not feel that Dove's letter made anything better on that count.

2011-12-02T07:22:00.003-05:00

I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, which is now making me wish I were rereading Thucydides.

Sefton, lying on the floor in her little bedroom, was reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. She lay flat on her front, propped up by her elbows, her bare feet, protruding from her corduroy trousers, crossed. Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.

"When the day came Nicias led his army forward, but the Syracusans and their allies kept attacking in the same fashion, hurling missiles and striking them down with javelins on all sides. The Athenians pushed on to the river Assinarus, partly because they thought, hard pressed as they were on all sides by the attack of numerous horsemen and of the miscellaneous troops, that they would be somewhat better off if they crossed the river, and partly by reason of their weariness and desire for water. And when they had crossed it they rushed in, no longer preserving order, but everyone eager to be himself the first to cross, and at the same time the pressure of the enemy now made the crossing difficult. For since they were obliged to move in a dense mass they fell upon and trod one another down, and some perished at once, run through by their own spears, while others became entangled in their trappings and were carried away by the current. The Syracusans stood along the other bank of the river, which was steep, and hurled missiles down upon the Athenians, most of whom were drinking greedily and were all huddled in confusion in the hollow bed of the river. Moreover, the Peloponnesians went down to the river's edge and butchered them, especially those in the river. The water at once became foul, but was drunk all the same although muddy and dyed with blood, and indeed was fought for by most of them. At length when the dead now lay in heaps one upon the other in the river and the army had perished utterly, part in the river and part--if any got safely across--at the hands of the cavalry, Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus."

There is great patience in the retelling of this scene, a formal yet inexorable patience, which to me is why it is, all at once, "so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible." It is like Picasso's Guernica or Civil War photographer Matthew Brady's portraits of death . . . which, even though they are neither physically nor artistically similar to this passage, share its horrible, eloquent, patient narrative of destruction.

The translator was Charles Forster Smith (1852-1931), who published his first versions of Thucydides in 1886. As I've discovered in my anthology research, many of these nineteenth-century classicists were extraordinary translators, perhaps because they adopted the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century novel: the enfolded clauses, the balanced repetitions, the metrical pacing of fine prose. There is, in a way, something of George Eliot's all-seeing eye in this passage. It is so clear and forgiving and ruthless.

2011-12-01T07:23:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I submitted a preliminary table of contents to the publisher of my forthcoming anthology. It's still got holes, but the bulk of it exists. Yet I fear (as most anthologists do?) that I am the only person who will follow the trajectory of these selections. The problem, I'm realizing, is that a collection's editor must focus on the book as a whole whereas the reader doesn't feel required to read the volume from beginning to end. So I feel oddly disconnected from whomever will choose, or be assigned, to read this book . . . as if all my carefully knotted threads and tangents are, in the end, beside the point.

Oh, well. We write the poem we can write, and we anthologize the book we anthologize. The more I think about Rita Dove's new Penguin anthology, the more sympathy I have for her struggles. Should an editor choose works that others have overlooked? Works she is personally compelled to read? Works that other people honor but that she can't bring herself to love? And if she decides to follow all those routes, how does she balance them? How does she create a collection that is her book, as her poetry collections are her book, but that can also surprise and satisfy a reader who is nothing at all like her, neither in education nor politics nor poetic vision nor gender nor culture nor age nor place of residence on earth? The job is basically impossible.

2011-11-30T07:21:00.002-05:00

Steady rain and a warm southwest wind. Despite the bleak winter dark, the hour feels like April. I have been reading the letters of William Blake. He says to his friend:

I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity. I percieve that the sore travel which has been given me these three years leads to Glory & Honour. I rejoice & I tremble “I am fearfully & wonderfully made”. I had been reading the cxxxix Psalm a little before your Letter arrived. I take your advice. I see the face of my Heavenly Father he lays his Hand upon my Head & gives a blessing to all my works why should I be troubled why should my heart & flesh cry out. I will go on in the Strength of the Lord through Hell will I sing forth his Praises. that the Dragons of the Deep may praise him & that those who dwell in darkness & on the Sea coasts may be gatherd into his Kingdom. Excuse my perhaps too great Enthusiasm.

Rain and rain and rain. All the colors have been washed from the sky, the trees, the roofs, but the grass glows like a bed of emeralds in the misty half-light. My heart is full of futurity. Excuse my perhaps too great Enthusiasm. A car flies by, hissing, invisible beyond the trees. The sky is a clouded mirror. The grass swallows rain. I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you, but I cannot say any of them.

2011-11-29T07:41:00.006-05:00

This afternoon I'll be leading my first school workshops of the season: two 9th-grade classes at a local high school. I've decided to take the classic Baron Wormser approach (dictation) and to work with Czeslaw Milosz's poem "Encounter," which is an interesting case: a poem written in Polish but translated into English by the poet. One of the classes has been memorizing Frost poems, so I thought I'd take up the subject of Frost's crabbiness about free versifiers by making the students copy out a free verse poem. Unfortunately both classes are very short, so we won't have much time to write; but I'm hoping that in at least one of them I'll get a chance to use this prompt, based on the Milosz stanzas:

Think back to something that happened yesterday.

Now write a 4-stanza poem.

Stanza 1: Say what you are doing.

Stanza 2: Say what you see.

Stanza 3: Say what you remember.

Stanza 4: Ask a question.

You have 5 minutes to write.

2011-11-28T10:47:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes, yes, I am still alive. Merely I have been driving and driving and talking and driving and eating and driving and washing dishes and driving. But finally I am alone in my house and back at my desk.

When I got home last night, I discovered that yet another journal, Hawk and Handsaw, had accepted every single western Pennsylvania poem I'd submitted. Moreover, the editor asked for more. I can't tell you how pleased I am to see that these poems do, in fact, seem to make sense to their readers. The style and approach are so new to me, and I've also been suffering under a sense of imminent divorce . . . which is to say that I've had to consciously force myself not to work on the series because of looming editorial and anthology deadlines. With poems, as with love affairs, "too busy" can lead to "never again." So knowing that two journals plan to take a total of eight or ten Chestnut Ridge poems is heartening.

Now, however, I ought to be addressing those looming editorial and anthology deadlines.

2011-11-26T10:04:00.003-05:00

Don't worry: I haven't vanished, merely been too surrounded by people to write. I will offer the following words, however, and you can fill in the blanks:

African violets.

Pileated woodpecker holes.

Bacon.

Coffee.

Ice skates.

Beagle.

Grace Kelly.

Scotch.

2011-11-23T09:40:00.004-05:00

Snow snow snow, and we are going nowhere fast. It's actually quite lovely. Last night, insomnia released its hold over me, and I slept from 11 to 7 without waking up even once. And now here I sit, while the boys loll in their blankets and the snow falls and falls. Tomorrow we'll drive to Vermont; today we'll sit beside the fire and drink coffee and, eventually, discuss the thorny issue of college applications. But for the moment, the washing machine is doing all the work.

I want to thank you for the comments you sent me about the poem draft I posted a few days ago. They were helpful, but they also uniformly agreed with what I had already guessed would probably need to happen, which is both reassuring and, paradoxically, why I rarely ask anyone anything about work in progress. I've never belonged to a writers' group, and I don't go to workshops anymore because they so often become competitions, excoriations, back patting, praise parties, or hand holding, none of which I want. During the two years I worked with Baron Wormser as a private student, I relied heavily on his suggestions; but one of the wonders of Baron's teaching is his ability to wean his students from dependency on advice. He taught me, as much anything, how to use my own resources to become my own teacher.

This isn't to say that my poems can't benefit from an outside eye, but, after all, the work must come from me, from beginning to end. Regarding the draft you saw, there are elements I don't care to excise but that require excision. Probably those excisions will lead to additions. The piece will change, perhaps radically. What I like best about the draft is, I think, the tone; and I believe that undertaking a faux-translation allowed me to ride the fluidity of that voice as I composed the narrative. Probably the Italian has done its work. I should imagine it as a bread casing, the sort that one makes to envelope a ham for baking but that is not intended to be eaten. Why does all the food need to go into the same mouths? It's not a waste to feed the scraps to the hens.

2011-11-22T07:16:00.005-05:00

Along with everyone else in the northeast, I am wasting my coffee hour trying to reconfigure our Thanksgiving plans. Suddenly we are facing 11 inches of snow for tomorrow-- not ideal weather for driving across both the White Mountains and the Green Mountains. This, combined with kennel reservations an hour north and a dog-stitch-removal appointment a half-hour south, is accumulating into a headache. I hope we can drive on Thanksgiving Day, but perhaps we will end up spending the holiday here, watching the snow fall while eating four pounds of cranberry relish.

In the meantime, I'll be doing 100 pounds of laundry and reading something or other.

2011-11-21T08:14:00.003-05:00

I forgot to remind you that it's time to make Emily Dickinson's Black Cake. I'll be glad to forward the recipe, if you're interested. I also forgot to tell you that, one of these days, both the recipe and my chatter about its history will appear in a Tupelo Press poets' cookbook edited by Kurt Brown. I wonder what else will be in there. All I got was an email from Kurt, whom I've never met, asking me to submit a recipe. Naturally Black Cake came to mind, but I also started thinking about other poet-cooks.

In Her Husband, biographer Diane Middlebrook wrote about how Sylvia Plath obstinately worked her way through The Joy of Cooking during the early months of her marriage to Ted Hughes. If I remember correctly, they were living in a hut (in Spain, perhaps?), and meanwhile Sylvia wrestled with lemon meringue pie and other 1950s American delights. I found the tale disturbing, touching, and characteristic. Also familiar.

I cook; therefore I am.

I cook; therefore I am ________ .

[useful]

[lovable]

[resourceful]

[worth staying married to]

2011-11-20T07:51:00.009-05:00

I've worn out my need to discuss Helen Vendler, and no doubt you are relieved. I really don't know what came over me. For the most part I just let these poetry disputes drip off my rain hood and back into the oily pond from whence they came. Also, I would say too many stupid things. For instance, if I were being honest, I'd have to admit that I've never heard of a single one of the writers who won this year's National Book Award.

How can that be? What am I doing on this earth? Well, what I have been doing on this earth lately is reading William Blake's letters and washing kitchen cupboards and making a grocery list and stoking the wood stove and dosing the stitched-together dog. William Blake's letters are remarkable, the other occupations less so. It's possible that those book award winners would have livened things up for me, yet somehow they never walked into the room. Where were they? Where was I?

Oh, well. Fourth River just accepted four of my western Pennsylvania poems--which is to say every single poem that I sent them--so that's a happy surprise. The journal is based in Pittsburgh and publishes nature and environmental writing; and because my poems all deal with the history of the Fayette County coal seam, I'm very, very pleased that a regional publication decided to take so many of them. Like most things I write, the poems are character- rather than image-driven, so I wasn't exactly sure how naturelike they'd appear to a journal editor. They're not very Mary Oliverish, that's for sure.

So now I'm going to do something I've never done here before. If you're interested, I'm going to share a draft of a western Pennsylvania poem that's been bothering me, and maybe you can give me your opinion about what I should do with it. The poem is, basically, a riff on the sound of Dante's lines rather than the meaning. (I do not speak Italian.) The idea sprang from a friend's family story: of a miner relative, an Italian immigrant, who knew a great deal of Dante by heart. Hers was a sad story: he came to a lonely and alcoholic end; but my version doesn't mimic facts, only atmospherics and time period. One large issue, as I discussed in a previous post, is the challenge of including immigrant voices in this project without resorting to dialect. So this was my experiment. And here is my question: are the lines from the Inferno important to the poem, or should I drop them? Certainly they were important to its construction, but perhaps they're merely distracting here.

2011-11-19T08:49:00.003-05:00

So, back to Helen Vendler's review of Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry--

One thing I haven't talked about is how much V dislikes D's introduction, "with its uneasy mix of potted history . . . and peculiar judgments." But she doesn't limit her dislike to subject matter: she also complains about D's metaphors ("cartoonish") and descriptive vagaries ("Can Dove think that a poet of Merrill's depth can be confined to the putative space of a vague 'poetry establishment,' or that placing poets on one side of another of such an assumed 'establishment' says anything about their abilities?")

Basically, Vendler has no patience with either Dove's prose style or her historical summaries:

The simplest thing to say about Dove's introduction is that she is writing in a genre not her own; she is a poet, not an essayist, and, uncomfortable in the essayist's role, she strains for effects (alliteration the favorite) on the one hand and, on the other, falls into mere boilerplate. . . . Dove offers stereotypes and cliches as she lifts the curtain.

V then proceeds to prove her point in six dense columns of excoriating detail. The review is quite remarkably unforgiving; and if this were my book under study, I would crawl into bed and weep.

Yet as far as I can tell, D's prose really is alarming. Even if I set aside the personal judgments (Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" is "blunt and somewhat smug"?), the examples V quotes remind me of the stuff I read in Paul's middle school social studies textbook: history as brisk, colorful pap. This particular pap is flavored with hip twentieth-century poets rather than unhip eighteenth-century generals, but the summarizing grinder has nonetheless reduced them to a familiar, digestible mush, as in D's portrait of 1950s America:

It's hard to imagine what a jolt Ginsberg's Howl gave to the self-satisfied fifties, with broadcast series like Father Knows Best crooning peace and prosperity while GIs died in Korea and McCarthyism mocked the forefathers' democratic ideals.

Of course, the middle school textbook questions for such a sentence could be fun to invent--perhaps "Pretend you are a GI in Korea. Write a letter home to a friend or family member. It should contain a description of the Korean landscape and three questions about Howl." But seriously, if an anthology's primary use is instructional and the book has been designed specifically as a historical survey, what are the editor's obligations to that history? If we value open-ended ambiguity in poems, why can't we help students understand that poetry's relationship to political and social history has a parallel ambiguity, that political and social histories are themselves Argus-eyed and ambiguous?

I suppose, in the end, this is what worries me: not that an anthology might include poems I don't admire or find challenging or personally vital but that it would choose to tuck all this pain and joy and struggle and error into tidy boxes. Why cheerfully announce that the poets of the Harlem Renaissance "felt empowered to explore all aspects of their humanity"?--as if anyone, at any time, has ever been able to do such a thing.

Revision strategy 3

2011-11-18T10:02:00.006-05:00

Because a few of you still seem interested in my college-essay patter, I'll take a break from Helen Vendler and share step 3 of my give-the-boy-some-structure-but-make-him-do-the-thinking revision suggestions. If you're wondering how I got to this stage, you may want to look back at strategies 1 and 2.

Okay, boy: after two thorough revisions, you've now built a decent organizational framework and found a fairly consistent authorial tone. So in this revision, you're going to move to sentence level. Sit down with your current draft, and read each sentence carefully.

*Are your nouns, verbs, and modifiers interesting? I don't necessarily mean fancy but accurate and vigorous.

*Do you notice any phrases that you repeat too often? (For example, in my own work, I often use too many "kind of" and "sort of" phrases; so when I rewrite, I have to make sure I go back and delete or reword them.)

*Are your examples eye-catching, compelling, and maybe a little unusual? (For example, how are you describing particular physical objects such as clothing or hair? If you're mentioning brand names or pop culture items, are they run-of-the-mill or intriguing?)

*Are your imagined or remembered events slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect? (For example, how can you tweak your mention of a second-grade teacher or a hip hop star so that it becomes more memorable?)

*Is there any imagined example that you feel, in your heart, is an unfair dramatization? For example, are you carelessly blackballing a particular aunt, school principal, garbage collector, or lawyer even though you don't actually believe said person deserves such carelessness? Who, in fact, does deserve your censure? Or is the censure inappropriate in this context?

2011-11-17T07:20:00.004-05:00

As one might have expected, people are angry about the Vendler review. Teresa just sent me a copy of what she calls "the opening salvo" from the Women's Poetry Listserv, which I used to get but don't any longer because I couldn't figure out how to keep its hundreds of comments from clotting up my email every day. I haven't yet read the responses to this salvo, although I presume they're supportive.

But here's the thing:

1. I have little interest in many of the poets that Helen Vendler loves: e.g., Jorie Graham, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, etc., etc. I've always presumed that, as with any art, different styles and schools of poetry appeal to different readers. Some people like Pollack; some people like Grandma Moses. Myself, I don't care for either, but I do like Rothko and Vermeer.

2. I have been greatly influenced by the poetry of canonized white men. I don't know why this is so, but there you have it. However, I am not a canonized white man myself.

3. Helen Vendler is a woman. Other women are angry at her. Will they soon begin making those kinds of cruel personal remarks that politically liberal women made about Margaret Thatcher? I didn't like Margaret Thatcher either, but the remarks made me nervous, even when I was seventeen and as ignorant as a biscuit.

4. The subject or theme of a piece of writing may speak to the political, social, or sexual concerns of a particular group of people, yet it may still be a mediocre work of art. Also, people with bad politics or limited points of view can be great artists. I am not dissing anyone in particular here.

5. Poetry as breezy anecdote bores me. Poetry as a bland stack of images bores me. Poetry as a screech or a whine bores me. Poetry as cynical wordplay bores me. I don't care who writes this stuff--man or woman, Latino or white, Elizabethan or modernist. I don't want to read it.

2011-11-16T09:40:00.002-05:00

Another late post because of yet another dog emergency . . . this time involving poor Anna the poodle, who is now at the vet's office getting a big leg laceration stitched up. Given the season, my first fear was that she'd been grazed by a stray bullet, but the vet thinks it might be a bad wild-animal scratch. What it looks like to me is a barbed-wire tear, but we don't have any such thing on our property, and Anna isn't a wanderer. Ah well. I always wanted vet bills for Christmas, and now I have them.

I am, however, relieved about the bullet decision. The idea of stray bullets flying through my backyard does not make me happy.

2011-11-15T08:47:00.002-05:00

It is a dark, strangely warm morning. I am washing sheets and thinking about last night's dreams, which were all about grocery shopping. I was pushing a cart through one of those enormous supermarkets, with aisles as wide as living rooms and ceilings as high as cathedrals. In the only vignette I can recall at all clearly, I was in the produce section, navigating among spotlit faux-crates of round beige food: honeydew melons, perhaps, or giant parched grapefruits, or waxy rutabagas? I don't think I had anything at all in my cart. Mostly I remember the lighting. It was like stage lighting, dramatic and portentous but not at all secretive. It was also like bad fluorescent lighting in seminar classrooms, the kind of brilliance that does everyone a bad turn. Yet I wouldn't call this an anxiety dream. I didn't worry about cereal boxes falling on me, nor was I pursued by villains on a mart-cart, nor did I discover I'd forgotten to get dressed before going to the store, nor did I have to navigate any motorized vehicles by means of a string. No doubt, my subconscious was up to something disreputable, but my only memory is garishly lit tedium.

Fortunately, when I woke up, I remembered that in real life Teresa had sent me another note: "How as poets we are all in the business of re-inventing seems much more important than whether we are 'finely educated' or 'accessible' or where we live or how we earn money (or don't)."

The business of re-inventing. How can that phrase not lift your spirits?

2011-11-14T07:25:00.007-05:00

Monday morning, and a quiet house, again. I am sitting here at the kitchen table, boiling hamburger and rice for the old barn dog's breakfast, listening to the laundry click and thump in the dryer, listening to the wood stove sigh, listening to the milk tanker rumble down the road to the Trafton farm. Already I have received a phone call: the school secretary asked if I would change my parent-teacher time "because you're easy." This was funny and we both laughed.

I got a note yesterday from my friend Teresa Carson. I'd asked her what she thought of the Vendler review, and without reading any of my blog posts she said, among many other smart things, "while [V's] comment that 'all poets who wield language powerfully are exquisitely well educated' makes me a bit uneasy, her further comment that 'just because someone describes a “hardscrabble Appalachia” doesn’t make one a hardscrabble Appalachian' hits home for me. Take, for example, Phil Levine’s anointment as the voice of the working class poet. While I have no doubt he worked for some short amount of time in the auto factories, he didn’t get stuck there. (MFA from Iowa is about as far away from manual labor as you can get.) As someone who worked many years in a union job and then more years in a low level management job I can tell you many of his poems about work are tainted by a sentimentality that’s only possible for someone who got out fast."

So, here's another take on "exquisitely well educated"--that it's a dangerous phrase, in some way, and that it influences the kind of blue-collar posturing that all of us who live on the class line find ourselves doing. Teresa and Phil Levine and I don't negotiate the identical demarcation--not by any means. But I'm a housewife in a remote, conservative, north-country town. Teresa spent her career working for the phone company in urban New Jersey. Levine worked for a while in the Detroit factories. We've all found modes of escape that are also modes of comprehension. We've all used poetry to reconfigure ourselves and dramatize the world we both live in and stand outside of. Meanwhile, we teach at Iowa or copy out all of Paradise Lost or compose talks about Keats or whatever. The definition of "exquisitely well educated" becomes no clearer.

2011-11-13T09:16:00.003-05:00

Today I might learn how to use a chainsaw; I might not. I don't really want to learn, mostly because I hate chores that involve loud motors: i.e., vacuuming, lawn mowing, power wood splitting. I would much rather split wood by hand and sweep with a broom, not so much for reasons of reactionary purity but because I hate noise. That said, I find the smell of bar-and-chain oil on a man who's been cutting trees all afternoon exceedingly attractive. (I also like the smell of a man who's been working with cows all day. But Axe and Old Spice? Ick.)

As you can see, today's letter is shaping up to be far less cerebral than my last few have been; and I've been trying all morning to use this brisk non-cerebral feeling to convince myself to submit a few poems to a few editors. I have a stack of poems to submit to journals, but I haven't been able to bring myself to send anything out. I wish (as we all wish) that someone would just write to me and say, "Dawn, do you have a stack of poems to send me?" And then I would send that kind person the stack, and he or she would choose some and/or reject some, and that would be that. I am tired of writing hopeful letters to editors I don't know and who don't know me. Nothing against the editors, but I'm just tired of being a cheerful sales clerk.

And if you happen to know of anyone who might like to look at--and not lose--a manuscript about obsessive rereading, let me know.

Sigh.

But don't worry: I'm really not in a despairing mood. I'm just in some kind of submission coma.

2011-11-12T10:20:00.006-05:00

Wearily, I find myself, once again, required to say something about MFA degrees. I don't want to talk about them; but as your comments over the past few days have shown, they're on your minds. That's understandable: almost any contemporary conversation about poetic education seems to circle back to them.

You all know that I don't have a master's degree, but that was my own choice. I could have entered an MFA program; and if I had, I might be holding down a real job now. Here's what I think: If you have a degree, and earning that degree changed your artistic life for the better, then it was worth getting. If you don't have a degree and have, as a self-taught student of the art, changed your artistic life for the better, then earning a degree was unnecessary.

My gut feeling is that getting a teaching job should not depend on whether or not one has an MFA. Poetry training is not the same as teacher training. But then again, a Ph.D. isn't a teaching degree either; it's a sign that one has supposedly accumulated a certain amount of knowledge. Nonetheless, for all practical purposes, it equals a teaching degree. We all know that some college professors are stunning teachers and that others are horrible. So the problem isn't with the advanced degree per se; it's the difficulty of proving that someone is a good teacher and deciding whether or not good teaching abilities should trump research or scholarship credentials. And don't tell me that requiring all these poets and scholars to get education certificates will solve the teaching problem, because it won't.

Anyway, I'm going to stop talking about this now. I want to reiterate that my comments about education had nothing to do with degrees but with Vendler's remark that "one must, after all, face the fact that all poets who wield language powerfully are exquisitely well educated, even if they have had to educate themselves, as Whitman and Dickinson and Crane did." I think it's an interesting statement. Was John Keats a better poet than John Clare because he was better able to educate himself through reading? Was Keats a better poet than Clare because he was better able to make use of his life experiences? Was Keats really a better poet than Clare? Even if those questions are unanswerable, I still think they're interesting.

2011-11-11T08:57:00.009-05:00

I thought I was going to continue talking today about Helen Vendler's review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry, but your comments about yesterday's post seemed to suggest that we were all veering off into other concerns. Perhaps I could sum them up as "what is the definition of an educated poet?" and "is there any value in a poet's detachment from her subject matter?" and "why do so many poems seem so unnecessary?"

Really, it would absurd for me to invent generalized answers to these questions. All of our explanations would be different and would probably escalate into bad-tempered confrontation or self-excoriation. But I think it is occasionally important to consider the private import of such questions. That may sound narcissistic, but for the most part artistic creation emanates from the individual outward into the world. Artistic influence, on the other hand, is drawn from the world into the individual. So these questions matter to each of us, though our answers will all be different.

After reading yesterday's post, a friend remarked to me, "I just read The Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon. At first, really responding to the early stuff, I thought, 'I'll bet Dawn likes her.' Then, as the collection leveled out or tailed off, I began to grow irritated. Yes she's all rural and rustic but not in your 'I have to go and feed the cows now' way. Rather, she comes across as a walker through a pastoral landscape counting on it to poetically stimulate her. When not writing poetry, her real job, mentioned exactly once, would seem to be that of a teacher. But there's no confronting the problems and emotions teaching raises."

His comment moved me for several reasons. First, as I know well, it is difficult to decide whether growing indifference to a book is the reader's fault or the writer's. As my friend said later in his note to me, the poems felt "un-needed," and that is a something no writer wants to imagine hearing about her work. Second, there's the issue of detachment--in this case, the sense that an artist is "walking through" a place but somehow not participating in it herself. This is something that photographers do constantly, so why is it more difficult to bear in a poet? Or is it? After all, Kenyon's primary theme is not the countryside but her own melancholia; and the poems do accrue into a sort of poetic Prozacian amble that, in fact, does quite accurately mirror how depressed acquaintances describe the action of medication. Finally, though, there's the question of "what does this poet do?" How does she actually engage with the world? Does she teach kindergartners? Does she train circus dogs? Does she rob banks? What life does she vigorously live? Where, in other words, does the impetus to write come from?

This is the self-education question, from the other side. What must one know if one is to be, in Vendler's words, "exquisitely well educated"? Is Shakespeare enough? Or do we also need to know how to clean a chicken?

As I said, I am not going to begin to offer any snappy answers to these questions. But I'm thinking about them.

2011-11-10T07:16:00.005-05:00

I'm by no means an acolyte of poetry critic Helen Vendler; but when I noticed "Are These the Poems to Remember?"--her review in the NY Review of Books of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove--I thought I ought to read it. As you know, I'm in the midst of assembling my own poetry-themed anthology, so I've acquired a certain professional interest in how other editors make and defend their choices and how those choices and attitudes might influence a reader. One of the primary discoveries I've made as an anthologist is that, without purposefully narrowing one's scope to a specific time, place, or subgroup of writers, it's nigh on impossible to avoid creating a book full of canonical white male poets if one is honestly working to include the best, most influential writers. The reasons are clear: thousands of years of illiterate or undereducated women, oral as opposed to written traditions, a dearth of translations and transcriptions, not to mention a lack of leisure. Even if they were literate, slaves and serfs didn't have, to put it mildly, the liberty of unstructured time. Moreover, people haven't always had access to a variety of books. The canonical writers became our cultural foundation partly because their volumes were sitting on our bookshelves. If we wanted to better ourselves, whether we were Charlotte Bronte or Frederick Douglass, we took Shakespeare off the shelf.

According to Vendler, Dove's anthology attempts to "shift the balance." Of course she is working solely within the twentieth century, so she has more material at hand, yet Vendler still has reservations:

Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as "elitism," and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn't be able to take on the long-term commitment of writing a novel find a longed-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every literary critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time and its sifting of wheat from chaff: Which of Dove's 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

I think this is a fair question. And I also think that Vendler's later comment about education is worth considering:

One must, after all, face the fact that all poets who wield language powerfully are exquisitely well educated, even if they have had to educate themselves, as Whitman and Dickinson and Crane did. Just because one describes a "hardscrabble Appalachia" doesn't make one a hardscrabble Appalachian. . . .

Pegging poets to their origins doesn't change the fact that they leave those origins behind and live the "elite" life of the educated, even when, like Whitman, they live in poverty.

I have to go feed animals now, or else I'd talk more about Vendler's reactions to Dove's commentary on the history of twentieth-century poetry and what V sees as D's discomfort "in the essayist's role." But if you've read the review, I'd love to hear your comments. I'd also love to hear what you think about this education-elitism conundrum.

Revision strategy 2

2011-11-09T07:24:00.003-05:00

Last week I shared the opening move in my long-term plot of guiding my son toward ways of revising his college-application essay so that it sounds like his own honest, coherent, personal statement. This morning I'm delighted to say that the revision he returned to me was a marked improvement on the first draft. And because several people asked me to continue annotating my strategy, here, forthwith, is my second move:

Reread the essay and choose the paragraph that you think is most interesting: i.e., the least boring, the wackiest, the funniest; the one that includes the best descriptions or the strangest details--however you, personally, in the depths of your heart or ironic mind, define most interesting.

Move that paragraph to the top of the page and use it as your opener. Reorganize the remaining information to follow that paragraph, hacking out anything which now seems useless and adding new material as necessary. (Remember to keep avoiding the generalized "we" statements you replaced in your first revision.) Then send your new draft to me.

2011-11-08T07:53:00.002-05:00

I am wondering why I am never satisfied to be doing whatever it is I'm doing. If I'm outside splitting wood, I think I ought to be inside working on my copyediting project. If I'm working on the copyediting project, I think I ought to be writing poems. If I'm writing poems, I think I ought to be sorting laundry. If I'm sorting laundry, I think I ought to be researching pieces for the anthology. Practically the only time I don't think I ought to be doing something other than what I'm actually doing is when I'm driving. And I don't even like to drive.

Pardon my slight crankiness this morning, but I've reached yet another impasse with my apparently unpublishable essay manuscript--this time involving a careless rejection letter that lumped my ms into a submission category I didn't even apply under. What is going on here? I am bewildered by the number of times this ms has been lost, forgotten, or misfiled. Probably I should just give up and let the poor thing retire to the dusty back corner of my bookshelf, where its shreddable paper and delicious ink can entertain a few generations of mice.

2011-11-07T07:30:00.007-05:00

In the garden the thyme glitters with rime, each tiny leaf outlined in frost. Yesterday I dug up my remaining leeks before the ground freezes hard. But for now the days are still warming. In the afternoons I split wood in shirtsleeves while the sociable dogs sit around and watch, and in the evenings my bare hands aren't too cold to cut brussels sprouts or kale for dinner. Last week's heavy snow flattened the garden lettuce beyond resurrection, but in the greenhouse I've still got a few lettuce and spinach plants, plus a batch of kale to make me feel better when the deer invade my garden and eat the rest of what's out there.

For dinner last night, we had turkey hash, a plain yet sublime food--chopped dark meat mixed with leftover mashed potatoes; a mixture of sauteed leeks, carrots, and sourdough bread cubes; and some of the turkey stock that had been simmering all day--which Tom pan-fried on a buttered griddle. Using the food processor, I ground together cranberries, apples, and an orange, which requires only 3/4 of a cup of sugar to become a fine, fresh, and very quick-to-prepare relish. And for our salad we ate tiny roasted brussels sprouts mixed with frost-sweetened spinach leaves, radish sprouts, and grated kohlrabi.

Today, however, I am back at my desk: copyediting and anthologizing and still thinking about the Stan Musial poem that is beginning to assume an amoeba shape in my mind. I hope the poem will declare itself soon. But of course these things cannot be rushed.

2011-11-06T09:44:00.005-05:00

As I sit here at home, recovering from the flurry of last night's benefit turkey dinner and girding my loins to deal with half a leftover turkey, a batch of bread, and a washing machine full of dirty dish towels, I must say that one of the sweetest things that has ever happened to me in this small town, where I will always and forever be "from away," was listening to the citizens try to outbid each other for the pleasure of bringing home one of my pies. The people of Harmony could care less about my poems, but pie is a different story. And that's okay. Sometimes pie is better than poetry. It's good for poetry to remember that.

2011-11-05T12:42:00.002-04:00

Perhaps we should resurrect this particular use of poetry:

The "nith-song" or "drum-song" is the Eskimo's way of replacing a law court by a public poetry contest. . . .

The background of the nith-song (from the Norwegian nith, meaning "contention"), observed as early as 1746, has been described as follows: "When a Greenlander considers himself injured in any way by another person, he composes about him a satirical song, which he rehearses with the help of his intimates. He then challenges the offending one to a duel of song. One after another the two disputants sing at each other their wisdom, wit, and satire, supported by their partisans, until at last one is at his wit's end, when the audience, who are the jury, make known their decision. The matter is now settled for good, and the contestants must be friends again and not recall the matter which was in dispute."

[from A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indians (1951)]

2011-11-04T07:15:00.008-04:00

Today is crazy pie-baking day. I will start with apple and then move on to pumpkin. Five or six of these pies are reserved for tomorrow's 8th-grade benefit dinner, but at least a couple of them must stay in the house. Otherwise, my family would be sad. Then, in the late afternoon, I begin part 2 of my day: carpooling two hours north to Lincoln to watch Paul and a few other middle-school Harmonians perform in the district music festival. Paul's pretty excited about this, mostly because he'll get to sing in Latin. Meanwhile, James will be home constructing a robot costume for the high school's masquerade ball, and Tom, I hope, will be recovering from his long construction-worker week by lying on the couch watching French New Wave films.

So let's talk about pie. I was raised on margarine-and-Crisco crusts; but once I moved into my own apartment, I saw the light and switched to all-butter crusts. Although a lard crust does have a lovely flaky texture, I prefer the flavor of butter. I also think that a buttery crust means that the filling can be less sweet.

My favorite local orchard donated a bushel of utility Macintosh apples for the purposes of this pie caper. I do not usually use Macs in pies, but these are big firm good-looking ones. They do tend to cook down into sauce rather than hold their shape, and I prefer chunks of apple in my pies. (Macouns and Cortlands are nice and chunky, while early yellow apples such as Ginger Golds are an excellent base for a ginger-lime apple pie.) However, in this instance, a bushel of free apples is a good thing, and I will make due.

Flavoring the filling: I use 2/3rds of a cup of natural cane sugar (such as turbinado or Demerara) per apple pie, adding more sugar if the apples are very tart--not the case with Macs. Even though these sugar crystals are coarse, I like the slight caramel taste of a brown cane sugar, and it melts nicely into syrup during baking. I do not add flour; apples have plenty of thickening power on their own. Often I use nutmeg rather than cinnamon, but with the Macs I'll probably stick with cinnamon. I grate lemon peel into the mixture and mix in 1 to 3 tablespoons of butter, depending on how rich a syrup I want. (Probably I'll use the lesser amount for the pie caper, just to save costs.)

Usually I don't sugar or egg-wash my top crusts. They're pretty that way, but sometimes they get tough.

Okay: that's apple. Because I am running out of time, I will merely remark that, even for this pie caper, I could not bring myself to buy canned pumpkin for the pumpkin pies. So yesterday afternoon involved a fair amount of squash baking, seed scraping, and food-mill grinding. Fortunately Paul helped me pass the time by reading off all the names of this year's baseball free agents, and we enjoyed a sweet shared pipe dream in which Oswalt and Wilson were trotting onto the field as Red Sox starting pitchers. . . .

2011-11-03T07:08:00.007-04:00

I've been working steadily on my forthcoming anthology for Autumn House Press. Mostly I've been researching and compiling a table of contents, but I've also begun extracting and proofreading the pieces themselves as well as writing brief introductions for each. Although these intros offer a soupcon of biographical information, they also mention the writer's or subject's influence on other writers and offer a quick explanation as to why I think the extracted piece may be valuable to poets. I don't want to tell readers what to think about the piece, but I do want to open a door into it.

Mostly this task has gone swiftly and smoothly. Still, as I've been writing these intros, I've also discovered a disturbing tic. While I easily mention male poets by last name, I constantly make the mistake of calling Anne Bradstreet "Anne" instead of "Bradstreet," Emily Bronte "Emily" instead of "Bronte"--though it would never occur to me to call John Milton "John." This is problematic behavior on a couple of obvious levels: the first involving an embarrassing sexist disparity, the second revealing a copyeditor's blind spot.

In a way, I'm more troubled by the editing inconsistency than by the sexist implications--but that's probably because I'm also ready to make excuses for myself. I might claim, for instance, to feel closer to the women poets, more akin to them as both a writer and a human being. Thus, I might conclude, it's easier for me to use their names more informally.

This explanation is a crock of lies. In truth, I do not feel closer to Anne Bradstreet than to John Milton. I know a whole lot more about Milton than I do about Bradstreet, and I have lived with his poetry as I have not lived with hers. Nonetheless, she is "Anne" to me, and he will never be "John." There's something sad about this, on so many fronts. And possibly the saddest truth is that I would like him to be John to me. But he says no.

Revision strategy 1

2011-11-02T07:34:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the boy finally broke down and admitted that perhaps I could give him a few helpful tips about how to revise his college-application essay. I have been patient, very patient, about allowing him and his father to pretend they know what they're doing with this thing, so let's hope all this sitting on my hands has paid off. In the meantime, I will share my opening revision strategy with you, in case you, too, have found yourself in the position of having to help a kid figure out how to write in his or her own voice.

What I noticed in J's case is what I notice in the first drafts of many students who are accustomed to writing for teachers rather than themselves: his pronouns slip unwittingly from "I" to "we." This immediately allows him to make generalizations rather than personal remarks. So Revision Instruction Number 1 goes like this: "Go in and change all the we's to I's. Then reread and decide if used-to-be we is saying something that sounds like something I would say. If not, substitute a remark that I really would make."

This approach can be helpful in a couple of ways. First, it allows the student to think of revision as a concrete activity: "I change one word to another." Second, the simple pronoun switch also immediately forces the student to accept responsibility for everything that "I" now says. When "I" was "we," "we" could easily fork out a lot of pompous, un-[your student's name here]-like stuff. But now that "we" is "I," [your student's name here] will start to think twice about such undigested tripe.

2011-11-01T07:06:00.003-04:00

The dog drank water on her own yesterday and even licked dog food off her paws. But our six inches of snow have not melted, and the pile of unsplit logs is snarling at me. I have a million desserts to bake for an eighth-grade fundraiser and an eighth grader who is mad at me because I took away his computer privileges. At least the other two family members are still more or less congenial, and we have electricity and running water, and I didn't forget to bake bread yesterday, and the poodle loves me, and we have plenty of coffee, and I get to read Milton's Areopagitica today. Talk about crabby: even Paul can't beat Milton.

P.S. Regarding Carleen's request for the cake recipe: I doubled a basic marble-cake recipe, but instead of mixing the chocolate and vanilla in each pan, I made 2 pans of vanilla, 2 pans of chocolate. I alternated the layer colors, frosting them with a cooked fudge frosting that I lightened and extended with some confectioners' sugar. Then I pressed M&M patterns all over the outside. I hope it tasted good, but I'll never know because I was at the vet with a giant floppy depressed dog.

2011-10-31T09:10:00.002-04:00

I'm not ignoring you: I was just busy boiling homemade dog food. Sigh.

On the bright side, Mathilde is sitting up on her chest and barking every time she hears a gunshot. This is the opening week of deer season, so she is hearing many gunshots, a fortunate state of affairs for a convalescent dog who needs a hobby.

And now I am off to copyedit, and perhaps later I will write a brief disquisition about Shakespeare. Apparently that word is defined as "a long or elaborate essay or discussion on a particular subject," but I'll be writing a short one anyway, despite the dictionary's bossy assumptions.

Here's what I'll be writing about. It's from A Midsummer Night's Dream: a

ct 5, scene 1, lines 4–22. Theseus is speaking.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

2011-10-30T07:21:00.004-04:00

This morning I was sure we'd have no electricity, but I was wrong: the water continues to run, and the freezers continue to freeze. Still, lying in bed listening to the peaceful sound of snow-weighted trees crashing down in our yard did give me the idea that I ought not expect too much from Central Maine Power.

Sorry I didn't write you a note yesterday. I was (1) up at 6 a.m. making a four-layer cake for a birthday party; (2) loading a flock of chickens into the back of a truck; and (3) fetching a 100-pound Great Pyrenees back from the vet, where she'd been parked overnight because she can't walk. And, yes, on Friday I did have to load that staggering 100-pound dog into the car by myself. Turns out she has an ear infection that is making her dizzy and nauseated; but since she is 14 years old, even an ear infection can be a delicate situation. So for the next several days I am going to have to syringe-feed an elderly dog with a stomach ache who weighs almost as much as I do. If last night's dinner is any predictor, this will involve both of us being liberally smeared with liquefied canned dog food. The bouncy and enthusiastic poodle is the only family member who finds this situation charming.

Between the above activities and my cleaning out the now-empty chicken house/getting ready for snow by splitting as much firewood as possible activities, I didn't get too much reading done yesterday. So I have no interesting quotations for you. You may or may not be relieved.

2011-10-28T07:45:00.005-04:00

Today is my son Paul's fourteenth birthday, and in honor of his birth I will give you a glimpse into our shared comic storytelling. My mother and I had a similar riff when I was young: in that case our central character was our cat Twerp, whose mother (Mrs. Erp) lived on Pointyhead Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, where she worshipped at the Church of the Trap Door (if you didn't donate during collection, you got dropped into the basement), and whose ne'er-do-well father (Wyatt Erp) had last been seen in Wacko, Texas.

The story that Paul and I share came into being thanks to his fourth- and fifth-grade spelling homework. Over breakfast, as I fed him words to spell aloud, I developed the habit of using each word in a ridiculous sentence. The words accrued into unexpectedly comic combinations, we morphed into math-homework word problems without answers, and voila: we had a setting and a cast of characters.

One thing you should know is that the fourth- and fifth-grade teacher chooses his spelling words from the kids' journals, so the lists are particularly rich for ridiculous invention.

The town is Jinx. The central character is Mr. Tacklebox, a hapless ninny. Mr. Tacklebox is the nephew of Great-Aunt Yolanda, owner of the world's most fearsome cat, Ulgy (yes, the spelling is correct). Ulgy hangs around with a lazy disreputable cousin-cat named Ratt. Great-Aunt Yolanda's next-door neighbor is Police Sergeant Kinkelhoffer, uncle of Jinx's leading citizen, Mayor Kinkelhoffer. Great-Aunt Yolanda's husband, Great-Uncle Bill, lives at the nursing home with his girlfriend, Nurse.

Important things to know about Jinx: It has a restaurant called the Happy Sibling that features not only Turf 'n' Turf but also (I'm sorry to say) the popular Tortured Chicken Sandwich and a drink special known as the Chattering Disaster. The restaurant is a watering hole for members of the local baseball team (the Jinx Cement), managed by the mysterious Mr. Velocipede, a team so starved for opponents that it's forced to play games against cats.

Important thing to know about Mr. Tacklebox: While he does like the 80s hair band Plaque, his overall favorite musician is Suspicious Junior, an old bluesman who crossed over into punk in an attempt to jumpstart his sagging career. SJ's most recent retrospective album is Suspicious Junior: The Rank Years.

Important thing to know about Great-Aunt Yolanda: Her life is entirely controlled by her fascist cat Ulgy, and she depends on a cleaning product known as Substitute Neighbor. Her relationship with Police Sergeant Kinkelhoffer is ambiguous.

Important thing to know about the nursing home: It serves a wholesome beverage known as Delicious System Action and permits Great-Uncle Bill to keep an assortment of power tools under his bed.

So there you have it: this is how Paul and I while away our foolish hours. And by the way, for his birthday, among other gifts, he received a badly counterfeited $14 bill from Ratt.

2011-10-27T07:19:00.008-04:00

A fine poem about the anxieties of publication and revision--

The Author to her Book

Anne Bradstreet (1612-72)

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad expos'd to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Critics' hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.

2011-10-26T07:33:00.003-04:00

How long will I be able to keep writing this letter to you every day?

Recently I heard another writer complain that she could never keep a blog because blogs "give away writing for free"--a complaint that is understandable, I suppose, if one is used to getting paid for every word. But of course that is not my problem. My problem is more the burgeoning sense that I am a bore. Really I do nothing exciting. I feed animals and people. I read unpopular books. I garden and hang laundry. I write. Occasionally I play music. My rants are rare and mostly involve grammar. I don't pick fights. I don't have a mission of instruction. I'm not a regular book reviewer. I don't publicize prurient details about my or anyone else's private life. Mornings like today I do feel that I have nothing to offer you but tedium, and I apologize for that. Apparently the life of a poet is dull, despite all Shelleyean evidence to the contrary.

2011-10-25T07:17:00.008-04:00

Yesterday I received the current issue of New Walk, a British literary journal that has published one of two recent essays I've written about William Blake. As I paged through the journal, I came across poet Paul Driver's translations of three Verlaine poems, which were lovely and made me stop and think about French poetry--which I rarely do. I've always found Baudelaire, Apollinaire, et al. distasteful, so these pieces were a welcome discovery. I think American writers would do well to check out what's going on in the British journals . . . lots of poets we've never heard of who are writing intelligent, intelligible, musical poems. And New Walk doesn't charge extra for overseas shipping.

Autumn House Press's Coal Hill Review chapbook contest closes on November 1. I don't ordinarily promote book contests; but all my interactions with Autumn House Press have been delightful, so perhaps yours will be as well.

I guess that's all the professional-sounding news I have to share today. In nonprofessional news, I'm still afraid of mousetraps and can't get the woodstove to light. In weather news, snow is forecast for Thursday night, and middle schoolers don't believe in the efficacy of winter coats. In reading news, I recommend the lais of Marie de France and a comic/horrifying Wikipedia article about the year Rome was inflicted with four emperors. I read it aloud to my son while he was washing dishes (his idea: both the dishes and the reading). The article ends with my current favorite deathbed quotation: "Vespasian did not meet any direct threat to his imperial power after the death of Vitellius. He became the founder of the stable Flavian dynasty that succeeded the Julio-Claudians and died of natural causes as emperor in 79, with the famous last words, 'Vae, puto deus fio' ('Dear me, I must be turning into a god')."

2011-10-24T07:42:00.003-04:00

Reading poem proofs, beginning a new copyediting job, researching the unknown life of Marie de France.

Vacuuming the hopeless living room rug, yanking out frost-fried cosmos and bachelors' buttons, washing boy clothes.

Splitting firewood, stacking firewood, listening to woodpeckers and squirrels, picking burrs out of the poodle's ears.

Writing, worrying about my writing, not worrying about my writing, reading about mosquitoes in the Everglades, drinking coffee, fruitlessly hunting for a stamp.

Drinking red wine, eating tomato pie, watching baseball, discussing Hemingway and/or starting pitchers, not driving to Portland to see the Flaming Lips concert but waving good-bye to those who are.

Listening to wind and coyotes, dreaming strange dreams.

2011-10-23T08:24:00.003-04:00

I have been so immersed in other people's work that I have almost forgotten how to read my own. So when I got a note on Friday from CavanKerry Press I was afraid to open it. The subject was my forthcoming collection; the note included pre-press comments from the manuscript editor on the state of the ms.

I didn't want to know what anyone thought; I just didn't want to know. This reaction had nothing to do with defensiveness, or distrust of criticism, or lack of respect for the editor's eye, or anything of the sort. Maybe fear is the word--fear that nothing I've written will make sense to me when I look at it again, that the poems will have lost all power to speak. It's stupid to stay so raw about one's creations. But how can anyone help it?

2011-10-22T06:54:00.004-04:00

Things I discovered yesterday:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was Dante's first American translator, and his version is gorgeous.

The historian Suetonius writes about Virgil's revision process: "it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape."

Middle school dances are hotbeds of unsubstantiated rumor and the rampant consumption of salty snacks. Also, one of the songs on the request list was Foreigner's "Hot Blooded." My son claims he did not request it just to drive me crazy. He claims to have had nothing at all to do with it because he was too busy strutting around beneath the strobe lights with a gold-painted box on his head.

2011-10-21T07:44:00.003-04:00

Read yesterday's comments, and you'll find a snatch of Ovid's poetry, gorgeously translated into sixteenth-century English. But what follows is the Ovid that I've been reading lately: a prose translation of one of his Epistolae ex Ponto, a series of desperate and despairing verse letters written from the shores of the Black Sea, where, in 8 A.D., Emperor Augustus banished the poet for reasons that are still unclear. The only explanation that Ovid himself offers is carmen et error--a poem and a mistake.

Why then do I write, you wonder? I too wonder, and with you I often ask what I seek from it. Or do the people say true that poets are not sane and am I the strongest proof of this maxim, I, who though so many times deceived by the barrenness of the soil, persist in sowing my seed in ground that ruins me? Clearly each man shows a passion for his own pursuits, taking pleasure in devoting time to his familiar art. The wounded gladiator forswears the fight, yet forgetting his former wound he dons his arms. The shipwrecked man declares that he will have nothing to do with the waves of the sea, yet plies the oar in the water in which but recently he swam. In the same way I continually hold to a profitless pursuit, returning to the goddesses whom I would I had not worshipped.

2011-10-20T07:14:00.008-04:00

Last night I dreamed about Ovid, but I don't know what I was dreaming. Outside my open window the quiet rain was falling, falling; I woke with a crick in my neck and then I was dreaming, tossing, crumpling my pillow, waking, dreaming.

There is a voice in my head that will not be stilled, but I cannot hear it or remember what it says. The voice is like a song with no words or tune; it is like the clicking of an iron stove expanding in the heat; it is like the drumming of a grouse--a dull pulse, endless, an almost-silence.

The rain is falling, falling; and now the light is creeping through the empty maples, the skeletal arms of the birches. Last night I dreamed about Ovid, but I don't know what I was dreaming. I want, I don't want, to invent a tale to replace the truth. I remember nothing, but I could make you believe me.

I could.

2011-10-19T07:53:00.005-04:00

I've been reading Horace's Ars Poetica, composed during Rome's Augustan Age, alongside Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, set in the Everglades at the turn of the twentieth century. I've been thinking about Ben Jonson and Lord Byron and gold spray paint for my son's Halloween costume. I've been masterminding the other son's doctor's appointment and forking over gas money and baking pumpkins. I've been unable to compose a Facebook status. I've been watching late-afternoon clouds, navy blue and ominous, bullying their way across a pallid sky. I've been thinking about Borges and the World Series and forgetting to write "mustard" on the grocery list. I've been letting the dog in and letting the dog out and letting the dog in and sweeping up ashes from the hearth and thinking about the King James Version versus the Revised Standard Version. I've been sitting in the Dexter library's reading room listening to a fat cat wash its feet. I've been pondering my son's remark, "The best place to see strange people is at the grocery store," and countering with "What about a hospital waiting room? Or a bus station?" I've been feeding old freezer-burnt tortillas to greedy chickens and ineffectually coaxing the poodle to swallow a pill. I've been finishing crossword puzzles while ignoring the sudoku. I've been imagining a poem about a 1940s baseball star from Donora, Pennsylvania, and dreaming early-morning dreams that I can't remember once I wake up. I've been digging up a garden bed for garlic; I've been reading the local obituaries; I've been nagging my son to brush his teeth; I've been reading the poetry of Alexander Pope. I've been sitting here in my raggedy bathrobe typing this note to you instead of filling the woodbox and hauling water for the goat. Therefore, as the shouting goat reminds me, I must stop doing this job and go do hers instead.

2011-10-18T07:36:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was reading Aristotle (dry) and Sappho (not dry). Here is Sir Philip Sidney's lovely, lovely translation of a Sappho fragment. This same fragment has also been translated by Catullus, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, Robert Lowell, and many others. But I like Sidney's best.

Fragment 31

Sappho (c. 615–c. 550 b.c.e.), trans. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86)

My muse, what ails this ardour?
Mine eys be dym, my lymbs shake,
My voice is hoarse, my throte scorcht,
My tong to this roofe cleaves,
My fancy amazde, my thoughtes dull’d,
My head doth ake, my life faints
My sowle begins to take leave,
So greate a passion all feele,
To think a soare so deadly
I should so rashly ripp up.

2011-10-17T07:14:00.002-04:00

Over the course of this two-day weekend, my eighth-grade son read Conrad Richter's A Light in the Forest, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Lewis Robinson's "Puckheads," and a chunk of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. He's always been an enthusiastic reader, but except for our Shakespeare projects, he hasn't challenged himself beyond youth literature. All of a sudden that seems to have changed: he just could not stop reading this weekend, and the Hemingway in particular amazed him. He kept wandering out of his room to read sentences aloud to me.

My older son is a perfectly competent reader, but he has never been a reader. It is strange how small our club is.

For my part, I will be undertaking Aristotle today, although I am still recovering from Plato. "Poetry is an outrage on the understanding," declares Socrates, and I think he may be right.

2011-10-16T09:39:00.005-04:00

I meant to post this earlier but forgot. Here is Tom's snapshots-while-driving slideshow. (Just to clarify: I was driving while he snapped.)

Drive-By Portraits: Thomas Birtwistle at PechaKucha Waterville v4 from PechaKucha Waterville on Vimeo.

2011-10-16T07:51:00.004-04:00

Sunday morning melancholy: awake too early with Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Sappho, and now I'm getting that old the-past-is-too-much-with-me feeling again.

Accident Report

Dawn Potter

You know how it is:

tires devouring the coiled road,

one hand on the wheel, bending left,

bending right, slick as a seal; one of those

dawns when grains of fog spatter your windshield

like handfuls of sand, when a monstrous owl drifts

from the invisible forest with a rat writhing in his claws;

when a half-grown buck, leaf-drunk, vaults across the sopping

tarmac like a prince under enchantment; and “Whoso list to hunt,

I know where is an hind!” you cry, but silently, of course, because . . .

because you’re ashamed to mouth a greater poet’s borrowed trappings;

you, with no rights in the matter, mere remote control in fog, ambivalent,

wishful, and cold as well; for all the heat’s in words you were afraid to sing

in earshot of these phantoms—Wyatt, Milton—floating in the vinyl shade,

ready to taunt your match-struck quavering flame. You, not man enough

to warble to an empty car; they, so long dead, still young: still flashing

their brash “So help me, God, an immortality of fame.” They played

their necessary cards: not only intellect and drudgery and grief,

wordy sleight-of-hand and rage and loving, probing curiosity,

but plain obnoxious gall. A poem, a stiletto in the back.

And you, alone and lonely, in your blundering car,

afraid of some fool prince with the temerity

to leap into your high-beam’s timid dark.

As if that murky light could be his star.

[first appeared in Locuspoint (2011); forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2013)].

2011-10-15T07:09:00.004-04:00

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a sad and beautiful book. That was my reaction when I first read it a decade ago, and still it makes me weep. Reading these stories on a bouncing school bus, when slightly motion sick and entirely noise-overloaded, is probably ideal. All the drug-hazed plot switches make perfect sense, and each sentence is as tearstained as a sentimental drunk. I wanted to cry along with them, but I had to behave like a chaperon who cared which kid was kicking which other kid's seat. Meanwhile, this is what Johnson was saying to me:

The last time I'd been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn't been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies.

Everything down there but the curtain was red. It was like a movie of something that was actually happening. Black pimps in fur coats. The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them. "I'll just take your money and go upstairs," somebody said to me.